Hawaii (74 page)

Of course, not all of General Ching's army settled in the Golden Valley, but all the Chars and the Chings did, and they built on the

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sides of the mountain a group of U-shaped low houses inside a mud wall, and this came to be known as the High Village; whereas the village along the river bank, in which the Punti lived, was always known as the Low Village; and in the two, certain sayings became common. When Punti children played, they taunted their fellows: "Quack like a duck and talk like a Hakka," but in the High Village people frequently cried, with adequate facial gestures: "I am not afraid of heaven. I'm not afraid of earth. But the thing I do fear is listening to a Punti trying to speak Mandarin." There were other folk sayings in the two villages that got closer to the fundamental differences between Hakka and Punti; for in the High Village, Hakka mothers would warn their daughters: "You continue as lazy as you are, and we'll bind your feet and make you a Punti." But in the Low Village, Punti mothers threatened their sons: "One more word out.of you, and I'll marry you to a Hakka girl." This latter was held to be a rather dreadful prospect, for Hakka girls were known to make powerful, strong-willed, intelligent wives who demanded an equal voice in family matters, and no sensible man wanted a wife like that.

The High Village and the Low Village had only one thing in common. At periodic intervals, each was visited by disaster. In some ways the perils of the Low Village were the more conspicuous, for when the great river rose in flood, as it did at least once every ten years, it burst forth from its banks with a sullen violence and engulfed the farmlands. It surged across fields of rice, swept away cattle, crept high up the walls of the village houses, and left a starving people. Worse, it threw sand across the fields, so that subsequent crops were diminished, and in the two years after a flood, it was known that one lowland person in four was sure to perish either from starvation or from plague.

What the Hakka, looking down on this recurring disaster, could never understand was this. In the year 1114, with the aid of nearly sixty thousand people, Hakka and Punti alike, the government built a great spillway which started above the Low Village and which was intended to divert the flood waters away from that village and many others, and the idea was a capital one and would have saved many lives, except that greedy officials, seeing much inviting land in the bottom of the dry channel and along it sides, reasoned: "Why should we leave such fine silted soil lying idle? Let us plant crops in the channel, because in nine average years out of ten, there is no flood and we will make a lot of money. Then, in the tenth year, we lose our crops, but we will already have made a fortune and we can bear the loss." But over a period of seven hundred years the Hakka noticed that the escape channel for the river was never once used, and for this reason: "We can see there is going to be a flood," the officials argued, "and a great many people are bound to be killed. But if we open the floodgates to save the vilkges, our crops in the channel will be destroyed. Now let's be sensible. Why should we allow the waters to wash away our crops in the one

year when we will be able to charge highest prices for them?" So the gates remained closed, and to protect one thirtieth of one per cent of the land around the villages, all the rest was laid waste. Flood after flood after flood swept down, and not once were the gates opened to save the people. The backbreaking work of sixty thousand peasants was used solely to protect the crops of a few already rich government officials, whose profits quadrupled when the countryside was starving. This the Hakka could never comprehend. "It is the way of China," Ching the seer explained, "but if it were Hakka fields being destroyed, I am sure we would kill the officials and break down the floodgates."

The Punti, on the other hand, were unable to understand Hakka behavior when drought struck the High Village. One Punti woman told her children, "There is no sensible way of explaining a people who wall up their houses with mud, place crossed sticks before the door, and then wander about the countryside for six months eating roots and clay." The Punti did learn one thing about the Hakka, however, and that was never to touch the walled-up houses or disturb the seed grain. During the great famine of 911 a body of Punti had invaded the deserted High Village and had carried away the seed grain, but there was much death when the theft was discovered, and this did not happen again.

For eight hundred years following the settlement in 874, the Hakka and the Punti lived side by side in these two starving villages �as they did throughout much of southern China�without a single man from the High Village ever marrying a woman from the Low Vilkge. And certainly no marriage could be contracted the other way around, for no Low Village man would want to marry a woman with big feet. When it came time for a man in the High Village to marry, he faced something of a problem, for everyone in his community was named either Char or Ching, after the two famous generals who had led the Hakka south, and to contract a marriage within such close relationships would have been incestuous; the Chinese knew that to keep a village strong required the constant importation of new wives from outside. So in late autumn, when the fields were tended and time was free, missions would set out from the High Vilkge to trek across the mountains to some neighboring Hakka village twenty miles away, and there would be a good deal of study and discussion and argument and even downright trading, but the upshot always was that the High Village committee came home with a pretty fair bundle of brides. Of course, at the same time missions from other Hakka villages were visiting the High Village to look over its women, and in this way the Hakka blood was kept strong. Two additional rules were followed: no man could marry into a family into which his ancestors had married until five generations had elapsed; and no girl was accepted as a potential bride unless her horoscope assured a bountiful relationship with her proposed husband.

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By these means the Hakka perfected one of the most rigid and binding family systems in China. Pestilence, war, floods and Punti threatened the group, but the family continued, and every child was proudly taught the filial words of Char the farmer: "From the beginning of history there have been mothers, and mothers have sons."

In 1693 a Punti man of no standing whatever ran away with a Hakka woman, the first such marriage ever recorded in the Golden Valley, and a brawl started which lasted more than forty years. No similar marriages were attempted, but serious fighting between the Hakka and the Punti erupted on many occasions, and during one terrible campaign which involved a good deal of southern China, more than one hundred thousand people were massacred in scenes of horror which dug one more unbridgeable gulf between the two peoples. In surliness, in misunderstanding and in fear the two groups lived side by side, and no one in the area thought their enmity strange. As Ching the seer pointed out: "From the beginning of history, people who are not alike have hated one another." In the Low Village the sages often explained the bitterness by asking, "Do the dog and the tiger mate?" Of course, when they asked this question, they threw out their chests a little at the word tiger so that no one could misunderstand as to who the dogs were.

IN THE YEAR 1847, when young Reverend Micah Hale was preaching in Connecticut�the same year in which Dr. John Whipple sailed to Valparaiso to study the export of hides�Char, the headman of the High Village, had a daughter to whom he gave a name of particular beauty: Char Nyuk Tsin, Char Perfect Jade, and it was this girl's destiny to grow up in the two decades when Hakka fortunes degenerated in scenes of great violence. Nyuk Tsin was not a tall child, nor was she alluring, but she had strong feet, capable hands and fine teeth. Her hair was not plentiful, and this bothered her, so that her mother had several times to reprimand her, saying, "Nyuk Tsin, it doesn't matter how you dress your hair. You haven't very much, so accept the fact." But what the little girl lacked in adornment, she made up in quick intelligence. Her father had to tell her only once the famous saying of the Char family: "From the beginning of history there have been mothers, and mothers have sons." When Char spoke of family loyalty, the conspicuous virtue of the Hakka, his daughter understood.

She was therefore distressed when many people in the High Village began to whisper that headman Char had gotten into serious trouble and had run away. She could not believe that her father had the capacity to be evil, but sure enough, in due time, soldiers invaded the High Village and announced: "We are searching for the headman Char. He has joined the Taiping Rebellion, and if he dares to come back to the village, you must kill him." The men kicked Nyuk

Tsin's mother several times and one of them jabbed a gun into the girl's stomach, growling, "Your father is a murderer, and next time we come back it's you we're going to shoot."

Nyuk Tsin was six that year, 1853, and she saw her father only once thereafter. Well, that is not entirely correct, but let us grant for the present that she saw him only once, for he did return to the High Village late one night and mysteriously. The first thing he did was embrace his skinny little girl and tell her, "Ah, Jade, your father has seen things he never dreamed of before. Horses of his ownl I captured an entire Punti city . . . not a village like that one down there. Jade, they all bowed as I came in. Low, girl. Like thisl" Later he embraced her as if she were his beloved and not his eight-year-old daughter, and he took her with him to watch his Hakka friends enlist in his great venture. Pointing at the frightened would-be soldiers, he said, "To begin with, all soldiers are afraid, Nyuk Tsin. Me? I trembled like a bird gathering seeds. But the important thing is to have loyalty in your heart. When General Lai tells me, 'General Char, occupy that city!' do you suppose I stop to question, 'Now what is General Lai up to?' No, indeed. I occupy the city, and if I have to kill fifty thousand enemy to do it, I kill them. Jade," he cried warmly in the mountain darkness, "we are headed far north. I may never see you again." He swept the quiet girl into his arms and held her close to him. "Take care of your mother," he said, and the men dashed down the mountainside after him.

Nyuk Tsin did see her father again. In 1863, when she was a thin, extremely well-organized girl of sixteen, capable of bearing huge loads of wood and of caring for her mother and the rest of her family, General Wang of the imperial forces marched into the High Village and commanded his drummer to roll the drum a long time, so that all the villagers assembled. Then, with the aid of an interpreter, for such a general would never know how to speak Hakka, he ordered a herald bearing a black object to read an official announcement.

The man kept the black object in his left hand, stepped forward and read in a high nasal voice: "The Taiping rebel chief named Char, who was captured at Nanking and brought under guard to Peking, having confessed that he was a fellow conspirator with Lai Siu Tsuen, who himself has falsely assumed the title of General of the North, was tried and put to death last month by being slowly cut into three hundred small pieces over a period of nine hours, according to just law, and his head was exposed at the city for three days as a warning to all."

Having said this, the herald passed the decree to another, and with his free hand drew away the black covering, disclosing in a wire cage the head of General Char. Ants had gotten to it, and flies, so that the eyeballs were gone and the tongue, but the dedicated man's features were clear, and the head was fixed to a pole in the middle of the village, after which General Wang announced sternly: "This is what happens to traitorsl" Then he demanded: "Where is the

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widow of the traitor Char?" The villagers refused to identify the wife of their great leader, but Nyuk Tsin's mother put her children aside and announced proudly, "I am his wife."

"Shoot her," General Wang said, and she fell into the vilkge dust.

Later the High Village remembered sardonically General Wang's platitudes about traitors, for it was hardly less than two weeks after his brave appearance in their vilkge that he studied the various opportunities confronting him and decided to become a traitor himself.

The year 1864 was therefore a truly terrible one in the Golden Valley, for half the time General Wang was rampaging through the villages seeking loot, while during the other half government troops were in pursuit of the traitor. Wang, having discovered the High Vilkge, rarely passed it by, and in time even enlisted a good many Hakka into his band. This gave the government troops title to whatever they could find in the High Vilkge, and they often shot Hakka farmers for the fun of it. Nyuk Tsin, by virtue of not looking too pretty and of working long hours hauling wood to the lowknds, which made her seem much older than she was, escaped rape, but many of the other Hakka girls did not.

At this time Nyuk Tsin was living meagerly in the home of her uncle, who, following the execution of her father and mother, was required by village custom to take her in. This uncle, a hard, unhappy one, reminded her constantly of two dismal facts: she was already seventeen years old and unmarried; and because she was her rebellious father's daughter the soldiers might at any time return to the High Vilkge and shoot both her and her uncle. These two conditions were cause enough for her uncle to cut down on her food rations and increase the bundle of wood she was required to lug down onto the plain.

Nyuk Tsin was not married because of a most unfortunate event over which she had no control. Her horoscope, which had been carefully cast when envoys from a distant Hakka village came seeking wives for the Lai family, showed the thin girl to be doubly cursed: she was born under the influence of the horse and was therefore a headstrong, evil prospect as a wife; and she was clearly a husband-killer, so that only a foolish man would take her into his home. There were, of course, favorable aspects to her future, such as a promise of wealth and many descendants, and these might have encouraged an avaricious husband to discount the peril, except that her horoscope divulged an additional disgrace: she would die in a foreign land. Adding together her willfulness, her husband-killing propensity and her burial in alien soil, the Hakka of the High Vilkge knew that in Char Nyuk Tsin they had an unmarriageable girl, and after a while they stopped proposing her to visiting envoys.