My Family's Circled Dragon House

by Hoi Yung Lau (Hong Kong)

I didn't expect to find China

Forty years ago, my parents moved from their hometown Meizhou to Hong Kong with my two elder sisters who were just a few years old. I was born after that in Hong Kong and even Meizhou is only 300 kilometers away, I had never set foot there until this year, when we traveled there for a ritual to place my late mother’s spirit tablet in the old family house. I had always regarded Hong Kong as my only hometown and rarely paid attention when my parents talked about theirs. I knew they led a hard life in a poor village and had assumed they lived in an ugly dirty hut. It turned out that the ugly dirty hut is a traditional ‘circled dragon house’, which is unique to my ethnic group, the Hakka, in the Meizhou area. It is a huge semi-circular housing compound that encloses a few dozen rooms and halls within. The three halls close to the entrance are common spaces for ancestral worship and other lineage activities. The rest of the rooms are much smaller, serving as apartments, communal kitchens and storage, etc. There is a big semi-circular fishpond in front of the compound and together they form a perfect circle. The compound used to house more than a hundred people in the extended family, though they all moved out decades ago in favor of modern accommodation nearby or better prospects in the cities. Now it is usually locked up and I felt like stepping into the film set of a Chinese period drama with overhanging gable roofs, green tiles and wooden slatted windows. It was musty, dilapidated and rather melancholic, but also dignified and utterly aesthetic. After we laid out a steamed chicken, fruit and other offerings on the table in the ancestral hall, we had to wait for the auspicious hour to perform the ritual, so we wandered around in the compound. Each of the rooms that served as an apartment is only about ten square meters but often housed a family of four or five. The room given to my family is now an empty space with nothing more than unpainted walls and bare cement floor, but it still managed to conjure up my sisters’ long-lost memories. They remembered that Mom used to keep silkworms in a corner as a duty assigned by the rural production team. Recollecting a story from Mom, I tried to picture a much younger version of my parents and sisters in the room. They were sitting by the faint oil lamp, and my parents were picking lice off my sisters’ hair. Mom could feel the goosebumps on her skin rising. All the while, the fat wriggly silkworms were quietly munching on mulberry leaves in their corner. We continued our tour of the compound. As I began to harbor the notion that people tend to remember yucky stuff most clearly, one of my sisters confirmed it by pointing out a tree and proudly declared that our aunt used to bring her there to do number two. We found signs of everyday life scattered around: a rusty bike, rickety chairs, grimy clothes-hangers. We wandered to a row of empty rooms separated from the rest of the compound and they told me those were classrooms. I had never imagined that my family’s humble old house came with its own academy. We returned to the ancestral hall when the auspicious hour came. We bowed to the altar with incense sticks in our hands, and reverently placed the sticks in the incense burner. The process was repeated several times to pay homage to various deities and ancestors. Then we burned joss paper (underworld currency) as an offering to Mom, wishing her a prosperous afterlife. We worked up a big fire and welcomed the heat in the cold day as we watched the colorful paper turning into black ashes, some of them escaping to float around in the air... The compound was locked up once more and the spirits of the deceased were left on their own again until another spirit joins their ranks. I was filled with a sense of wonder and realization as if I had discovered something hidden deep inside me.