As Lisa Chung, a friend of Hyphen, reports in the San Jose Mercury News, Lee reconnected with the language of his childhood while researching his memoir, The Eighth Promise.

William and I once worked together at the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, and I enjoyed his book.

As someone who also grew up speaking a peasant dialect (my family is not from Toisan but nearby Enping county, pronounced "yun ping" in Cantonese), I can identify with how the language is looked down upon.

You kind of have a double whammy if you lived out in the boonies. You feel like an outsider being the rare Asian American, and you're also ridiculed when visiting Chinese friends and family in San Francisco, who speak the more proper Hong Kong or Cantonese dialect.

I am still very mindful of letting "yun ping wah" words or ways of saying things slip in when I speak Cantonese. When I visited relatives in Guangzhou, they really noticed when when it happened.

And some of these dialects are a language onto themselves. I've visited Toisan and some nearby areas, and at times I couldn't understand anything the locals were saying. Some dialects had this lisp to it and others had totally different vocabularies.

As Lisa points out in her story, there's long history of these peasant languages in the United States. Chinese Americans are a far more diverse group nowadays. We may not want to hear those harsh tones all the time, but there's a heritage there we shouldn't forget.