Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [8]
Spur-On Village, Hoi Ping County, Guangdong Province, China
The village lay within the boundaries of the township of Wo On in Hoi Ping County. Newfangled as its name sounds, the village was actually couple of hundred years old. Legend has it that in the reign of the Qing emperor Qianlong, two brothers fled from famine-stricken Annam and settled here with their families. They cleared the land, tilled the soil, raised cattle and pigs and within a decade or so were firmly established. As he lay dying, the elder brother issued an exhortation to the whole family—they were to spur themselves on to ever-great efforts. Thus the village acquired the name Tsz Min, or Spur-On Village.
By the reign of Tongzhi, Spur-On Village had grown into a sizeable place, with over a hundred families. There were two clans: the Fongs, the dominant family and descendants of the Annamese brothers, and the Aus, outsiders who had come from Fujian. They were almost all farmers, with the difference that the Fongs owned large, contiguous fields while the Au clan, who had arrived later, cultivated scraps of land which they cleared at the edges of the Fongs’ fields. Later the two families began to intermarry, the daughters of one with the sons of the other. As the families merged, so, gradually, did the fields, and the differences in status between the Fongs and the Aus blurred too. This did not last: events took place which sharpened edges previously blunted … but that was not until much later.
One boundary of the village was marked by a small river, while at the other end was a low hill. The fields lay in a depression between the two landmarks; after years of intensive cultivation, they were fertile and productive and, in good years, their produce was enough to support the entire village. In times of drought and flooding, however, sons and daughters were still sometimes sold as servants.
Apart from growing crops, the people of Spur-On Village also reared pigs, grew vegetables, and did embroidery and weaving. They ate a little of their own produce, but most was taken to market and the cash used to buy household goods. Almost all Spur-On families had pigs and cattle, but there was only one slaughterman among them: Fong Tak Fat’s father, Fong Yuen Cheong.
Three generations of Fong Yuen Cheong’s family had been slaughtermen. As soon he was weaned and able to toddle without falling over, Fong Tak Fat would squat bare-bottomed next to his father and watch him butcher pigs. The knife went in white and came out red but he was not the least bit scared. “The furthest I’ve been to butcher pigs is ten or twenty li,” his father boasted to the other villagers, “but our Ah-Fat will travel thousands of li to butcher pigs.” Only half of this boast was correct, the bit about thousands of li.1 He was wrong about the butchering because before the time had come for him to hand his son the knife, Fong Yuen Cheong died.
Yuen Cheong’s branch of the Fong family had been getting poorer with every generation. His father had still owned a few mu2 of poor land, but by Yuen Cheong’s time, they were reduced to renting a few patches here and there. After the rent on the land had been paid, the yield was only enough to fill half the family rice bowl. They relied on Yuen Cheong’s butchering work for the other half. If he killed his own clan’s pigs in Spur-On Village, he received only the offal. It was when he worked for families who were not related, like the Aus, or who were from other villages, that he could earn a few coppers. So the family rice bowl sometimes stayed half-empty. It depended on the weather, the number of animals to be killed, the agricultural almanac and the cultural calendar—at propitious times when there were more weddings and more houses being built, more animals were killed.
Beginning in year ten of the reign of Tongzhi, there were two successive years of drought. The river which ran past the village dried to a strip of ooze over which clouds of insects swarmed as the evening sun went down. The fish and shrimps were nowhere to be seen. The parched earth,