School Drop Out and Planting of Padi

 Many among the second generation of the Foochow pioneers in Sibu were still struggling to survive as agronomists, depending on the land they had opened up.

Here is the story of one family's struggles.

After the Japanese Occupation, many Foochow fathers were absentee fathers, mothers and children had to plant rice to supplement their household income. Most of the Foochows in their 20's and 30's had hardly 3 years of school or none at all if they lived in very remote Foochow villages. Those with their own land had some rubber trees grown in the 1910's.  Rice was planted in the muddy fields around their stilted house by the banks of the Rajang River while rubber tapping was on going.

My mother's eldest brother, Pang Ping was an absentee father who would come back once in three months if he worked far away or once in three weeks if he worked at a place nearer home. He never really had  permanent work, as he sought available work in timber camps when he was younger. He had to move from place to place to do logging work. He worked as wharf coolie at times. And when older, he was a barber, to rest his back which ached because of long hours of toiling in the sun and over exhaustion.

When he came home he brought back his hard earn money as there was no online remittance in those days. Cash was hard to come by and debts had to be paid.

My cousin Lau Kiing Hung, just one year younger than I (born in the year of the Tiger) was not good in school and was often beaten by the teachers. With very poor school reports, he dropped out when he was barely 14 years old. He helped around the house, tapped rubber in the morning and plated padi in the afternoon.

Aunt and he planted about 3 acres of  their land with rice which could support the family well for more than a year. They kept their rice grains on the first floor of the big family house, meant for four brothers and their families. 

Whenever they needed some fresh rice, they would take the rice to mill. Freshly milled rice was very fragrant and very few people would forget the aroma of freshly cooked rice, hot and steaming in the kitchen. It was also the satisfaction of hard work to get a whiff of one's harvest. 

It was hard work, waiting for the tide to ebb and then carry the cangkul to the field. Weeding was back breaking. Harvesting during the hot season, when the grains were golden, was skin blistering.

It was the tide, the overflow of the Rajang, carrying mud sediments from the upper river, that brought in organic fertilizers to the growing padi and also keeping the weeds at bay. Flooding was a daily occurrence in those days when even the word organic was unknown and  even plastic was not invented.

In the days of natural farming, each day they prayed that the insects would not come to devour the growing grains, or the rain would not come continuously for too many days to kill off the roots and the slowly growing rice grains.

When the grains gained their golden colour, my cousin and my aunt would sigh and feel relieved that almost a good year had gone and they were ready to harvest.

They were the cattle and horse of their own farm. They were beasts of burden on the land. My cousin Hung was a padi planter and rubber tapper for three years before he moved away from the village to go elsewhere to seek his fortune.