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This old lady said "Well, if you want my history, I can sit down here and talk for days and days—but I am not giving it to you". Of course, you know very well, the moment she said it, that she means she wants a listener. She doesn't want us to get information too easily. So you hang on and stay there, and learn to be fairly thick-skinned. Presently, she began a fascinating story of what happened to her during the Second World War. What happened also illustrates what happened in the family.
I won't go into details; but just to give you a clue, she married the youngest and least important son of a very unimportant family in the village. To make things worse, she was a refugee from China at the beginning of the war, and her family was so poor (I can always remember the line she gave me) that she had to go up to her future husband's family to ask for the other five dollars that they owed her as part of the “bride price”. You can imagine the loss of 'face' that was associated with a woman coming up to the door of her future husband to ask for the last five dollars! Worse still, her husband was taken away by the Japanese and she was there on her own ever after. It is one of these very very sorrowful stories you hear when tears actually flowed; and I think not only from her but also from some of the people who were with me.
We called our project the ‘Oral History Project', as we began thinking that we would rely primarily on interviews. Of course we couldn't use a detailed questionnaire with people of this kind, so I drew up a list of topics we would need to get information on, such as the outline history of the area. We supplemented those with other things which we could ask people as we got to know them better. Very soon, it was clear that village festivals were important events from which much could be learned about village organisation and history, and I began to make a point of going to them. It was not always possible to adhere to a plan of working only within a designated district. At times, you get to be told of a contact elsewhere who is willing to be interviewed; and if he is 85, you don't want to wait another five years before you go to him! You take whatever opportunity that comes up, and that often takes you out of your way. And so before very long, we were doing three lines of research work at the same time.