"Going to the Cantonese table at Oldenborg has created a safe community for me. Oftentimes, when people think of Chinese, they think of Mandarin. It's nice to be in this niche group of people who speak Cantonese—it's actually really difficult to find people who speak it although there's many Chinese students at the Claremont Colleges. 

Even more specifically, I am able to speak my own dialect with another person who comes to the Cantonese table. I come from a place where the dialect I speak is frowned upon because it's seen as the 'country language,' or the 'poor, uneducated' dialect of China.  

I think I even identify more as Taishanese than as Chinese."