A language is also a way of belonging.

Where Serdang’s Hakka roots lead

Huizhou Hakka were the largest group in the study, and Huiyang is one important link. In 2009 a Serdang delegation visited Huiyang and signed a letter of intent to establish friendly relations. On the same trip, then Selangor executive councillor Ean Yong Hian Wah traced his great-grandfather to Moling village in Baihua, in today’s Huidong County. A 2015 oral-history study also recorded a Serdang family with roots in Dongguan.

Chixi is in present-day Taishan, Guangdong, and Hepo is in Jiexi. Some townships in Gaozhou have both Hakka and Cantonese speakers. The labels used in the Serdang survey preserve the different places that families identified with.

One documented link between Chixi Hakka and early mining in Serdang is Yap Kwan Seng. He left Chixi as a young man, stopped first in Melaka and later worked as a miner in Seremban. Historical research records that his later mining operations in Selangor included Serdang.

Why cross the sea? Tin work and ties from home

War and hardship in nineteenth-century southern China pushed many people to seek work abroad. Malaya’s expanding tin industry needed labour. Relatives and people from the same home district could help arrange a journey or guarantee the fare. Some migrants travelled on money advanced by recruiters and worked to pay it back.

Historian Phin-Keong Voon traces Huizhou Hakka arrivals in the mining areas around Kuala Lumpur to the 1840s. Closer to Serdang, a local temple interview offers a more specific story. Around 1896, a migrant surnamed Ye from Huizhou is said to have enshrined a Tan Gong image brought from home at the Yeyuan settlement. This places a Huizhou Hakka presence in the area before the new village. The available records do not establish when most Serdang families crossed the sea. Family records and oral histories can help date individual journeys.

From mining and estate settlements into the new village

Before the new village, families lived near work in settlements such as Gong Jiao Yuan, Yeyuan, Kuyoh and Henglu. They made a living from mining, tapping rubber or farming. In an oral-history study, one Serdang woman recalled panning for tin, tapping rubber, sewing garments and selling noodles. Several kinds of work could sustain the same household.

After the Malayan Emergency began in 1948, British colonial authorities used the Briggs Plan to cut links between communist guerrillas and rural communities. Families from nearby settlements were forcibly moved to a controlled new village on former rubber land in the Old Puchong area. Longtime resident Wu Yunhua (吴运华) recalled his family moving from Gong Jiao Yuan on 1 October 1951. That date records one household’s move into the village, a later chapter than the overseas journeys that had brought earlier generations to Malaya.

The lake at The Mines began as a tin mine

The lake beside Jalan Dulang marks the site of Hong Fatt, an open-cast tin mine in the Sungai Besi mining area. Water filled the pit after mining ended, and the former mining land was redeveloped as Mines Resort City. Shopping and leisure facilities grew around the lake.

The Mines and the streets of Serdang New Village are separate places linked by the same working landscape. The early village checkpoint stood by the Kuyoh River facing the Hong Fatt mine. Families who had lived near mines and rubber estates brought their working lives with them when they moved into the village.

How the new village grew into today’s town

From the 1970s, villagers increasingly took up construction, ran home-based shoe workshops and grew starfruit alongside the older mining and rubber trades. As tin mining declined in the 1980s, shoemaking and farming supported more households. Housing areas such as Serdang Jaya, Seri Serdang and later Bukit Serdang grew around the village, while its old streets, schools and temples remained part of daily life.

Today the MRT Putrajaya Line is another way to see how the village became part of a wider Klang Valley town. The original settlement remains one of greater Serdang’s historic centres, surrounded by newer homes, businesses and transport links.

A language heard in everyday life

Hakka travelled with families from Guangdong and became a shared language in the village. In a 2023 study, 82.5% of respondents in its everyday-language questionnaire reported using Hakka at the market. Interviewees also described neighbours from other dialect groups picking it up. Younger respondents were more likely to name Mandarin as their strongest language, even when they could still understand Hakka. In one family, a grandparent might speak Hakka while a grandchild answers in Mandarin.

Tian Chuan · a Hakka tradition

Tian Chuan recalls the legend of Nüwa repairing the sky, and celebrations have been documented in Serdang. Such traditions offer another way to encounter Hakka cultural memory beyond Lunar New Year. This is a cultural introduction, rather than an announcement of an upcoming event.

Start a conversation at the table

Pan mee, yong tau foo and home cooking offer an approachable starting point. Ask an older relative how a dish was prepared, where the family shopped or what they ate after school. The same dish can carry different memories in different households.

Give the next generation a chance to speak

Keeping a language alive can begin with a greeting, a family recipe or a conversation about school and work. These are invitations to participate, not claims that every household shares the same background. Listening to one another also connects today’s diverse community.

A changing language landscape

Language use changes across generations, school, work and online life. Keeping Hakka heritage alive need not mean freezing everyday life in the past. Understanding a grandparent’s form of address, learning about a custom or cooking a family dish can be practical beginnings.