98
BARBARA E. WARD
ingly and quite quickly into almost as complete a retirement as his own eighty-year-old father. For the next six or seven years he continued to live on board the second junk of the pair and take part in fishing operations, but everybody now called Cheung Hei si lau even though his father and grandfather were both still alive. He was 34.
Lo Shing Chui took over command of his family's pair of purse-seiners at an even earlier age. His father, Lo Kwai Fat, amiable but not very intelligent and, like Ma Tai Tak who retired when his son was barely 20, unhappy in contacts with the outside world, was only too pleased to withdraw as soon as possible. His younger brother Kwai Ch'ing, still in his thirties, still lived and worked in the same firm, undivided, and it might have been expected that (as in another Kau Sai pair at the same period) he would take over the mastership. So indeed he might, had he not been of such subnormal intelligence that he was obviously incapable. In cases of real incapacity, I was told, mere seniority is always overridden.
rather less regular
One final case will illustrate another situation. In 1953 the two brothers Shek Hung Toh and Shek Hei Toh (they denied any relationship with the other Shek family just described) were running a pair of purse-seiners together. The elder, Hung Toh, aged 35, was si tau of the firm; the younger, Hei Toh, 29, master of the second junk. Their father had recently died, and their mother, aged 51, lived on Hei Toh's boat. Also living with them, on Hung Toh's boat, was their deceased father's elder brother, Shek Lin Hei, aged 63. This man had no managerial status. He was, like Lo Kwai Ch'ing above, simply another member of the crew, but unlike Kwai Ch'ing he was in no way incapacitated except, a little, by his age. On enquiry, I was told that Lin Hei and his now deceased brother had formally divided their family some ten or so years before, during the Japanese occupation (when poverty forced a number of divisions that might not otherwise have taken place). Unlike his brother, who had prospered, Lin Hei had suffered a run of very bad luck culminating in an accident in which his wife and all his children were drowned. After this, his brother had invited him to come and live on his boat, although, the family being divided there