89
It is clear from this table that a man would not be in charge of a fishing boat until he was over 30 years of age. By that time he would usually be a married man of between 10 and 20 years' standing with several children. The significance of this (and therefore the importance in local estimation of early marriage and the rapid production of children) should be obvious from the earlier discussion about the size of the work force on different types of boat. A man with wife, mother and 2 children aged 10 or above could run a small long-liner quite successfully. With fewer than that, or with only younger children, he would encounter difficulty; alone or with only a wife, he would have to take to the much less remunerative business of handlining or find paid employment on somebody else's junk. A master's age and his date of marriage could thus be seen in one light as functions of his role (and vice versa). The likely age of mastership was fixed also by a man's father's age. The father of a man of, say, 36 years would be likely to be in at least his middle fifties. By that age a Kau Sai man tends to think of himself as old, and, as we shall see, it is not uncommon for masters of fifty and upwards to enter upon "retirement". When this happens their places are normally assumed by their eldest sons in about their mid-thirties. There were no cases in Kau Sai of retirement before 50, and only one example of a man (aged 57) handing over his mastership to a son under thirty. (It should not be inferred from this that all men of fifty and over wished to withdraw from active mastership: retirement, which is discussed in detail below and in Chapter 8, was an idiosyncratic matter).
There is some evidence that the expectation of life among the Boat People is lower than among the land people in Hong Kong. Barnett1 discerns a rapid falling off in numbers after the age of fifty. In so far as that was the case it would follow, of course, that a common age for succession would be sometime in a man's thirties or late twenties. My figures from Kau Sai are too few to add anything of substance to the discussion about the expectation of life among the Boat People in general, but the following tables, which show the incidence of mastership among males of the various age groups, do provide some support for Barnett's hypothesis. Row 1 in Table 2 records two dramatic decreases: between the forties and fifties and the thirties and forties.
89
It is clear from this table that a man would not be in charge of a fishing boat until he was over 30 years of age. By that time he would usually be a married man of between 10 and 20 years' standing with several children. The significance of this (and therefore the importance in local estimation of early marriage and the rapid production of children) should be obvious from the earlier discussion about the size of the work force on different types of boat. A man with wife, mother and 2 children aged 10 or above could run a small long-liner quite successfully. With fewer than that, or with only younger children, he would encounter difficulty; alone or with only a wife, he would have to take to the much less remunerative business of handlining or find paid employment on somebody else's junk. A master's age and his date of marriage could thus be seen in one light as functions of his role (and vice versa). The likely age of mastership was fixed also by a man's father's age. The father of a man of, say, 36 years would be likely to be in at least his middle fifties. By that age a Kau Sai man tends to think of himself as old, and, as we shall see, it is not uncommon for masters of fifty and upwards to enter upon "retirement". When this happens their places are normally assumed by their eldest sons in about their mid-thirties. There were no cases in Kau Sai of retirement before 50, and only one example of a man (aged 57) handing over his mastership to a son under thirty. (It should not be inferred from this that all men of fifty and over wished to withdraw from active mastership: retirement, which is discussed in detail below and in Chapter 8, was an idiosyncratic matter).
There is some evidence that the expectation of life among the Boat People is lower than among the land people in Hong Kong. Barnett" discerns a rapid falling off in numbers after the age of fifty. In so far as that was the case it would follow, of course, that a common age for succession would be sometime in a man's thirties or late twenties. My figures from Kau Sai are too few to add anything of substance to the discussion about the expecta- tion of life among the Boat People in general, but the following tables, which show the incidence of mastership among males of the various age groups, do provide some support for Barnett's hypothesis. Row 1 in Table 2 records two dramatic decreases: between the forties and fifties and the thirties and forties
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