The Road There: A Look Back

"My grandmother saw me off when I left home. She told me to come here for four or five years, make some money and then go back. My oldest child was just nine months old at the time," says Chen Juhng-chang, the president of the Chinese Philanthropic Association of Tahiti, recalling his departure for Tahiti in 1937. "I boarded a ship in Hong Kong on July5, and when we got to the Philippines I heard on the radio about the Marco Polo Bridge Incident." It was ten years later before he could see his wife and child again.

Ho Ying, a silver-haired woman in her eighties, remembers clearly how in 1923 she took a train with her parents from Huiyang in Kwangtung Province to Hong Kong and then boarded a ship to Tahiti. "There were 72 Chinese people on board. A man named Liao died of illness when we stopped in Sydney, so there were 71 of us left when we arrived in Tahiti on September 2." She was 15 at the time. A matchmaker had arranged for her to marry a man on Tahiti whom she had never met but who had paid for her boat ticket.

The first group of Chinese arrived on Tahiti in 1865. A British company had recruited Chinese laborers to come to Tahiti and plant cotton at a time when the cotton fields in the United States had fallen into neglect because of the Civil War. Most of them came from seven counties in Kwangtung and spoke Cantonese. When U.S. cotton production returned to normal, most of the laborers were sent back to China or immigrated to other islands in the South Pacific.

The Chinese on Tahiti now are mainly Hakkas who came from three counties in Kwangtung between the first and second world wars. No matter what their ancestry, all the Chinese on the island can now speak Hakkanese. "The other Chinese here have no choice. They have to interact with Hakkas," says Mavea Tung, who majored in anthropology at National Taiwan University. She cites an example: "There aren't enough women, so you usually have to marry a Hakka wife."

Be they Cantonese or Hakka, their ancestors left home because of wars and hardship. They struggled to piece together the fare for a boat passage and build a new life for themselves overseas, and then to save up enough money to bring over the rest of the family or to marry a wife from their hometown.

"A lot of bachelors came here back then, and there were a lot of 'blind' marriages," Chang Fu-chang says. A story goes round that is said to be true: Many years ago, a beautiful girl came to Tahiti with a picture of her future husband whom she had never seen before. After the boat had docked, she waited and waited but she couldn't find the man who was supposed to meet her. Finally only one old man was left. The young lady hurried over, handed him the picture and asked, "Excuse me sir, do you know who this man is?" "It's me!" he said. The picture wasn't a fake. It was taken for his passport when he was young.

After the Second World War, many people wanted to return home. Gregory Lau, who runs a trading company on the island, recalls, "Two boats crammed with people went back after the war."

Lau's wife was born and raised on Tahiti. She boarded a ship bound for Shanghai in May 1949 to go study there, but when the city fell to the Communists in June, the ship simply sailed on to Hong Kong. There she met Gregory Lau, who had also grown up on Tahiti and had been sent back to Canton by his father to study. Together they returned to Tahiti.

After 1949, many people on Tahiti were unable to see their relatives on the mainland or to send back money to them. Julien Hothan, the owner of a general goods store, recalls that they were finally permitted to wire money back home in 1968, but only a limited amount per person. Many people wired back under other people's names, and the result was that nearly all the Chinese on the island registered to send back money. The Tahitian government simply used the register as a Chinese population census. The total was more than 7,000, and that became the official government statistic for 1968.

[Picture Caption]

The older generation of Chinese went through a lot. The picture shows the parents and older brothers of Michel Law, a former member of the territorial assembly. (rephotographed by Vincent Chang from an original provided by Michel Law)