Hi my name is Keira, I’m Teochew Australian, while my mother was raised in Vietnam and my father was born in Cambodia. I’m not sure if you’d read this message, but I’d like to say thank you for your content because they’ve been so helpful and entertaining for me as someone who only speaks English at home unless it’s with my grandma since I converse in broken Teochew with her. I’ve really resonated with your stories as someone who struggles with learning new languages and I’m especially appreciative to how many other Teochew communities can look at your content and feel like a part of their culture is coming back to them!
I founded The Teochew Store website in 2014 with the support of my then-girlfriend, and now wife. I wanted to build an online English-language resource to help Teochews worldwide connect with their language, culture, roots and identity. It was a journey that I’d undertaken myself, culminating in a three-year stay in Swatow, China. There I found the house that my grandfather left to go to Singapore in the 1930s, which he never returned to. I also reconnected with our bigger family, learned Teochew Ue (which I barely spoke before), and gained an understanding of how our people viewed the world and lived life. My drive was to share everything I learned with anyone interested, especially my fellow overseas Teochews.
The Teochew Store 潮舗 sells books and gifts related to the Teochew culture, but this was not the reason I chose its name. The word 舗 (pou) is now commonly understood to mean “shop” in Teochew. However, it originally referred to the stations of the equestrian postal relay system established by the Mongols during the Yuan dynasty, where the riders exchanged tired horses for fresh ones and replenished supplies to continue their long distance gallops. My vision was for The Teochew Store to be an online stop, where Teochews exploring our heritage can equip themselves with essential knowledge and tools.
Besides our website, The Teochew Store is now on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Telegram. These different social media platforms have helped us expand our reach to a wider audience both geographically and demographically, and also enabled us to share and disseminate materials of different formats, such as ebooks, songs, short films and old images. My personal pet project is writing up on the history of our ancestral land and people, which has never been adequately researched. If you’re just beginning to learn about Teochew culture, be sure to check out our helpful article, “10 Things You Must Know As A Teochew”.
At no point did I expect The Teochew Store to endure this long or grow the way it has. Not infrequently, we receive messages from readers asking for assistance to find their the homeplace of their fathers or grandfathers, resources to learn the Teochew language, or information for their academic researches. We have also helped a boyfriend learn to say “I love you”, a groom to surprise his bride with a wedding speech, and a daughter to pen a birthday message for her father—all in the language that mattered most to their loved ones. There were requests from parents who wished to know how to name their babies according to our traditions, and a man who needed help in reading his family genealogy to learn about his great-grandfather.
Fellow Teochews have also contacted us because they wanted to share their creative works with the community. There’s Mr Tan Peng Boon, who built a website to enable English-speakers to pick up the Teochew language and generously shared his family recipes for making various Teochew kuehs. Kew Lin, director of the Teochew short film “Uncle Goose Waits for a Phone Call,” is another. We must also remember the late Mr Goh Eng Choon, author of the popular Teochew language books, Colloquial Teochew (潮州口语集释), Let’s Speak Teochew 呾呾潮州话, and Learning Teochew 学呾潮州话.
In our end, we have been active in finding out about the passion behind Teochews in different countries who have dedicated themselves to promoting our shared language and culture. Amongst others, we are honoured to have interviewed Ty Eng Lim from the US who developed the popular WhatTCSay Teochew language dictionary and phrase-book app, and Allan Tan from Singapore who has a remarkable collection of Teochew language YouTube videos with English subtitles. We have also captured the stories of Vivian Lee from Indonesia, whose Teochew Gasig platform teaches daily Teochew words and phrases on Instagram and Facebook, and Denis Do, the producer of the Teochew language animation film The Forest of Miss Tang from France. Thanks to the Teo Ann Huay Kuan of Singapore, we were recently able to interview Ng Ziou-iang, a master of traditional Teochew paper-cutting from Teochew, China. The Teochew Store interviews are collated on this special page.
The high-point for The Teochew Store so far is the production of Wa Si Teochew Kia—My First 120 Teochew Expressions, our in-house multimedia flashcards developed for young children to pick up the Teochew language together with their parents. It is a milestone for us, not only because this project was realised with the funding of over 100 backers from 14 countries on Kickstarter, but it also reminded us on what do we live for—the next generation, as our fathers and mothers did.
The Teochew Store holding a "Fun with Teochew" introductory language class at Maha Yu Yi Chinese Bookstore
The deeper we delve into the Teochew culture, the richer and more profound it becomes to us. There is so much more that The Teochew Store could have done or do better. However, compliments from readers, especially young ones from both the Teochew diaspora and Teochew itself, tell us we are at least doing something right.
The Teochew Store may not have changed the world, but we have found our purpose in sowing seeds of change, restoring Teochew to individual lives and families.
~o0o~
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