66
BARBARA E. WARD
When to these differences are added marked linguistic and cultural distinctions, including stereotyped attitudes of mutual disdain, together with some direct clashes of interest, it becomes easy to understand how the Boat People regarded the loss of the landsmen in July 1952 as a distinct gain. They were openly delighted to lose the pigs (which they regarded, rightly, as exceedingly dirty) and the minor irritation of the landsmen's "gleaning" among the fish as they were drying in the sun. They were very little disturbed by the disappearance of the chance to buy fuel, for most of them had in any case usually followed the more economical practice of cutting their own. The shops, whose removal might have been inconvenient, remained for some time after the rest of the land population had departed. (Later there were to be opportunities for fishermen themselves to open replacements ashore). The closure of the school to which very few of them sent their children, and whose one poorly qualified teacher they did not trust, was not felt to be a loss (and the later provision of a modern building and new teachers was a very real gain). The seldom disinterested services of the Hakka ‘headman' they had long regarded with cynical acquiescence, and the chance to elect a new representative from among their own ranks was seen as a great opportunity. All in all, the fishermen saw their relationship with the local Hakka landspeople as one in which they themselves were more like hosts to parasites than equal partners in symbiosis. They were glad to be free of them.
Certainly my observation at the time was that the fishermen were in no sense inconvenienced by the move. The subsequent improvements in their standards of living have in fact owed more to the increased incomes that came with mechanisation than to anything else, but it may perhaps be true that their move towards living ashore was facilitated by the fact that the landspeople had left their house sites vacant. The fishermen may also have been correct in their unshakable conviction that their interests were better served by a 'headman' who shared them and moved exactly in the same territorial and cultural spheres as themselves.
Be that as it may (and these are all points to which we shall have to return) it should be clear from the diagrams alone that