Hawaii - James Michener [255]
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,