The Crippled Tree by Han Suyin (4)

[CHUNG Yoon-Ngan <chungyn@mozart.collective.com.au>]

     The Crippled Tree by Han Suyin (4)   
 
    This is an excerpt from the book "The Crippled Tree" by Han Suyin 
    a Hakka doctor cum author.   

   My ancestors had settled in Meihsien in the thirteenth century, and the
migration to Szechuan took place most probably between 1682AD and 1710AD.
In our family records it is stated that the first ancestor to reach
Szechuan arrived as an itinerant pedlar. His manner of travel was not
mentioned. Did he walked, across his shoulder a pole, at both ends the
baskets that pedlars swing as they walk, and what did he sell? - Southern
goods, sweetmeat, carved objects of wood which may have fetched a good
price?  The family gravestones are only certain on one point: that the
ancestor was a pedlar, and very poor.  

   I found in the National Library in Peking, among a collection of Hakka
love songs dating back to the sixteenth century, the following chat:

   My loved one is going , going up to Szechuan.
   At the Salt Point he boards the salt board to Chieh An.
   A hundred, a thousand riches I gladly forsake.
   But how can I leave my heart, my loved one?

   The salt gondolas, with their slanted prows, sailed up the inland river
and canals system from the salt pans in Kuangtung province to Chieh An in
Kiangsi province, at that time a big entrepot city for the salt. Until
some years ago they were still in use.

   The new settlers seeded themselves all over Szechuan province, chiefly
along the Great River and its tributaries, all the way from Chungking, up
to the Mien River to Cengtu, and in the plain of Chengtu, the most fertile
sea-on-land plain. And because there was little opposition, no feuding,
much to eat, they assimilated in great part, intermarried with local
inhabitants. By the end of the nineteenth century only traces of the
original Hakka dialect lingered among the older members of the family, my
father's generation no longer spoke Hakka.

   After his arrival in Szechuan, the first ancestor, the pedlar, became a
land-tiller, first a hired hand, then later a small tenant-farmer. That
was at Pihsien, west of Chengtu, where in 250BC Li Ping, governor of the
region, but, also an engineer, carried out a complex operation upon the
Mein River as it descended steeply from the Tibetant ranges to hurtle at
vast speed across the plain, dragging frightful boulders, and flooding 
the shallow basin every three years. At Kuanhsien, where the Mein River
left the foorhills, Li Ping redirected its waters by cutting a gorge forty
meters deep through the solid rock of the cliffs, thus dividing the river
into two forks, and by means of dams and barriers, still kept up today,
controlling the water flow. The strong current out of this artificial
gorge was then divided and subdivided, twisted and curbed by stone
revetments, the water grooved into innumerable canals and streams which
latticed the plain and transformed it into a garden fair beautiful in all
its corners. Pihsien was reputed one of the best corners, the first
district after Kuanhsien to receive the now domesticated and harmonious
waters.

   In such a well chosen spot the ancestors prospered, and soon acquired
more land, and moved up the feudal hierarchy of China, accumulating estate
and property, becoming educated, and thus attaining the top echelon, the
scholar-official-administrator class. They became landed gentry; began to
wear silk and read literature; soon their sons were competing in the
provincial examinations. No longer did they marry larged-foot hard-working
women from the ancestral district of Menhsien; their brides were small,
pale, had bound feet, and seldom left the house. They erected ancestors'
sanctuaries and halls with fields attached for their upkeep and for the
collective education of their sons. They kept the Book of Generations
filled with the names of the new sons; they planted groves of the lanmu
tree, that exellent fine-whorled wood for coffins in which the body does
not rot, so that their heirs might be well provided for, from birth to
beyond death.

   They multiplied, and held the family property in joint ownership;
family councils decided on the careers of the sons, the alliances to be
contracted through marriages, the buying and selling of land. Soon there
were too many of them, and they had to subdivde, both the property and the
families into local branches, some remaining in Pihsien, others settling
in other towns of Szechuan, in spite of their efforts to live up to the
motto Five Generations Under One Roof.
     
   They must have quarrelled, and there must have been family scandals,
but not a word of these was ever recorded. It is not propitious to record
lapses. What affected the Family as a whole is recorded, the final,
authoritative decision is inscribed on paper, or even carved on stone, if
weighty enough; but the transient concern of an individual member, a
wayward and aberrant effusion soon terminated, finds no place here; as in
the feudal families of Europe with their alliances based on
self-interested, there was no place for the individual choice. The tenor
of continuity, an invisible but relentless heart, beats its steady
pulsation, propelling the Family forward into its own destiny through
these two centuries, the seventeenth to the nineteenth. Only a harmony
unceasingly displayed could sustain this relentless holding together,
nonconformism and disunity were erased from memory lest they remain or
suscitate discord...................................................

   From "The Crippled Tree" by Han Suyin.