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easier and less shameful for a man without such extra house-room to borrow an empty house from a kinsman for his declining years. It would in any case, I believe, be inconceivable for a villager to bring his bride into rented or borrowed accommodation.
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c) Adoption
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My informants distinguished clearly between two forms of male adoption: loh-faan-tsai5 and kwoh-kai-tsai#17 which correspond to a distinction between adoption from outside the localised descent group, and that within it. Different surname adoption was generally frowned on in the past13; I found that men who have entered the village in this way are still looked down on; and informants agreed that it is often an unsatisfactory way of ensuring one's descent. It has nonetheless been a frequent occurrence in Sheung Tsuen, and although the questions of its frequency in this, a mixed-surname village of relatively small lineages, as compared with its frequency in a single-surname village, and of the reasons impelling people to choose one form of adoption rather than the other, are fascinating and important ones, different surname adoption is for the purposes of this discussion the precise equivalent of the production by a man and his wife of a single son. I therefore omit it entirely from what follows.
“Adoption” is not a good translation of kwoh-kai, though I am at a loss for a better one. The Chinese term means "to cross and continue": it denotes the transfer of a son from one descent line to another within the localised descent group.14 It is in theory, therefore, a straightforward means of redistributing property within the lineage when nature fails to provide the holder with an heir. In practice, however, it is rather less than adequate to the strains put on the system by the gross irregularities in the production of sons.
In general, a man is not regarded as capable of being an individual property-holder until his marriage15; and he does not achieve full control of his property until his rights are formally distinguished from those of his brothers.16 Thus a man is provided with a house when he marries, but the house is not ritually identified as the focus of a new and distinct line of descent until a separate ancestral tablet is installed at the time when formal division takes place. Families are not divided, however, unless