Travelers, safe at home
Me: (years ago) It’s hard to explain. Essentially, it’s kinda like how Jewish Europeans were looked at by other Europeans. [My people] mainly look like everyone else but everyone else hated us for how different we were from them.
Lea, my Irish friend: (in her Irish accent) Ah, you’re a traveler!
When I was a kid, I read the Diary of Anne Frank, and it really messed with me. I only ever read it that one time because it shook me so much.
Couldn’t wrap my kid brain around it; I had Jewish friends and they looked exactly like all the other Caucasian kids.
Remember that this was the 80s and, at that time, Asians were only starting to move into Queens so there weren’t a lotta us.
I remember thinking, “Man, white people are so weird. They hate and try to kill off an entire group of people just because they’re different.”
It wasn’t until way later that I discovered that this wasn’t limited to Jews and Europeans.
The Indians had their caste system, the Japanese had their Burakumin, and the Chinese – I later discovered – had…us.
You see, I’m not exactly Chinese in the same way that a Jewish citizen of France may or may not call themselves “French,” and/or “Jewish.”
My family – prior to my marrying Alison and then Sara – is 100% Hakka, which is what we called ourselves, for at least the last 700 years. This means that I’m genetically 100% Hakka.
Man, did I mess that up.
But that’s neither here nor there.
Just like the Irish called their itinerants “travelers,” the Hakka literally translates to “guest people.”
We were “guest people,” because no one wanted us, so we were essentially nomads
But we were called less savory things and treated even worse than that.
It was estimated that in during one reprisal, the Chinese killed 30,000 Hakka every single day for weeks.
That’s just a tiny bit of our story but essentially, people have been trying to kill or get rid of us for centuries.
That’s why so many Hakka are in Taiwan. There’s a dark explanation that I told for years and still tell.
We’re kinda like the Jews of China. No one wanted us and everyone was always trying to kill us. When there wasn’t any more China to escape to, we left the whole mainland and went to Taiwan. My parents went even further and came here.
But it’s true.
And it’s deeply imbedded into the psyche of many/most Hakka that the next reprisal could come at any day, so safety has always been a theme of this blog.
So too is embedded the concept of home, probably one of the top two or three recurring themes in this blog.
The place that this mindset shows up the most, though, is in our houses.
But, this entry’s getting long, so I’ll wrap it up in the next one.
Oh, but here are some pictures of classic Hakka food before I go.
Location: my little slice of the world
Mood: stressed
Music: I’ve been travellin’ a hard road (Spotify)
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