“Our ancestors were probably Hakka. The Hakka surnames in this area are Li (李), Liao (廖), and Zhong (鐘), and we’re the Zhong. But the Zhong people in our village can’t speak Hakka at all. I hear that in the old days the Zhong worshipped an ancestral deity called Zhong Kui (鍾馗), who was said to drive off evil spirits, so they even built a shrine to enshrine him, but my family is Catholic, so I wouldn’t really know.”

This was the reply of Mr. Zhong, said to be a classmate of Professor Ye. Lunbei (崙背) township in Yunlin (雲林) county, in west-central Taiwan, is a region inhabited by Taiwan’s Zhao’an Hakka, where farming and livestock were the village’s core industries. The Zhong people living in Shuiwei (水尾) village of Lunbei township are made up of one-third residents who are Protestant–their ancestors having converted to Christianity–one-third who are Catholic, and one-third who are non-Christian. What’s interesting is that the Zhong who were Christian, whether Protestant or Catholic, had no interest at all in their Hakka identity; they merely remembered that their ancestors had been Hakka.

The homeland of the Zhao’an Hakka is Zhao’an in Fujian province, a place of origin different from that of the Guangdong Hakka who make up the majority of Taiwan’s Hakka. Hakka who speak Zhao’an make up 1.7% of all Taiwanese Hakka and are classified as the least-spoken of the Hakka dialects. The fact that they hail from Fujian means that they cannot belong to the category of “righteous people” (義民) shared among Taiwan’s Hakka groups, and it means that within Taiwanese Hakka’s Minnan (Fujianese) - Hakka (Cantonese) framework, they cannot choose either side.

Mr. Zhong showed me around Lunqian(崙前) village at the center of Lunbei, and in the churchyard of Lunqian village (since Mr. Zhong was Catholic), where I was having coffee with Father Zhao (趙), I met Chen (陳) Dage. Chen Dage (elder brother), a man of expansive character, told me on our very first meeting to call him “big brother,” and when I said I studied the Hakka, he was ready to introduce me right away to his wife, a Liao (廖) Hakka. Mrs. Liao was a retired midwife, and as such there was hardly anyone in the village who didn’t know her. When I told Mrs. Liao I’d heard that Taiwanese women were reluctant to marry Hakka men, she reassured me, saying: “The Hakka here aren’t real Hakka. They used to be called ‘ao ke’ (傲客), they’re not diligent and frugal and thrifty like the northern Hakka. Even if you marry into a family here, you won’t have to work as hard as the Hakka do.”

This was the first time I’d met Hakka who introduced themselves so frankly. The Hakka I’d met until then had wanted to boast of their identity through their grand, intricately constructed Hakka houses, to show me the shrines honoring the spirits of ancestors who had given their bodies to defend their homeland as honorable “righteous people” (義民), and to prove the wealth and standing they had built up–through labor, frugality, and thrift, refusing to yield to the relatively weaker physical condition of being women amid harsh economic circumstances. Of course, since I had introduced myself as someone who studied the Hakka, they would have wanted to speak of some excellence of the “Hakka.”