From Kanpur to Toronto

Liu Ying Hsien’s father moved to India from Meixian, China, over eighty years ago. His family lived in Kanpur, also known as the “Manchester of India,” an industrial city with leather tanneries and textile mills in the state of Uttar Pradesh. They ran a shoe shop, a Chinese restaurant, and several ladies’ hair salons. Ying Hsien compares his life in Kanpur, a city in northern India, to those of the Hakka who lived in Calcutta, 665 miles southeast: “Calcutta had twenty to thirty thousand Hakkas. The disadvantage is that very few worked and mixed outside of the Chinese community. The advantages were that they could speak Hakka more fluently and were immersed in Hakka culture and customs. There weren’t many Hakkas where I lived. But I had a greater opportunity to mix and learn about things in India—its people, its customs, and the Hindi and English languages.”