Tales of a Hakka town (1)

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

   Tales of a Hakka town

   The name of my hometown is Pusing which is sixteen kilometers south of 
Ipoh, the capital of the State of Perak in Malaysia. Over ninety per cent 
of the residents in Pusing are Hakka, the offspring of the immigrants who 
came from Dongguan county in Guangdong province China during the ninetieth
century. These immigrants came to this area to work in the tin mines. 
They built their settlement and called it Xi Di which meant Tin Land.
Later a Malay penghulu or chieftain in Batu Gajah, four kilometers away, 
renamed it Pusing, ater a little stream near the settlement because there 
was a shape bend of about ninety degrees on it. Pusing in Malay means 
turn, rotate or whirl. 

 More and more Hakkas arrived from Dongguan at the turn of the twentieth
century. Due to the increment of the population Pusing prospered. Many
new shop houses were built and it became a small town. There is a saying 
in Pusing that more than hundred per cent of the Pusing Chinese speak
Hakka. Why is it so? The answer is that the few Malay and Indian families
in Pusing speak Hakka too. 

  The Hakkas in Pusing acquired a little hill about two kilometers west 
of the town. They used this hill as the burial ground for their deceased 
relatives and it became a cemetery. Before they began to use thier 
cemetery they first buried the things they brought along with them 
from Dongguan. Things like clothing, soil, water, the golden urn 
containing their ancestors bones, and many other things. This was what 
they called Zong Fen or Main Grave which was to be the substitution for
their Hakka villages in Dongguan. Every year on the 14th day of the 7th 
moon, according to the Lunar Calendar, the Hakkas in Pusing would go to 
the Main Grave to pray. After the ceremony they would adjourn to a 
restaurant for a grand feast.    
 
  I recalled an occasion when my father invited an Indian Sikh who was a 
bullock cart owner to the feast. In order to create a harmonious enviourment
in the town sometimes non-Hakkas were invited to the feast. This Sikh spoke 
Hakka as if he was from Dongguan. My father used to hire his bullock cart 
to carry tin ore from the mine to Pusing to sell to a British company called 
Eastern Smelting Company. During the feast this Sikh jokingly told the 
dinners that he was a Dongguan Punjabi. This made every one roared. From
then on he was nicknamed Dongguan Punjabi.  

CHUNG Yoon-Ngan