The Encyclopedia Britannica, the website of the World Hakka Convention (世界客屬墾親大會), and Wikipedia each report a different figure for the global Hakka population—roughly 80 million, 40 million, and 6.56 million, respectively. The gap between 80 million and 6.56 million is more than twelvefold. Setting aside, for the moment, my doubts about this discrepancy, the fact remained that this population was scattered across the globe, and so I needed to define a specific region in order to study them. Where should I go to find the Hakka? Which Hakka community, living where, would become the subject of my research?

One might assume that the choice of a research subject rests on some rigorous set of criteria and considerations of fit, but in reality, the process is often shaped by chance and personal connections. After completing my master's thesis in 2005, I had the opportunity to present on the topic at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. There I met Professor Cheung(張)¹, who, upon learning of my interest in the Hakka, introduced me to a graduate named Ms. Ye(葉), who had just finished her own master's thesis on the tulou (土楼)—the traditional Hakka dwellings. Professor Zhang also invited me to a Hakka restaurant in Hong Kong that he himself was studying from the perspective of food anthropology. Ye had written her thesis on a particular tulou called Eryilou (二宜楼), located in Hua'an County (华安县), Fujian Province (福建省)—her mother's hometown—and she put me in touch with an acquaintance there. After finishing my presentation in Hong Kong, I traveled to the hometown of Professor Zhang's student's mother and met the acquaintance she had introduced me to, who took me to a tulou that had taken thirty years to build, dating back to the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (乾隆帝) of the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century.

Built in 1740 by Jiang Shixiong (蔣士熊), the fourteenth-generation head of the Jiang clan, Eryilou was a four-story circular structure spanning 9,300 square meters, with a diameter of 73.4 meters. At its center was a round courtyard with two wells and an ancestral shrine, around which some fifty households—roughly 200 to 300 people—once lived. The ground floor held kitchens and storerooms, the second floor bedrooms, the third floor more rooms and storage, and the fourth floor a shrine niche (神龕) holding the ancestral tablets; each household owned a vertical slice of space running from the first floor to the fourth². In 1996, the building was designated a National Key Cultural Heritage Site. By the time I visited, I was told, most of the young people had left for the cities to find work, and it was mainly the elderly who remained in the tulou, living there with their grandchildren. The Hakka of Fujian are concentrated mainly in the mountainous areas of the west and southwest, and my guide emphasized that the tulou were, above all, defensive dwellings built to withstand outside attack or siege. For this reason, the first and second floors have no windows facing outward, only small defensive openings called loopholes(銃眼). These are further divided into those meant for watching the movements of an approaching enemy(瞭望孔) and those meant for firing guns or arrows. Standing before this fortress-like structure—thirty years in the building, home to a single-surname clan for nearly three hundred years—I began to feel a creeping doubt. If the Hakka were strangers, guests, then where was the host—the group that properly belonged to this land? What I was looking at was nothing more than the glorious trace of a fully armed Hakka clan.

According to Luo Xianglin (羅香林)³, known as the father of Hakka studies, the regions of Guangdong (廣東), Fujian (福建), and Jiangxi (江西) are the birthplace, or ancestral home, of the Hakka. It was only after settling in these regions that the Hakka established the actual foundations of their language and culture, distinguishing this new homeland from the Central Plains (中原)—the homeland of the ancestral group they had left behind, which they called their yuanxiang (原鄕), or place of origin (羅香林, 1933). If the Fujian region they had migrated to was concentrated in mountainous terrain, such that any trace of conflict between the Hakka and their enemies, or the group whose place they had taken, could be found only in historical documents—then might the Hakka regions of Guangdong be different? Swallowing my disappointment, I left the empty fortress behind and turned toward Meixian (梅縣), in Guangdong Province.

On the train to Meixian, home to some 60 percent of China's Hakka population, my heart began to lift with anticipation. I was about to arrive at the homeland of the Hakka I had read about in Skinner's account of Thailand, and who were scattered across the globe. Just then, a young man sitting in the seat in front of me struck up a conversation.

“Where are you from?”　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　
-I’m from Korea.
“Wow, Korea? Your Chinese is really good.”　　　　　　　
-Yes, I studied Chinese.
“This is the first time I’ve met someone from Korea. I watch Korean dramas sometimes, though…….”
-I guess a lot of Korean dramas are airing in China these days.
“So, are you traveling? Where are you headed？”
-Well, it’s not really travel… I’m going to Meixian to research Hakka..
“Hakka?? What kind of research? I’m Hakka myself…….”
-Oh, really? Nice to meet you. Are there a lot of Hakka living in Meixian?
“Everyone on this train is Hakka. Almost everyone who lives in Meixian is Hakka. But what exactly about the Hakka are you researching?”
-Well, um… what I’m trying to research is… I mean, something to do with Hakka identity… Is there anyone in Meixian who isn’t Hakka?
“Well, most people are Hakka, though these days there are a few outsiders too. You should go to Jiaying University(嘉应大學), I think there’s a place there that studies Hakka.”

My face flushed red. Here I was, introducing myself as someone who had come to research the Hakka, and yet I didn't even know myself what I was researching. The train pulled into Meixian, and I felt a mixture of excitement and embarrassment. I hadn't come here because anyone had introduced me, nor to meet anyone in particular, nor with any fixed destination in mind⁴. Just as the vague question, “so where am I supposed to find a research topic?” began to settle over me, a rickshaw pulled up in front of me, and the driver asked where I was headed. The name "Jiaying University," which the Hakka man on the train had mentioned, suddenly came to mind, and I asked him to take me there. He told me that Jiaying University had both an old campus inside the old city wall and a new campus outside it, and asked once more exactly where I wanted to go. I said I wanted to go to the Hakka research institute, and explained that this was my first time in Meixian, and that I had come from Korea hoping to study the Hakka. The rickshaw driver laughed warmly and said that on the way to Jiaying University, he knew a place that had once hosted the World Hakka Convention, and that I should at least stop and have a look. He pulled the rickshaw up in front of a large mansion. As soon as we entered through the gate, he found the owner of the house and introduced me.

“This is Miss Oh(吳小姐), a Hakka researcher who’s come all the way from Korea. I told her she had to stop by and meet you on her way to Jiaying University. I thought it would be good for her to see a proper Hakka weilongwu(圍龍屋)......”
“Welcome, welcome. So glad to have you. We hosted the World Hakka Convention here in 1994. Please, come in and have a look around.”
-Oh, thank you so much.

The house called weilongwu (圍龍屋) was, in form, completely different from the tulou of Fujian. Its name means "house that encloses a dragon": in front lies a semicircular pond, while behind the house extends the huatai (化胎), a semicircular geomantic terrace literally meaning "embryo of transformation", surrounded by rooms called longwu, or "dragon rooms." Along the central axis running from the pond to the huatai, a series of square (ㅁ-shaped) structures are arranged one after another. In the innermost hall, the shangtang (上堂), closest to the huatai, the ancestral tablets are enshrined; in the middle hall, the zhongtang (中堂), clan members would gather for meetings, hold rites such as weddings and funerals, and it also served as a kind of academy for educating the clan's children. The outer hall, the xiatang (下堂), is comparatively narrow and marks the threshold between inside and outside, sometimes also called the mentang (門堂), or "gate hall." Taken together, the semicircular pond in front and the semicircular huatai behind form a circle, while the square structures in the middle form a square—an embodiment of the ancient Chinese cosmological principle tianyuandifang (天圓地方), "heaven is round, earth is square" (change and motion, the boundless cosmos, cyclical time, as against stability and fixity, human society and the ground beneath it). On either side of these square structures, rooms are arranged in two or three long parallel rows, called hengwu (橫屋), or "side houses." Listening to the owner's explanation, I came to understand how the Hakka—who, amid war and the incursions of other peoples, had migrated again and again—banded together by clan after wave upon wave of displacement, in an effort to build homes that were safe and impregnable. Built on a grand and solid scale, grounded in the philosophy of fengshui, and constructed for the sake of the clan's prosperity and the flourishing of future generations, this house was now old—a space out of history, offering neither comfort nor privacy.

Having listened to the owner's explanation, the rickshaw driver then drove me to the Hakka research institute, ferrying me along on the back of his rickshaw as though I were some honored state guest. To him, I may have seemed a precious foreign scholar, someone who would study the Hakka's fine traditions and history and spread their spirit to the world. Inside the old city, on the campus of Jiaying University, there was indeed a Hakka research institute, and when I introduced myself as a Korean student hoping to study the Hakka, Director Fang Xuejia (房學嘉) welcomed me warmly. He introduced me to a master's student majoring in Hakka studies, Li Haidong (李海東), as well as to a doctoral student from Japan, Iigura Koji, who had come to research the weilongwu of the Meixian region. Li Haidong took me to see a weilongwu called Renhou Wengongci (仁厚温公祠), built during the Ming dynasty (1490), which was far larger in scale than the one I had seen with the rickshaw driver. Though similar in structure, it had some 390 rooms, wider halls, and a network of skywells (天井), passageways, and courtyards connecting them, giving the whole place the feel of a small village. Li told me that Director Fang had originally been a local educator, a math teacher, and that it was through his growing interest in houses like the weilongwu, and his subsequent research into them, that he had come to be a guardian of Hakka culture.

The traditional Hakka houses I encountered in my visits to the Hakka regions of Fujian and Guangdong were fascinating, but they could not become the subject of my research. These traditional houses didn't feel like places where the Hakka actually lived their present lives—they felt more like folk villages. Two to five hundred years ago, when the Hakka had migrated to these regions of Fujian and Guangdong, each clan had pooled its strength to build fortress-like houses to protect itself from enemies; and now, frozen in that era, these houses simply waited for the tourists who came to visit them. Of course, when something special happens within a family—Lunar New Year (春節), a wedding, a funeral, an ancestral rite—the owners of these houses gather there, traveling in from the cities or wherever they now live. If one were to study the structure and layout of these distinctive houses, their building materials, the history of their construction, and the writing, images, and symbols scattered throughout them, one might well be able to interpret the unspoken inner world of the people who live there. But I did not want to wait around for such special occasions, studying material culture in places designated as tourist sites or cultural heritage.

Todorov took a similarly critical view of Cortés's attitude and methods in his approach to the Other. Cortés learned the language of the native peoples, grasped the meaning of their myths, prophecies, and rituals, and in doing so came to recognize what they feared and what they held sacred—reading these symbols and using them to dominate the people themselves (Tzvetan Todorov, 1982). In my own case, I had no intention of dominating the Hakka—but more fundamentally, I never thought of the Hakka as "natives" , essentially different from myself. I imagine that, two to five hundred years ago, my own ancestors must have lived in houses not so different in form from the ones the Hakka left behind from that same era. And so I came to believe that Hakka identity lies not simply in the differing architectural styles found from region to region, but in the emotions forged through a life of ceaseless migration, and in whatever force drives them to form a global network that transcends locality. I brought my brief journey to the Hakka homeland to a close by tucking, into a corner of my bookshelf, the research volumes on southern Chinese Hakka houses that Director Fang had given me as a gift. In the homeland of Hakka, I could not find my research subject.