Cultural erasure often happens slowly, invisibly, unconsciously. One story forgotten. A drumbeat unremembered. A word vanished into amnesia. A food lost to assimilation.

It’s hidden in plain sight. Sometimes it looks like institutions suppressing a language from official use, discouraging its spread in the name of practicality. Sometimes it looks like policies that incentivize capital to destroy physical heritage, extracting more from land and property. Sometimes it looks like Chinese names of parents and grandparents left off a grave marker, because descendants have forgotten them through assimilation.

Slow. Steady. Invisible erasure. Only when the language, the food, the dance, the place, the people are gone does someone finally ask: “Where did they go?”

And sometimes, through sheer will, tenacity, self-interrogation, and the fragile threads of oral and generational memory, descendants can trace what was lost. They imagine what could be through themselves, and revive their culture to heal broken generational bonds. In other words: cultural reclamation.

Rarely do you witness cultural erasure and reclamation happening simultaneously, in real time. That’s what happened at the Fire Dragon Festival in Chinatown on September 20, 2025.

In 2024, I approached the Fire Dragon Festival organizers privately and personally about adding a Hakka blessing to honour the ritual’s Hakka origins and traditions. They shut me down immediately. They said a Chinatown Cantonese sifu was already doing a Cantonese blessing, so a Hakka blessing was “not needed.”

From that moment, I knew: this was a festival of cultural appropriation, of cultural erasure.

Still, we carved out space. We claimed what was rightfully Hakka. We gathered Hakka people from the diaspora — from Guangdong to Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and beyond. We made sure that Hakka elders who had witnessed the original Fire Dragon ritual in Tai Hang were present, that elders who had made the 1975 Fire Dragon could dot the eyes, and that Hakka children were there with their mothers to create core memories of living their culture in diaspora with family. We offered a Hakka blessing with our elders, mothers, daughters, and children. Attendees came up to us, saying that hearing the language and witnessing generations of Hakka people living their heritage was one of the most meaningful parts of the ceremony. But the organizers disagreed.

A year later, we discovered they publicly labeled us a “safety risk,” claiming Hakka people taking too long to speak Hakka causing “injury,” and used it as an excuse to erase meaningful Hakka involvement entirely.

We persisted and asked for accountability for our culture. I wondered: had they learned anything in that year of reflection?

Would they allow a Hakka blessing from someone Hakka, anyone Hakka? Or would they continue to silence our language? Would they follow the ritual protocols they claimed to honour, or overwrite them with their own?

Of course, it was the latter. This is what cultural appropriators do: they extract, overwrite, and claim. The same formula, again and again.

Before the fire dragon awoke this year, two Cantonese patriarchs, young and old, took the mic, belting out Cantonese and English blessings, breaking more than a century of Hakka protocol. It was an act of cultural erasure. An act of language erasure.

We resisted. Because Hakka people always have. As historically displaced migrants, all we have is our culture and our people. So we speak our language. We sing. We sang over their Cantonese and English blessings, over their erasure.

In a circle of queer, women, and gender-diverse Hakka people joined hand in hand, we offered Hakka blessings in the style of our ancestral hill songs. Through our voices, we echoed generations of Hakka culture stubbornly passed down from the mountains to Chinatown. When they suppress our language, we let it fill the air, vibrate through our bodies, and claim its rightful space in the ritual and in history.

I have witnessed cultural erasure and engaged in acts of anti-cultural erasure in my lifetime, but usually these acts are separated by time, perforated by memory. There is usually a lag between erasure and reclamation, sometimes spanning generations.

In many Hakka Chinese families living in non-Hakka dominant areas, including my own, Hakka was the suppressed language. Cantonese or Mandarin became primary through family dynamics, social pressures, economic practicality, or simply because being Hakka was looked down upon. Hakka disappeared within our families, within our own bodies, across generations. Just as Hakkaness was erased from the Fire Dragon ritual at the appropriated festival. Hakka erasure is systemic, reinforced from the family to the institutional and back again.

But in that moment, at the Fire Dragon Festival — singing one of the languages of my childhood, Hakka, with my Hakka kin, while hearing the other language of my childhood, Cantonese, and the language of assimilation, English, overwrite Hakka in the air — I witnessed a rare collision of cultural erasure and reclamation, happening all at once, within my body and around me.

Language and culture disappear when no one cares, when people are complicit in letting them vanish because it’s convenient, comfortable, or palatable to the powerful.

It’s these moments of agitation, however small, that make cultural reclamation tangible whenever culture is suppressed. It’s an act that ripples through time. A thread that weaves what was forgotten back into the present. A refusal to be forgotten or silenced.

This is how cultural reclamation happens: one blessing, one song, one word, one powerful act of resistance at a time.

– A testimony of the Fire Dragon Festival, September 20, 2025 in Vancouver’s Chinatown