Feng-Shui

Feng-shui is a particularly interesting topic to examine with respect to what it says about the identity of Shung Him Tong people. To non-Christians, feng-shui is commonly believed to be a "theory of the forces underlying such natural phenomena as hills, watercourses, certain directions, etc. which affect human fate and therefore must be taken into careful consideration in choosing sites for graves, temples, and all buildings" (Law and Ward 1982:90). Reference to feng-shui was made many times by Shung Him Tong Christians in connection with such topics as the founding of the village, the beauty of the area surrounding Shung Him Tong, the establishment of the cemetery, graves, and houses, the good or bad fortune of particular people, and the location of the new church.

Several Shung Him Tong people told me that feng-shui is a "superstition," implying that it is a false belief, particularly if it is "taken too far" and is believed to be capable of influencing a person's success or prosperity. Others, including one church elder, described feng-shui as secular, "scientific" logic, or as an intuitive aesthetic sense that "all Chinese people know." Along with this "rational" and secularized view of feng-shui is an attitude of condescension toward those who "take it too far" and treat it as a religion.

Mr. C., a particularly conservative and pious Christian, expressed a very common sense view of feng-shui. The topic arose as we were discussing Hakka houses. While we were drinking tea, he began to sketch a horseshoe-shaped Hakka house, the kind he had seen when he was growing up in Wuhua. As he drew the decorations on the outside, he explained that the Hakka were stone carvers while the Chaozhou were wood carvers. Very rich Hakka would have carvings over the front entrance and some along the eaves of the roof. I asked whether such a house had good feng-shui and he answered:

Yes, it's very simple. All it has to do with is balance. If I were to situate myself well in front of the house, I would want to see a house which is balanced properly. It's only logical. The house should be a little bit up on a hill but not too high up, and looking out from the house there should be a view, but not an open view. Preferably there should be hills and mountains which surround the view. You don't want it to be too open.

He demonstrated this by seating himself straight and holding his arms out before him: "When I am at my house I should feel like a man looking out and sitting in his throne. Things should all be balanced." Then he fidgeted with one hand as if he imagined some imbalance: "Balance, that's all feng-shui is." The Chinese concept of balance, he explained, is connected with ideas of hygiene. By way of contrast he described an apartment in Luen Wo market where there are rows of rooms with few windows as "unhygienic." Old houses, he explained, had thicker walls and the tiles on the roof had air passing through them into the house so they reflected heat away in the summer. New houses have thin walls and can only reflect or repel the heat for a few hours before they absorb it and the whole house gets hot.

Non-Christians consider feng-shui an important factor in placing graves. A well-placed grave not only insures proper rest for the dead but can also assure the descendants success, prosperity, and the birth of sons.^[14] Several people of Shung Him Tong told me that outsiders believe that Shung Him Tong has very good feng-shui, which explains the large horseshoe-shaped graves located on the hill above the village. One is the grave of a multimillionaire who made his fortune in Malaysian mining. Many years ago he is said to have approached Pang Lok Sam to ask whether he could be buried there. As Tin explained, "Of course the villagers, being Christian, couldn't care about feng-shui, so they let him build it." Another man from Shung Him Tong told me the tale of one of the newer graves: another rich man asked permission to put his grave on the hill and was refused by the villagers—who as Christians disdained the idea of feng-shui —until "he offered to pay every family in the village a hundred Hong Kong dollars, and more to the church elders," after which he was allowed to build the grave.

Like many villagers, a relative of Pang Lok Sam commented on the beauty of the location of the Shung Him cemetery and said that it had good feng-shui, explaining that "Pang Lok Sam and all old people back then knew about feng-shui. Although he didn't hire a feng-shui expert to find the site, I think he knew it had it." The cemetery appears to follow the basic rules of feng-shui: it is located in one of the green contours or "veins" of the dragon, to the rear of the village. To the people of Shung Him Tong, the cemetery is in an ideal location that satisfies both those who openly believe in feng-shui and those who do

not. Everyone agrees that a cemetery should be located on a hill and it should not be too close to the places of the living.

According to the founding legend of the village (see chap. 3), Shung Him Tong is located in a place where the feng-shui is very good. As one particularly pious and conservative Christian explained, on a certain level feng-shui is just common sense—"something all Chinese know intuitively." Thus it is no surprise that the son of Pastor Ling should have picked a good site: not only did he have an intuitive aesthetic appreciation of feng-shui, but he was also a trained engineer involved in surveying for the Kowloon Canton Railway.

The local people were opposed to the Christians settling at Shung Him Tong because their presence was expected to obstruct the locals' own feng-shui. But the locals were also afraid to settle there themselves because the site, although considered good, was also potentially hazardous. The Punti were surprised, according to one young woman, that no harm came to the Christians, because part of Shung Him Tong is located along the throat and head of the dragon, while another part sits on top of the pearl that the dragon holds in his mouth. As one Hong Kong feng-shui expert explained, "A house on the dragon's head can be risky: living on its brain is good, but a slight miscalculation could put the residents dangerously close to the beast's mouth, the source of strong ch'i [qi, energy or cosmic breath] and a huge appetite" (Rossbach 1983:37). Too much qi can prove as much of a problem as too little in causing misfortune. In the ideal site, the qi flows smoothly and the yin and yang are balanced (Weller 1987:173–84; Rossbach 1983:28; Feuchtwang 1974b:48–56).

Shung Him Tong is neatly nestled between two low-lying hills to the northeast and the southwest with Dragon Mountain sheltering its back to the southeast and the Phoenix River running across the front southwest to north.^[15] The village is oriented in the same direction as the older neighboring villages in Lung Yeuk Tau, which are believed to be oriented to best take advantage of the geomantic features of the area. The village is nestled in the embrace of the hills, which is referred to as the classic feng-shui "armchair" formation, or as the "dragon-protecting pearl" (Rossbach 1983:39–40; Freedman 1969, 1979; Knapp 1977:4; Lai 1974; Lip 1979). For Hakka Christians of Shung Him Tong, of course, this is out of practical rather than religious considerations.

Tales of the effect of feng-shui on the people of Shung Him Tong continue to circulate. According to one friend from Shung Him Tong, the Punti believe that one church member dug up the pearl from the dragon's mouth when he and his brother built their two houses and that this act brought them bad luck. According to another person the family had bad luck because they severed the tendons in the dragon's feet: "that is why the older brother got very sick and couldn't walk and then he died." Another person disagreed, insisting that it was not the tendons but the pearl that had been dug up; it was the pearl,

she said, that "people say brought bad luck." Yet another person explained that the desecration did not cause the brother's death but rather the death of the church member's son, and the fact that he now has only one son. "But," he quickly added, "Christians don't believe this."

The most striking tale of feng-shui in Shung Him Tong involves an aborted attempt to build the new church; it is a topic that the villagers are hesitant to bring up because they do not want to "stir up conflicts again." By the late 1960s the church building had become too small and the board began the process of deciding where the new church would be built. Some people wanted the church high up on the hill and others wanted it on level land near the old church. A third group was in favor of putting it on the slope on the west side of the village, but that plan was not popular because the slope was too steep. Those who wanted the church located on the hill between Shung Him Tong and the neighboring village wanted it there, according to Mr. C., because it would be visible from far away and closer to non-Christian villages. Those who favored the old church site wanted it there because it would be more convenient and more easily accessible on foot. Their plan, they said, would also be cheaper because it would not require a new road for transporting construction materials.

The decision was made to build the church on the hill. A new lot, northeast of the village on a small hill overlooking the neighboring non-Christian village, was leased from the government and plans for construction began. As Freedman aptly wrote of feng-shui and Chinese architectural aesthetics, "Let one man in a village build a fraction too high; let him make a window or a door that can be interpreted as a threat; and he has a struggle on his hands" (1969:14). The attempt to build the church above the village was interpreted as a literal and figurative attempt by Christians to put themselves "above" their neighbors and to prosper or benefit at the expense of the non-Christian village (cf. Freedman 1979:203; Feuchtwang 1974b:118). According to one government official familiar with the incident, "The Lung Yeuk Tau Tengs were against the church on the hill … because they thought the hill was the source of their feng-shui and that the church would block it." As Tin explained, "It would be like the people of the church were looking down on them, looking down at their houses."

When on the first day of construction a child from the non-Christian village nearby became seriously ill—and died, according to some—a large group of Punti believed to be from Lung Yeuk Tau organized a roadblock and threw stones to prevent the construction team from passing. Rather than attempt to negotiate with their angry neighbors, the Christians abandoned the hill site and built the new church next to the old one on lower land, a plan that some Christians had favored all along. One man remembers that after this incident several fences were erected and many Shung Him Tong people were afraid to walk through Lung Yeuk Tau at night.

Several Shung Him Tong people explained that "any time the villagers complain about feng-shui —not just feng-shui but also graves, roads, and buildings—the government doesn't want to stir up trouble with the Punti" and they let them have their way. Like many people in the Hong Kong government, some Shung Him Tong people believe that feng-shui beliefs are used by indigenous villagers as a "good excuse to do or not do certain things." In the New Territories government records, there are numerous examples of Punti opposition to construction projects because the feng-shui of the region would be disturbed. There are also numerous records of "feng-shui complaints" being solved with financial settlements. Shung Him Tong people believe that, although non-Christians may in fact believe in feng-shui, they are also well aware of the economic benefits that they can receive through such claims. In the case of the church site, however, even money would not have solved the problem. As Tin explained, they "believed in feng-shui and just didn't want the church looking over their shoulders. I believe in feng-shui too, but not that it can make you rich or poor." As Freedman has written: "Chinese may cease to believe in and practice his [sic] traditional religion without abandoning his faith in geomancy. Be he Christian or atheist, fung shui retains its meaning and appeal. Geomancy is a 'science' for those who would have it so" (1979:195).

Feng-shui, like the other beliefs outlined in this chapter, demonstrates the way in which the religious beliefs and practices of the people of Shung Him Tong differ significantly from those of their neighbors. While all religious systems have internal contradictions and inconsistencies, what is important in this case is that the ambiguities between the two systems have allowed Hakka Christians to create a rhetoric for arguing that they are Chinese. The Chinese and Christian identities of the people of Shung Him Tong are expressed through their Christian religious practices and the Chinese practices that they attempt to define as secular. Their identity is also expressed in the management of their landscape and the construction of their village. To British administrators, government officials, and European missionaries, the physical appearance of the village communicates—among other things—a concern for Christian orthodoxy. To their non-Christian neighbors, it displays many traditional aesthetic qualities and concern for feng-shui.

In their day-to-day lives, through their treatment of ancestors, their celebration of Chinese festivals and rites of passage, and the physical construction of their village, Hakka Christians express their Chinese identity within a constrained framework of acceptable Christian behavior. Yet as we have seen, the Hakka Christian definition of Chinese identity differs from that of non-Christians. Christians attempt to create a Chinese identity divorced from Chinese religious beliefs and practices, and thus they are constantly in a position of having to rationalize and clarify the ambiguities—to draw and redraw

boundaries between Christian and Chinese funeral practices, between Ching Ming and Easter, between the aesthetic and superstitious elements of feng-shui. Their ancestors are commemorated, not worshiped, and their festivals and rites of passage are reinterpreted as secular or Christian occasions. Similarly, the reinterpretation of feng-shui as "common sense" or as a purely aesthetic consideration is carefully spelled out verbally by Hakka Christians because their behavior—the construction of homes, church, and cemetery—suggests that they do subscribe to such a belief.

Although the particular beliefs and practices associated with the care of the dead in Shung Him Tong are not the same as those of non-Christians, the fact remains that these Chinese Christians are also concerned with their ancestors and their own conception of "proper" care. The church cemetery has not so much replaced the family cemetery as it has become a cemetery for the extended "church family." In much the same way, the importance of the church in people's minds has not replaced the importance of family and ancestors but has extended the family to include the entire Hakka Christian church community. Just as a family graveyard maps out the family genealogy, the church cemetery maps out the genealogy of the church community.

In contrast to the "dual" system of beliefs identified by Nash among Bolivian tin miners whose Catholic and "folk" beliefs coexist but are separated or "compartmentalized" in time and space (1979), the system developed by Hakka Christians attempts to separate Christian beliefs from all other religious beliefs and practices, which are rejected outright as false. In other words, Hakka Christians do not practice a syncretic religion that combines elements of Christianity with elements of Buddhism, Taoism, or Chinese popular religion. Nor do they restrict their practice of Christianity to particular contexts—certain times and circumstances. Instead, what they maintain of Chinese non-Christian religion has been transformed into a set of rationalized beliefs and values that they claim are compatible with Christianity. These "secularized" Chinese religious practices are most evident, as we have seen, in the cases of festivals and rites of passage, particularly those concerning death and feng-shui, because these are most closely tied to ancestors, genealogy, and history, and therefore to Hakka and Chinese identity.

As the examples above illustrate, Shung Him Tong's attempt to reconcile Chinese and Christian identities by way of rationalizing their respective religious beliefs and practices has not been easy, nor will it be entirely successful so long as Shung Him Tong villagers practice the type of Christianity they do, in which the two sets of beliefs are defined as mutually exclusive. This is not to say that their endeavors have been entirely unsuccessful, either; rather, the process is an ongoing one, as is the process of reconciling Hakka Chinese and Christian identities.