Beanbag: The Half-sold Man

While ambivert is (presumably) doing windmills while mugging and finishing chem, math and physics tutorials, and polaris um.. mugging, i was doing qing-ming-jie stuff with my extended family today.

There was the usual stuff - finding the two graves that we're supposed to clean up (among the billions of others that are at the graveyard) , burning paper money and incense sticks (also known as joss sticks), repainting the chinese characters on the tombstones, putting the funny coloured paper on the grass, and (literally) drenching yourself in smoke so you have an excuse to take a long, warm bath after returning home.

Then there was the not-so-usual stuff - like the story of the half-sold man.

I overheard my grandpa's sister-in-law talking about him and i asked her to tell me the story, which i shall try to repeat here in as much detail as possible.

The Story of the Half-sold Man
okay, before i begin the story, let's get you acquainted with the characters:
"Pa" - my grandfather's father
"Ma" - my grandfather's mother
"Uncle" - my grandfather's uncle (my grandfather's father's tang di)
"Gor" - my grandfather's elder brother (2nd son of the family)

Long before our time, like long long ago, around the japanese-occupation era or maybe even earlier, there lived a poor chinese family, blahblahblah, my grandfather's family. They were horribly poor, so poor in fact that they couldn't even afford rice, oil, and salt. In other words, they couldn't even feed themselves properly.

Luckily, Pa, the father of the family, had a cousin, Uncle, who was running a small provision shop. Uncle wasn't doing too badly, and since they were family after all, offered to loan some rice, oil, and salt to Pa's family. Pa would have to pay Uncle back eventually.

Unfortunately, life didn't go too well for Pa and his family, and even after quite a while (maybe a few years or something?), Pa was still really poor and living off Uncle. By then he owed Uncle around $100-or-so (and this was a huge sum of money at that time).

If you didn't know (and you wouldn't know anyway 'cos I haven't told you yet), Uncle was all married and stuff but he didnt have any sons at all (or maybe no kids at all - I'm not too sure). People at that time placed a huge emphasis on having sons to carry on the family name. Since Uncle had no sons, and Pa had a few, and Pa owed him a large some of money, after much negotiations, Pa and Uncle came to the agreement that Pa would "sell" Uncle a son, in exchange for negating all the rice-debts Pa owed Uncle.

However, Ma said, "NO". To her, one son was worth much more than $100-ish, and she refused to sell Uncle one of her sons. But Pa's family still owed Uncle a great big deal, so after more debating and negotiations and maybe lots of arguments and stuff, Ma agreed to sell Uncle half a son. And so Gor, Pa and Ma's second son, was given to Uncle.

Gor has been with Uncle ever since that day, till Gor passed away, and now half of Gor's descendents supposedly belong to our family. But due to complications (government things perhaps), our family decided to forego that half-selling thing, and just let all of Gor's descendents take on the surname (thus belonging) to Uncle's family.


Pretty cool, right? I didn't know i actually had this funky a family history till today. This really made my day. (this is when you get jealous of me and start whining) lawl.