Hakkas, the legend goes, are descendants of Shandong and Henan natives who patriotically migrated south during the Mongol invasions 600 years ago. Hakkas pride themselves on scholarship, thrift, and hard work, and on their independent women who rejected foot-binding and worked in the fields alongside men. Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui and Singapore strongman Lee Kwan Yew. Poorer than southerners, later migrants forced to settle the worst mountain land, the Hakkas are stereotyped as stingy, clannish, disruptive outsiders, who work their women like animals, rather than sequestering them at home, according to the now defunct mainstream ideal. All southern Chinese have intermarried extensively with indigenous people.
Public pride emerges only in the twentieth century.
Far from being ancient northern scholars and nobility, patriotic preservers of pure northern speech, the record shows the Hakka ancestors as very recent arrivals, very poor, uneducated, itinerant workers. Hakkas adopted old southern Chinese speech, which separated into a self-recognized Hakka dialect only within the last few centuries. Leong's most important contribution delineates how the construction of identity proceeds differently, according to history, contact, and ecological niche. The degree of self-identification differed dramatically. Hakkas living near the Cantonese developed the strongest and most separate identity.