Pine trees grow abundantly in Hongjian Village. They line up a road exactly like the agoho trees our visitors to Barrio Alto of Luisita have seen. The trees, standing like sentinels, were planted by relatives near and far with the same thought: to shade the tired farmers.
Mango, longan and lychee trees have since died in Hongjian but a powerful tree survives. It is a large banyan tree that greets visitors at the town plaza where Noynoy was last week. Known as a tree that survives generations, it is believed to be the same Blocking Wind Tree that has shielded the villagers from the severe northeasterly winds blowing in circles around two mountains, Tung An and Nan An. Some of its leaves point towards the direction of the house of the elders believed to be the oldest living Xus in China — the Cojuangco relatives in Hongjian. Her leaves have branched out while the rest of the branches point to the heavens. According to Chinese folklore, this formation of leaves means that the occupants of the house will multiply but find their fortune elsewhere. One son embarked on a 15-day sea voyage to arrive in the Philippines.
In the context of two presidential visits, the genealogy chart of the Xus (pronounced “Cos”) lived during the Yuan Regime (1279-1368). The elder Xus were tied to the soil’s produce for eight centuries, in Hongjian Village in Fujian; they had three sons, of which the third is believed to be the ancestor of the Philippine branch. In 1163, a two-row house was built as the ancestral home of the Xu family. The Emperor Qianlong of the Qing dynasty conferred the title “Xu Family Temple” upon this tiny edifice that still stands.
Before the much-publicized visit of Corazon Aquino to Beijing in 1988, Peping visited the city of Xiamen for a scheduled agricultural trip on Sept. 28, 1987 with Congressman Francisco “Komong” Sumulong. From Xiamen, on the southeast coast of Fujian, we were driven to Hongjian, a 45-minute trip to the village at midnight. Definitely, it was not a wealthy area. It was a small unit and its officials belonged to the lower category within the hierarchy of official rankings. The townspeople did not own lots and lived in identical state-owned and state-constructed houses of two or three rooms built next to each other and seemingly connected. Peping was asked to enter a home and was introduced to a relative. Stunned, he met another and another but because each could not speak the other’s language, they did not talk much; a family — now an international trait — appeared to be so.
“Every time I met someone, I was given a hard-boiled egg and a cup of pearl tea which was customary to the town,” the amused Peping told his niece Marisse Reyes who was going to Hongjian with her research team. Actually, hard-boiled eggs are used in many countries during rituals signifying birth and eternity. Anyway, after the rituals with unfamiliar relatives that night, we were brought to the town plaza where it seemed like daytime. The townspeople switched on all of the lights for this momentous occasion. Escorted to the Xu Family Temple, Peping was given joss sticks and paid his respects to his ancestors. It was almost 1 a.m. and I realized “all falling leaves return to their roots.” Right, Marisse?
By October of 1992, Marisse was ready to write Tide of Time — the Cojuangco family history. She viewed Hongjian from a plane — small brick houses with tiled roofs — and thought, It takes courage to leave one’s homeland for a strange country. Marisse told us her story: “At the municipal building, I was asked to sit in the center of the long room, facing the door, as a sign of honor for all visiting guests and served mineral water with yellow-green bananas and apples. Eight pictures commemorated the visit of Auntie Cory and red streamers with golden Chinese characters. There were unlit Oriental lanterns and urns of different sizes on an altar. At a loss regarding protocol, I watched Grand-uncle Xu Yuanxing as he took a handful of joss sticks, lit them and gave me half. The act of worshipping my own family was alien to me, being a Catholic, especially since I had recently joined Familia, a family life apostolate. I watched Grand-uncle place the sticks at what must have been my family’s urn.”
At Noy’s 2011 visit to China he saw the tree planted by his departed mother. It had a deeper and larger meaning: a reminder of filial piety and hard labor. A very interesting tradition was this: the Xu ancestors, like other fellow Chinese, engraved family records on memorial stones. Just as archives are powdered with dust, so are stories of dynasties buried beneath the earth. Ironically the same stones, these memorabilia, were sometimes used in building houses. Marisse, seeing some spirit tablets, gazed at them with a sense of loss because the Chinese characters contained more than the names of her ancestors on these hallowed grounds they stood on. The Xus worshiped them to remember the source from which their means of life had come. Hallowed grounds were made holy by the numerous acts of devotion that had occurred there continuously through the centuries. “The home of Grand-uncle had but one reminder of a modern convenience,” Marisse noticed. “It was a portable red and blue cassette player atop a dark-brown altar table. The walls were filled with pictures of Auntie Cory and Xeroxed images of Ingkong Jose, venerated like a god.” Over 480 years the Xu family had multiplied 16 generations of subsistence farmers.
Fujianese are well-known as emigrants for the simple reason that their homeland is barren and because of its nearness to Taiwan, a popular destination of migrant Chinese. One source tells us why the people migrated: “When the imperial eunuch, Cheng Ho, returned from his trips to the ‘western ocean,’ a great rush for El Dorado begun on the coast of Fukien and Kwangtung with tales of the ‘strange’ countries vividly described in popular ballads, and novels such as See Yang Chi’s A Tale of the Western Ocean.”
Spurred possibly by song or by drought, crop failure and famine during which farmers were only given “three tow” of rice by the government to alleviate starvation, Fujianese departed from their villages to live out a ballad of land and sea, returning to pay homage to ancestors and viewing the tree of life.
Not all who have migrated had the opportunity to return to their familial roots to see what happened to their communities and to the people who were once part of their lives. Many did not have the opportunity to see that the trees they had planted had grown. We were lucky to see the roots of departed ancestors, and the tree of life, and to see the living members of the lineage Xu (or Co) pay homage to departed members and know the value of family.