Hawaii

by James Michener

  "Mountains and rivers are like milk to me," she replied. And she became the symbol of the group: an indomitable old woman who had known starvation and murder and change. She refused to be carried, and often when her son, General Char, rejoined the group after some rear-guard action against local troops who were trying to disperse the army, he would throw his sword upon the ground and lie exhausted beside his mother, and she would say, "My years cannot go on forever, but I am sure that you and I will see a good land before I die."

  The years passed, and this curious, undigested body of stalwart Chinese, holding to old customs and disciplined as no other that had ever wandered across China, probed constantly southward, until in the year 874 they entered upon a valley in Kwangtung Province, west of the city of Canton. It had a clear, swift-running river, fine mountains to the rear, and soil that seemed ripe for intensive cultivation. "I think this is what we have been looking for," General Ching said as his minions stared down at the rich promise below them. "This is the Golden Valley."

  He held a consultation with General Char and his lieutenants, and then called in Char's fantastically old mother. "What do you think?" he asked her solemnly.

  "From what I can see, it looks good," she said.

  The general rose, cupped his hands, and faced north. "You old people, dead back there in the walled village!" he shouted. "Your children have found their new home." Then he glared at Char's mother and said, "You can die now. It is really outrageous how long you have lived."

  The occupation of the valley was not so simple a task as General Ching and his advisers had hoped, for the river bed was occupied by a capable, fiercely compact group of southerners whom Ching and his cohorts held to be not Chinese at all, for they spoke a different language, ate different food, dressed differently, followed different customs and hated above all else the old-style Chinese from the north. At first, Ching attempted to settle the problem directly, by driving the southerners out, but their troops were as well trained as his, so his army had little success. Next, he tried negotiation, but the southerners were more clever than he and tricked him into surrendering what advantages he had already gained. Finally, when military occupation of the entire valley proved unfeasible, the general decided to leave the lowlands to the southerners and to occupy all the highlands with his people, and in time the Highlanders became known as the Hakka, the Guest People, while the lowlanders were called the Punti, the Natives of the Land.

  It was in this manner that one of the strangest anomalies of history developed, for during a period of almost a thousand years these two contrasting bodies of people lived side by side with practically no friendly contact. The Hakka lived in the highlands and farmed; the Punti lived in the lowlands and established an urban life. From their walled villages the Hakka went into the forests to gather wood, which their women lugged down onto the plains in bundles; the Punti sold pigs. The Hakka mixed sweet potatoes with their rice; the Punti, more affluent, ate theirs white. The Hakka built their homes in the U formation of the north; the Punti did not. The Hakka remained a proud, fierce, aloof race of people, Chinese to the core and steeped in Chinese lore; the Punti were relaxed southerners, and when the lords of China messed up the government so that no decent man could tell which end of the buffalo went forward, the Punti shrugged their shoulders and thought: "The north was always like that."

  In addition to all these obvious differences, there were two of such gravity that it could honestly be said, "No Punti can ever comprehend a Hakka, and no Hakka cares whether he does or not." The upland people, the Hakka, preserved intact their ancient speech habits inherited from the purest fountain of Chinese culture, whereas the Punti had a more amiable, adjustable language developed during two thousand years spent far outside the influence of Peking. No Punti could understand what a Hakka said; no Hakka gave a damn about what a Punti said. In certain pairs of villages, they lived within three miles of each other for ten centuries, but Hakka never spoke to Punti, not only because of inherited hatreds, but because neither could converse in the other's language.

  The second difference, however, was perhaps even more divisive, for when the outside conquerors of China decreed that all gentlewomen, out of respect for their exalted position, must bind their feet and hobble about like ladies on cruel and painful stumps, the Punti willingly kowtowed to the command, and Punti villages were marked by handsome, well-dressed wives who sat through long years of idleness, the throbbing pain in their feet only a distant memory. In this respect, the Punti village became a true portrait of all of China.

  But the self-reliant Hakka women refused to bind the feet of their girl babies, and once when a general of the imperial army strode into the High Village and commanded that henceforth all Hakka women must have small feet, the Hakka began to laugh at his folly, and they continued to ridicule the idea until the general retreated in confusion. When he returned with a company of troops to hang everyone, the Hakka women fled to the mountains and were not caught. In their resolve to be free they were fortified by their memories of three resolute ancestors: General Char's old mother, who had lived to be eighty-two and who survived the long trek south in better shape than most of the men; her practical daughter-in-law Nyuk Moi, who had ruled the Golden Valley for a decade after her husband's death; and the gentle, iron-willed Siu Lan, the learned widow of General Ching, who ruled the area for another decade after Nyuk Moi's death. They were revered as the ideal prototypes of Hakka womanhood, and for anyone to think of them marching with bound feet was ridiculous. Furthermore, as Ching the seer prudently pointed out in 1670: "If our women bind their feet, how can they work?" So the Hakka women laughed at the government edicts and remained free. Of course, the Punti ridiculed them, and on those rare occasions when a Hakka woman wandered into Canton, the city people stared, but these resolute, difficult, obstinate guests from the north refused to be dictated to.

  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 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 wate
rs 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 villages, 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 Village. 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 Village 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.

  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 own! 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 this!” 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 traitors!” Then he demanded: "Where is the 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 village 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 village 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 Village, 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 Village, 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 lowlands, which made her seem much older than she was, escaped rape, but many of the other Hakka girls did not.