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BARBARA E. WARD
Last year the Pang clan village of Fanling held its great ta chiu. It happens once every ten years. The film you saw at the beginning was taken there, and many of the photographs on display too. I was lucky enough to be able to spend nearly all the days of the ta chiu in Fanling. To my surprise, I found myself constantly being greeted and spoken to in English -- not in Hong Kong English, but in the different local dialects of different geographical regions in the United Kingdom. The speakers ranged in age from 3 to 25 years. All were children of the restaurant emigration which has taken place since about 1953. With their parents, they had come back for the occasion. To this village of less than 3,000 inhabitants, more than 500 people had come back by air at great personal expense. Asked why they had spent so much money, the parents all gave the same reply: "We want our children to know our customs and traditions"; "We want our children to know...." A similar thing happened in Ho Chung in December, and this year the villages of the Lam Tsuen valley expect the same. These people understand about personal identity; they know the immense value of the intangible; and they can still experience their cultural heritage. But whether the future will allow them to continue to do so we cannot tell. Even if it does (which I think rather unlikely) there are already far, far larger numbers of young (and older) people in our towns who have no chance at all of experiencing the intangibles of their cultural heritage at first hand. The only way they can be given even a small part of what is, after all, their right to their own past is through the kind of work that historians and anthropologists have done and are still for a short time able to do in the New Territories.
Most of you will not know that I am both the oldest and the pioneer social anthropologist in Hong Kong. It is a fact—now I suppose an historical fact—that I started the whole thing off, way back in 1950; and I have spent most of my academic life teaching, reading, researching, and writing about it. It is my hope and intention to continue this kind of work and, in cooperation with my historian friends, help to see it through to a triumphant conclusion sometime before the year 1990. That is why I accepted an invitation to come to the Chinese University, and, to answer the question I set at the beginning, that is also my justification for daring to speak to such an audience as this on the cultural heritage of the New Territories.