From the Old Country: Stories and Sketches of China and Taiwan

Toward noon I took the Taisuco half-gauge train¹ home to Zugteuzong,² after fifteen years away. The train was really battered and shabby, and the wooden carriage, with its joints all loose, screeched and squealed as it rocked and juddered wildly, so that passengers’ knees bumped off the knees of the person opposite and their elbows jabbed into the ribs of the person beside them. Each time this happened, the passengers would smile at one another in mutual understanding, without saying anything.

There weren’t many passengers, but all of them were strange to me. When I looked more closely, it did seem that a few faces were familiar, but I couldn’t remember any of their names. They were all good farming folk: simple, honest, frugal, and hard-working, devoting their whole lives to their land and their crops. As in the past, they wore bamboo hats and went barefoot; some of them had pipes in their mouths, and some held bamboo shoulder poles, their loads between their knees. It seemed to me that something was missing here. Only after a while did I realize: none of them were chewing betel nut; this was different from before. I particularly noticed those with blackened and recessed gums: these had been betel-nut chewers in the past. Another thing was that most of the women did not wear the traditional smocks that had been kept to by our Hakka women since immigration.³ Partly because of strict Japanese prohibitions, partly for economy, the younger women in particular had switched to simpler, pretty tunics worn over trousers.

They sat on the hard wooden benches. Some tucked one foot up on the bench, while others sat with legs crossed, letting the train shake them to and fro like grain being riddled. Some talked to their neighbors about farming; some only sat, staring idly at the scenery outside the windows; and some made no sound at all, unless to clear their throats.

The train left the sugar refinery terminus and headed into the countryside. Formerly, the only crops in the fields round here had been sugar and bananas. Now, as far as you looked there was nothing but paddy fields planted with nothing but rice. But the fields were dry, at this season when water was so absolutely essential. The rice stalks, now over a foot tall, were gasping, anemic; the leaves hung numbly, not just yellowing but with a white color that showed that the plants were suffering. The tips of the leaves were a gray-brown color, some even burned dark brown; they were all curled up like tea leaves. As the dry wind swished over the paddy they presented a sea of parched yellow as far as the eye could see. To the onlooker it was like an endless field of fire. Dazzling sunlight flickered and shimmered over the paddy fields. The sky was like a sheet of red-hot iron with a ball of cruel fire hanging in the middle, darkly smoldering as it beamed out maximum radiation to burn up the land.

Amid the paddy’s roots the earth was white and cracked like a tortoiseshell; the edges of the cracks were gaping toward the heavens, like lips opening thirstily for a drink.

Children were grazing cattle in every field. They were laughing, whooping and yelling, racing, wrestling, turning somersaults—every one of them brimming with high spirits. Alongside, a great herd of water buffalo were freely and happily eating the paddy. As they munched, from time to time they swished their tails, a picture of ease and leisure. This was a feast of rare opulence such as they had never known. Apparently, the desperately hard work of the people who planted the rice had all been for the sake of these animals.

—No two ways about it, this season’s rice crop was beyond hope!

Like people watching at the bedside of a dying relative, the train passengers stared out through the carriage windows at the fields stretching in all directions.

Across the carriage and to my left two farmers were chatting idly. One of them was puffing away on his pipe. The other, one leg crossed loosely over the other, prattled away as he watched his companion’s pipe bowl glow and dim by turns: “In our village the Kings⁴ always used to heed every prayer, but now for some reason the prayers don’t work; we’ve held three days of ceremonies and we’ve made vows: a whole pig and a whole goat, promised in thanks for the autumn harvest! But what do you know? A fortnight has passed now and the sun is as white-hot as ever, from rising in the east to setting in the west!”

His companion’s answer was a loud spit, a spout of brown liquid: “P-tuh … ! Goddamn! Your luck’s in all right! Just wait till the skinner gets you … !”

At the foot of the embankment an old ox with large horns was chewing to its heart’s content, shaking its head and swishing its tail, all the while watching the train with an air of unconcern.

“—The Kings? The Kings long since … the gods are all holed up in heaven, what’s the use of prayers? Stuffed into sacks and kept hanging for years⁵ … it’d be a wonder if they still answered prayers!”

A man with a square, unshaven face, sitting on my right, turned and joined in the conversation: “That’s … Brother A-Yuan, that was the Japanese, we had nothing to do with …”

“The Japanese did it—but it’s you that’ll pay the price!” The man called A-Yuan spoke with conviction: “There’s your retribution staring you right in the face. It’s so dry a single match would set the stones on fire!”

“Well, they said so, didn’t they?” said the one with one leg crossed over the other, as if to remind A-Yuan. “The Celestial Fire is coming down.”

“The Celestial Fire?” said the unshaven man. “Uh-huh, that’ll be in the seventh month! On the wall at home we’ve pasted up a piece of paper we got from the Pushantang Temple: ‘Virtuous Families, Two in Three Be Spared; Wicked Families, Root and Branch Shall Burn.’ Yup, they’re gonna burn!”

In the fields, a farmer was cutting whole paddy plants with a sickle. Everyone just stared, dumbfounded.

“Ai! All that hard labor to plant out the seedlings, and now with a flick of the wrist the sickle cuts it for cattle fodder. I’ve never seen anything like it in all my long years.”

As he spoke, A-Yuan brought out a twist of tobacco from his Ohta’s Antacid tin and refilled his pipe.

“Who knows how many families in town haven’t any rice!” he said. “When the pot comes to the table you can count the grains of rice; the children scoop away the layer of shredded sweet potato and dig down to the bottom with the rice paddle, not worrying that they might scrape a hole in the bottom.”

“Hey, Brother A-Yuan, they’re the lucky ones!” said the unshaven man after a few dry coughs. “A-Xiu and his wife have had nothing but sweet potato leaves to eat for two weeks now. They keep the sweet potatoes for the children…. Oh, Uncle Dechang! Been visiting your daughter?”

The train had stopped at a small way station. A bareheaded old man clambered unsteadily into the carriage with a cloth bundle on the end of a bamboo pole over one shoulder. He grunted a reply and went over to sit opposite the unshaven man. He wiped the seat down and dusted it off before carefully sitting down, putting his bundle on his knees.

“Didn’t your son-in-law ask you to stay to lunch, Uncle Dechang?” asked the unshaven man.

“What?” the old man gave his chin a rub; his hand trembled slightly, clumsily. “Oh, A-Tian? No! Um, he isn’t home. Longmei’s just had a baby …”

Now it was the turn of the people on my left to turn and look across to my right; Brother A-Yuan was still holding his pipe.

“A baby? A boy?” said A-Yuan. “So you’re a grandfather again, eh?”

“Uh-huh, a boy; just a scrap of a thing; a cat could give birth to a bigger kitten! Well, poor folks like us, the grown ones can’t eat properly, so the children go hungry too, and they’re weak—there’s no help for it! A great brood of children and a field no bigger than the palm of your hand; they work all year for a paltry few grains of rice: that won’t fill their bellies, not even in the thinnest gruel. Longmei should be ‘sitting out the month,’⁶ but she hasn’t had so much as a whiff of chicken, and after only a few days she had to go and work in the fields. You should see how hard she works: such a pile of washing and starching, and she even has to carry the water herself. No sesame oil chicken in rice wine⁷ for the daughters of the likes of us, eh?”

Just then the train crossed a metal bridge with a great rock and roll and a clattering, deafening din. The old man frowned as if he had a migraine.

I stuck my head out the window to look at the bridge: the riverbed beneath it was dry. The stones that used to be yellow from the salt water now presented a dark, green color. Both yellow earthen banks were thickly entangled with great bamboo trunks, like a mesh wire fence.

“Uncle Dechang, Brother A-Tian is clever and capable. He goes off on his bicycle and does whatever work he can find. He soon turns a profit, and his life is tripping along very nicely. You needn’t worry.”

“What’s the use of me worrying? I’m just an old bag of bones waiting for someone to put the lid on my coffin…. But these days, just being capable isn’t good enough! To catch a chicken you need a handful of rice; you’ll get nowhere empty-handed. Whatever way you look at it, having your own land is the surest way, ain’t it?”

“Your own land … Uncle Dechang, look …” A-Yuan pointed out the window with his chin as he spoke: “… just one more thing to worry about!”

Everybody looked out. The sunlight shimmered like a torch, so bright that the old man’s eyes blinked and blinked until a few tears squeezed out. With lips slightly parted, he put a trembling right hand up to shade his eyes. He looked out for quite a while, and then cried out in surprise: “Eh? So many oxen!”

In his line of sight there were two children, one running, the other hot on his heels, chasing in and out among the oxen. A bit further off was another gang of kids, utterly intent on their play. One water buffalo, its four stout legs planted firmly on the ground, stretched its neck up toward the distant northern sky and bellowed: “Moo …”

The three farmers stared in a trance, completely silent, the old man quite forgotten. After a while, the unshaven one said: “Surely we’re not already done for, just like that?”

With a long blast on its whistle, the train arrived at another station. This was a big town; more than half the passengers alighted and a fairly large number straggled on to take their places. The old man shouldered his bundle and hurried off behind the three farmers.

The next stop was the end of the line: my home village, Zugteuzong.

As soon as the train pulled out of the town I looked up: off to the northeast lay a village completely encircled by a thick dark-green belt of bamboo. A light gray mist hung over it, as if it were on fire. Earnestly, ardently I fixed my gaze, and the hot blood surged in my veins.

Finally the train pulled into the terminus. I mingled with the crowd of locals, as silent and solemn as a funeral procession, and made my way to my wife’s childhood home. My excitement communicated itself to my feet as they went erratically up and down, almost staggering, as if I were walking in an utterly unknown place. Houses covered in layers of dust squatted on both sides of the street; they all looked so low, so shabby and cramped. People scuttled silently in and out of them, like mice or rats. All along the street at regular intervals were great big stone basins. In the past these cisterns were always overflowing with clear water, so that their sides were thickly covered with bright-green moss and the ground around them was wet. But now the cisterns were dry to the very bottom, and a poster had been put up above each one: “Strictly no laundering. Strictly no watering of animals.”

Was there anyplace that did not show the desolate signs of the drought?

“So this is my homeland!” I thought to myself.

My wife’s family home was at the other end of the village. My leather shoes clip-clopped on the stone pavement, producing a hollow, distant sound. At the mouth of the lane I met a woman carrying a bamboo basket. It was the wife of a friend of mine.

“Well, well! A-He, you’re back! Bingwen’s just inside, come on in!”

Bingwen was one of my wife’s relatives, and he also used to be one of my best friends. He was a quick-witted, lively, hardworking young man of great prospects who had worked in the post office in Kaohsiung before the war. At the time I often went to Kaohsiung on errands for the family business in Pingtung and I would always be sure to look him up. We used to get up to all sorts of fun and games; as soon as we got together we’d start mouthing off, setting the world to rights. Sometimes we’d go to a tavern, drinking and messing around with the bar girls…. We’d get up to all sorts of mischief until deep into the night before weaving our drunken way home. The thing I prized most was that at that time he was also one of the very few of my friends who could read and discuss Chinese literature with me. This added a special layer of feeling to our friendship that took it beyond the ordinary.

I stepped into the room I knew so well. Inside it was very dark and quiet. A very, very small person was sitting askew in a bamboo chair over by the wall. My eyes had to grow accustomed to the dimness before I could make out his face. But when I did, I almost cried out in surprise. Involuntarily I recoiled a few steps. Could this man I saw before me, who had lost all appearance of being a man, really be my old friend Bingwen? Bingwen the snappy dresser, my companion of so many hours spent in teahouses and taverns? I couldn’t believe my eyes, far less connect the man of my memories with what I saw now.

Ever so slowly, the man’s thin lips parted: “Just got here? Have a seat!”

The voice was as thin as a mosquito’s whine, and there was no emotion in it.

I mumbled a reply, put my case down on the bench diagonally opposite him, and sat down. I didn’t know what to do with myself. My feelings of excitement and tension had disappeared in an instant.

Summoning my composure and observing more carefully, I was astonished at the change in my friend. On his pointy head there remained only a very few pale hairs, which stood up on end like those of a chronic malaria sufferer. His eyes were very pale brown, almost yellow, staring feebly out of their sunken sockets. His neck was terribly thin and his wrists terribly long; you could count all his bones…. He held, rolled up in his hand, an old-fashioned thread-bound book that I knew very well: The Three Kingdoms.⁸ His bamboo chair was so worn-out that its back and armrests were held together by string. He only had to move slightly to set the whole thing creaking.

“Like shriveled up pieces of dried turnip!” I thought.

Our conversation was a disjointed series of question and answer; moreover, it was businesslike and bereft of emotion. Though long awaited, our reunion proved unable to conjure up a poetic, moving scene. It was as if there had never been any such things between us as friendship, parting, the war, or Taiwan’s retrocession to China. His cold—one might almost say impatient—gaze and his twisted, mocking mouth were extremely upsetting.

“Don’t you work at the P.O. any more?” I essayed.

“No,” he simply replied.

“So …” I tried to think of something else.

After a while I thought of something else to say. I was beginning to feel depressed: “I’m living in Kaohsiung!”

“Hmm, Kaohsiung? Oh!”

Bingwen suddenly perked up, and he propelled his upper body nimbly toward me. Apparently he hadn’t yet been able to forget Kaohsiung.

“Kaohsiung,” he said, his eyes and voice both showing signs of life again. “Do you know if the Relief Commission fertilizer has arrived yet? Oh, there’s money to be made there! What if we were to transport some of it here? And what about cement?”

I watched him in surprise. I found his sudden enthusiasm inexplicable. Even his pallid, translucent face was now slightly flushed, and I could read in it something of his former lively intelligence.

“I haven’t heard anything about that,” I said. I knew nothing about that kind of thing, nor had I ever had any interest in it, but I did my best to humor him. “But if you want, I can try to find out. Cement? There’s bound to be cement—I’ve seen the factory chimneys smoking. I’ll ask around, no problem!”

“There’s bound to be, there’s bound to be!”

Bingwen’s eyes shot out hot sparks, and the corners of his mouth curled in a crafty smile.

“… I’ve done it a few times already, you can double your money! I’m planning to give it another go. You don’t need a shop, oh no—just turn the goods over, and that’s it! Hah! It’s great! It doesn’t matter how much or how little capital you have, as long as you have something, then …”

Just then, the sound of voices from outside interrupted him in mid-flow. The voices were warm and happy and familiar: I recognized one of them as my mother-in-law’s. And sure enough, following her voice, she appeared in the doorway.

“Were you on the train that just got in?” My mother-in-law was beaming at me. “Are you all on your own? What about Pingmei and Tie’er?⁹ I reckoned you must be due to come…. Let’s go through!”

I nodded goodbye to my host. In the same instant Bingwen shot a look of hatred at my mother-in-law and looked back at me in disappointment, his mouth slightly open. But the next moment, with a blink of his eyes, he assumed an expression of great indifference.

“I’ll stop by again after we’ve eaten.”

So saying, I picked up my case and followed my mother-in-law out of the room.

A few rooms further in was my mother-in-law’s home. As we entered the hall¹⁰ she poked her head into the kitchen to give instructions: “Your brother-in-law’s here. He can eat sweet potato rice same as the rest of us, but add a couple of eggs.”

Then she turned to me and smiled: “For lunch I’m going to give you something new. All these years you’ve been gone, do you know what us folks back home have been eating? Shredded sweet potato! The rice is just for show; dig for it in the pot and you’ll only get a few grains.”

One by one, those who’d been out at work were also returning home. First of all came two of Pingmei’s younger brothers. Both had married and had children since we left. From different parts of the room the children all stared at me with the same curiosity and timidity. A girl sitting on the threshold was digging in her nostril with a finger the whole time.

Before long, lunch had been set on the dining table and clamoring children surrounded it, each with a bowl in one hand as they fought over the rice paddle with the other.

“Hey! Aren’t you ashamed to let your uncle see you behave like this? Give me the rice paddle; stop grabbing at it, all of you!”

The children turned as one to look at me, licking their lips.

My second sister-in-law snatched the rice paddle from a boy’s hand, swept the top layer aside, and dug down into the pot to fill a bowl, which she put in front of me. Then she filled another bowl for our mother-in-law. These bowls were full of small orange and green strips lying this way and that, with a few grains of rice in between. When I looked at the other bowls, I saw that they had nothing but shredded sweet potato.

The dishes on the table were one bowl of fermented soybeans and three big bowls of sweet potato leaves, plus some diced dried turnip. In front of me was placed an eye-catching large bowl of duck egg soup with red yeast. The children knelt by the table looking greedily at the bright-red soup.

“These children, no manners at all!” my mother-in-law scolded good-naturedly, as she added two or three ladlefuls of egg soup to every child’s bowl.

“Get off now; your uncle is watching you!”

The children retreated to sit on the stone stools or the threshold, where they slurped and sucked up their food happily, with great relish.

“If you want to know the truth,” my mother-in-law said, half-indignantly, half-proudly, “there’s plenty of families in the village that are getting by on sweet potatoes alone. These days, who’s in any position to mock anyone else? The Japanese taxes and levies were heavy, and even heaven refused to help us: the year before last it rained all through the autumn so that the paddy rotted in the field and we harvested only a few grains. Since last June there hasn’t been a drop of rain. It’s so dry even the stones are splitting. Unless you’ve accumulated good luck in your last life, you needn’t even think about eating sweet potatoes …”

“Why didn’t Pingmei come back with you?” My eldest brother-in-law interrupted his mother, impatient with the old woman’s prattling.

“She’ll be back in a few days,” I said. “They’re still in Kaohsiung.”

“I saw your names in the paper on one of the refugee lists!” Now my third brother-in-law joined in the conversation. “You sailed from Shanghai, didn’t you?”

After a pause my mother-in-law spoke up again, fixing me earnestly with her eyes and showing great concern: “A-He, did Bingwen mention selling cement or fertilizer just now?”

I looked at her in puzzlement. I wondered if she had overheard my conversation with Bingwen. But that was impossible.

“He didn’t ask you for a loan, did he? Saying he was going in for cement or fertilizer?” my mother-in-law persisted.

“A loan? Cement or fertilizer?” Flustered, I repeated her words.

“You see … who asked you to interfere?” My eldest brother-in-law frowned.

My mother-in-law glanced at her son, and then turned back to me and smiled mysteriously.

“Well, that’s alright then,” she said.

Obviously there was more to this than met the eye. I made a mental note, and after lunch, when the men and their wives had gone out to work again, I asked my mother-in-law to explain everything to me in detail.

“Hai!” she sighed. “It has to be said that Bingwen has had a terrible time of it these past few years. He lost his job in Kaohsiung, and when he came home he had to rely on his own two hands for a living. But just think, the way things are these days, even those who own rock-solid property are living from one day to the next, aren’t they? As for those without so much as a strip of land, they’ll be lucky to scrape by even for a few days! It’s been several years now, and Bingwen can’t stick it out any longer. Since last year he’s been telling everyone he meets that he’s going into cement and fertilizer, tricking money out of people left, right, and center. The devil only knows what he’s selling! Strip off a man’s mask of decency and he’s capable of anything. Their child’s so hungry she’s like a little chick, cheep-cheeping round the yard. Who wouldn’t feel pity? But what can anyone do? Now that I’ve explained the whole thing, don’t you go falling for his scam. These days we can hardly fill our own stomachs.”

I felt like I was listening to a story. I found it quite hard to believe it was true. What? Could Bingwen have fallen so low? It was a truly terrifying thought. If it were true, I was even willing to “fall for his scam,” although my pockets contained a pitiful sum of money. His swindling evoked more sorrow in me than disgust!

Leaving my mother-in-law’s house, I went back to that room to find Bingwen still sitting askew in his ratty bamboo chair, the Three Kingdoms between the fingers of his left hand. It looked as though the whole scene had remained unchanged for centuries, and as if it might yet stay the same for centuries to come.

His wife was clearing things away from the table. A malnourished girl of about four was sitting on the threshold of the back door, holding a bowl of sweet potatoes in her hand, one chopstick skewering a piece.

“A-He, have a seat,” said the woman, and then turned to her daughter and barked, “A-Hong, go inside!” and dragged her into an inner room.

“Sorry!” As I spoke, I sat down on the bench as before and put down my case.

I was sure that Bingwen would have something more to say to me, so I waited in silence for several minutes, but he said nothing. The expression on his face had now reverted to the lifeless state I had seen when I first arrived. He looked like a simpleton. His eyes were unfocused and dull, the corners of his mouth were slack and somewhat crooked, his whole mouth was deeply sunken, and there were just a few brown hairs on his head, like a newborn baby …

Now that he had reverted to his natural state, the change in Bingwen was even more dramatically emphasized. This wasn’t just decrepitude—it was annihilation.

“Done for!” I thought to myself, but at the same time my mind was summoning up a friend of yore: another Bingwen, the image of a radiantly handsome, elegantly dressed young man. I felt that this image in my mind seemed clearer, truer, closer to me than the one in front of my eyes.

A sadness swelled inside me, as at a difficult parting.

After a pause, it was again I who spoke first: “Would you like me to ask around for you, for news of cement or fertilizer, for example?”

I had my right hand stuck in my pocket, grasping a few tattered notes, ready to pull them out as necessary.

But Bingwen was now very impatient.

“No need!” he said gruffly.

That stumped me. Eventually I managed: “But aren’t you planning to go into business?”

“You don’t want …”

He waved me away angrily.

I understood that it was all over between us, and what was even clearer was that my friend was gone forever. So I picked up my case and walked distractedly from that frightful room. Feeling a depression that was just the opposite of my feelings on arrival, I walked eastward toward the hills and my own home in the valley….

1. Between the 1920s and the 1960s the “half-gauge” train (wu fen che 五分車, aka xiao huoche 小火車 [little train]) was the most important means of modern transport from relatively isolated Meinong to the port of Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second city, and the world beyond. Taisuco is the Taiwan Sugar Corporation 台灣糖業股份有限公司, founded 1946. The sugar railways were established for the transportation of sugar cane during the Japanese occupation by Taisuco’s predecessor companies, including the Great Japan Sugar Co., Ltd. 大日本製糖株式會社, which ran passenger services as well as sugar cane wagon trains on the 2′ 6″ tracks (Standard Gauge is 4′ 8½″, hence the approximate term wu fen—literally “five-tenths”).

2. I use the Hakka transliteration of the fictional place-name 竹頭莊 (Bamboo Village) instead of the Mandarin (Zhutouzhuang). Read in Mandarin, the name seems to mean “Bamboo Head Village,” but the Hakka noun-suffix teu 頭 is meaningless (similar to -r 兒 in Mandarin). The name of the real-life village, the home of Zhong Lihe’s wife, Zhong Taimei (Pingmei), has always been Zugteupoi 竹頭背 to its almost exclusively Hakka inhabitants. It was officially named Taketōkaku 竹頭角 during the Japanese period and officially renamed Guangxing 廣興 after the return of Chinese rule in 1945.

3. The distinctive traditional smock denoted here is most commonly known as the lanshan 藍衫 (blue shirt). Royal blue or cobalt blue is the default color, but the smocks are also made in a wide range of hues, including various shades of red. Essential to every lanshan smock are the intricate multicolored bands embroidered around each sleeve and diagonally across the breast.

4. In the real-life Zugteuzong (Guangxing) the most important Taoist temple is that dedicated to the Three Mountain Kings (San shan guowang 三山國王), who are among the most popular deities in Hakka Taiwan.

5. Author’s note: “In 1940 the Japanese, for political reasons, tried to destroy all Taiwan’s Taoist temples. In many cases the people hid the effigies of their deities in secret places in hopes of preserving them.”

6. Author’s note: “Zuoyue, ji fenmian 坐月, 即分娩.” (“Sitting out the month” refers to confinement.) [Translator’s note: Traditionally, Chinese women were expected to remain confined to their room with the new baby for a month after birth, and to observe restrictions in their diet, hygiene, and behavior.]

8. It seems clear that the book is the early Ming novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, not the third-century authoritative history Records of the Three Kingdoms. Nevertheless, in the context of A-He’s idea of modern “literary youth,” Bingwen clutching this ancient book seems to be a symbol of his regression. Moreover, given that Zhong Lihe was profoundly influenced by Lu Xun as a kind of godfather of modern Chinese literature, it is likely that the mention of this book here draws an intentional parallel with a reactionary character associated with The Three Kingdoms, Zhao Qiye 趙七爺 (Seventh Master Zhao) in Lu Xun’s 1920 short story “Fengbo” (A storm in a teacup). See “Translator’s Introduction” at the beginning of this volume for more parallels with Lu Xun’s fiction.

9. In Zhong Lihe’s autobiographical stories, if the narrator’s wife is named it is always as Pingmei 平妹, not her actual name Taimei 台妹. “Tie’er” 鐵兒 refers to Tiemin 鐵民, the real name of the Zhongs’ eldest son (1941–2011).

10. “Hall”: this is the langwu 廊屋, originally a kind of corridor linking the main building of a traditional Hakka clan compound (huofang 夥房) to the bedroom wings on either side of the courtyard. The main building is usually reserved for religious observances, so the langwu becomes the main space for ordinary daily life.