John Wakefield

Biography

John Wakefield is a Chinese linguist from the United States and a former actor who was active in Hong Kong during the 1990s. He was born on August 16, 1963, in Nebraska, USA. In his early years, he was sent by the church to do missionary work in Hong Kong for a year and a half, where he developed an interest in Hong Kong and Cantonese. After graduating from university in the United States, he saw the white actor Gregory Charles Rivers (河国荣), who spoke fluent Cantonese, in Hong Kong television dramas, which sparked his desire to return to Hong Kong as an actor. In 1991, he received a recommendation to work as an actor in Hong Kong, and his first role was in the film "The Two Jakes" (五億探長雷洛傳II之父子情仇), where he played the police commissioner's translator. He continued to participate in various Hong Kong films and television dramas on both TVB and ATV networks. However, acting did not provide a sustainable livelihood, so he decided to change careers in the mid-1990s. Wakefield later studied linguistics courses in Hong Kong and opened a tutoring center, focusing on grammatical issues faced by native English speakers learning Cantonese. He earned his PhD in Linguistics from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2011 and received the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. Since 2008, he has taught at the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and later at the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2018, he was promoted to Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and is currently the Program Director of the MA in Language Studies program. He is married to a Hong Kong woman and has an adult daughter.