u/Tw_izted

My mom insisted that my grandpa's side is Teochew, but his ancestors had Hokkien surnames

I'm Thai but my mom's side is mixed Thai-Chinese, not much is known about my Chinese side's oral history, other than that they migrated through Laos unlike the majority of Teochew people, who travelled via junks leaving Southern China for destinations like Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia. Their ancestral surname was "Ooi" or "Sae-ui" in Thai (Sae being a common Chinese surname prefix in Thailand), and this is where the issue came

Ooi is only found in certain dialects of Hokkien, and if it was Teochew, it would've been "Ung" or "Sae-eung", which makes me wonder on what could've lead to this, but i only have a few theories

  1. They were Hoklos that once lived in Chaozhou, hence the confusion that they were Teochew when one of my ancestors migrated on land towards Laos, and eventually Siam (Thailand)

  2. One of my patriarch was Hoklo, and the matriarch adopted his surname, hence the Hokkien surname and not the Teochew one

  3. They were Hoklos but identified themselves as Teochew because of the environment they lived in, as parts of their family (which included my grandpa and his siblings) would later relocate to Bangkok, which is majority Teochew and Cantonese in the community, and to better fit in, identified themselves as Teochew

But i can't really confirm, because my Chinese side of the family was effectively cut off from communication ever since my grandpa died, leaving me to piece everything myself and by what my mom says. However, i'd like to know if it's a common thing or not for an ethnolinguistic group to have the surname of another ethnolinguistic group, and this would be the one closure that i want for now

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u/Tw_izted — 3 days ago

A lesser known movie stuff: Chow Yun-fat (of Hard Boiled and the Killer fame in the West) had his first international film role in a 1983 Thai film called Katanyu Prakasit

I couldn't find much verifiable info about the film, but his casting as one of the lead was probably to bank on his fame in Thailand back then as Hui Man-keung from The Bund (known in Thailand as Godfather of Shanghai, or roughly Lord of Shanghai, which aired on Channel 3 at the time and was immensely popular) 3 years before his superstar fame as Mark Lee in A Better Tomorrow

There are alot of clips of this movie online but i wasn't able to find the full synopsis of the whole movie, other than the casting, which featured alot of well-known Thai actors at the time (as the film was financed and made for television by Channel 3 themselves, if my information were to be correct), so i would also like additional info other than what i could dig up

u/Tw_izted — 6 days ago