Michener, James

by Hawaii

  "Brother Char," the general said patiently between gasps, "from the beginning of history there have been soldiers, and soldiers have rules."

  "General Ching," Char replied, "from the beginning of history there have been mothers, and mothers have sons." These simple words were to live in Chinese history as the filial words of Char the farmer, but at the moment they did not much impress General Ching.

  "She cannot come with us," he commanded icily. "She is my mother," Char argued stubbornly. "Does not the old man Lao-tse tell us that a man must live in harmony with the universe, that he must give loyalty to his parents even before his wife?"

  "Not even a mother can be allowed to imperil our march," General Ching responded. "She will stay here!" he cried dramatically, pointing to the rocks behind which she had been hidden.

  "Then I shall stay with her," Char said simply, and he seated his old mother on a large rock and sat beside her. To his wife and five children he said, "You must go on," and the assembly began to disappear in the distant dust, so that Char's mother said, "Faithful son, the other old people were left behind. It is only right that I too should stay. Hurry, catch up with Nyuk Moi."

  "We shall stay here and fight the Tartars," Char said stubbornly, but as he sat he saw a figure running back from the disappearing mob, and it was General Ching.

  "Char," he said, in surrender, "we cannot go without you. You are a stalwart man."

  "I will rejoin you, with my mother," Char replied. "You may bring her," General Ching consented. "She will represent all of our mothers." Then he added, "But I will not accept you, Char, unless you apologize to the entire body for having made fun of me as a soldier."

  "I will apologize," Char agreed. "Not from shame, but because you really are a very fine soldier."

  Then General Ching said to the old woman, "Of course you know that you will not live to see the new land."

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  "If a journey is long enough, everyone must die along the way,' the old woman replied.

  As GENERAL CHiNc's resolute group moved south from Honan Province they acquired people from more than a hundred additional villages whose sturdy peasants, like Ching's, refused to accept Tartar domination. In time, what had started as a rabble became in actuality a solid army, with General Ching courageously willing to forge ahead in any risks while his lieutenant, General Char, guarded the rear and fought off bandits and stray bands of Tartars who sought to prevent the exodus.

  Across great mountain ranges the travelers moved, down swollen rivers and past burned villages. Winter came and deep snows, summer and the blazing heat of central China. At times General Ching was forced to lay siege to large cities, until food was given, and had China been at peace, imperial troops would undoubtedly have cut the marauders to shreds and crucified the leaders, but China was not at peace, and the great trek continued.

  Years passed, and the stolid, resolute men of Honan struggled southward, a few miles a day. Sometimes they bogged down at a river bank for two or three months. The siege of a city might delay them for a year. They ate, no one knew how. They stole from all. In the high mountain passes in winter their feet, wrapped in bags, left bloody trails, but everyone was constantly on the alert to fight. More than a thousand children were born, and even they fell under the simple rules of General Ching: "No old people can join us. You must submit to the government of Ching and Char. We never break into a sealed house."

  There was only one element in the army that successfully defied General Ching, and that was Char's old mother. Like a resilient field hoe whose suppleness increases with age, the wiry old woman thrived on the long march. If there was plenty of food, she was able to gorge herself without the stomach sickness that assaulted the others at such a time; and if there was starvation ahead, she apparently had some inner source of strength that carried her along. General Ching used to look at her and swear, "By the fires of hell, old woman, I think you were sent to torment me. Aren't you ever going to die?"

  "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."

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  FROM THE STARVING VILLAGE

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  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 hjs, 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

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  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. I
n 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

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  FROM THE STARVING VILLAGE

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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

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  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.