The short answer is: yes, but it’s not a priority for most Lui Chiew descendants in Malaysia. The long answer is three generations long, and it’s the reason this site exists at all.
I’m a third-generation Lui Chiew descendant in Malaysia. My grandfather came from Leizhou with next to nothing in his pocket. His priority was simple: work hard, and settle as soon as he could. Like most of the first-generation Lui Chiew who landed in Melaka, he went into agriculture. He eventually settled and had a family, mostly in the years during and after the Second World War — Malaya was still in turmoil, and everyone was poor. So the second priority, for his generation, was to stay safe, grow and rear their own food, hold onto whatever they had, and get as much education as they could manage. As they grew older, many tried to move out of agriculture into their own businesses, or into work that paid better. By my generation and the one before it, the priority had shifted again: get a good education, and stabilise and build on whatever the family now had.
To understand why the language slipped through the gaps, you have to understand a bit about Malaysian education. There are the mainstream national schools, and there are the separate Chinese- and Tamil-medium schools. Malaysian policy doesn’t favour or reward the non-national stream: students from Chinese- or Tamil-medium schools can’t advance directly into local public universities, so parents who can afford it send their children overseas instead — to Singapore, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Chinese schools also receive very little national education funding and rely almost entirely on community donations to survive. So it’s no surprise that most Lui Chiew families, like most Chinese families in Malaysia, send their children to the mainstream national schools instead. And even inside the Chinese-medium schools that do exist, everything is taught in Mandarin — never in the dialects.
My father went through Chinese-medium primary school and then switched to a national school. When he entered the workforce, he saw firsthand that the job market favoured national-school graduates, who generally had a stronger command of English. Some graduates of Taiwanese universities weren’t recognised back in Malaysia at all, which made it hard for them to find work at home — so many of them simply stayed on in Taiwan.
I went through national schools myself, where there is no Chinese-language lesson at all. Even so, I speak fairly fluent Mandarin, because of a decision my father made for me outside of school. Lui Chiew is different: I can understand it at a basic level when spoken, but not enough to actually converse in it. Most of my cousins live apart from each other and rarely meet outside Chinese New Year. Unless you speak Lui Chiew at home every day, or happen to have Lui Chiew neighbours — unlikely in any city, since we’re a minority even among Malaysian Chinese — there’s simply not much chance of ever mastering the language.
Now that I’m older, into my middle age, I do want to reconnect with my own roots and understand a little more about where my family came from. But there is almost nothing about it on the internet. The Lui Chiew associations that still exist are mostly run by an older generation who aren’t especially tech-savvy, and their official presence online, where it exists at all, is thin.
That’s the gap this site is trying to fill — not a grand answer to Zinan’s question, but at least a small resource, so that Lui Chiew descendants like me have somewhere to start.