Anthropologist shares warm memories of Pulai Hakka village first visited 45 years ago

KUALA LUMPUR: Sharon A. Carstens was greeted by friendly villagers when she first stepped foot in a Chinese Hakka village in Pulai 45 years ago.

Recalling her first impression of the small village in Kelantan, Carstens said she remembered two small shops at the town centre and an old woman was sitting on a porch.

“As I was talking to a shopkeeper, a young woman came in (to the shop) and said she was going to visit her family nearby and asked if I wanted to join her. She said I could jump into the back of her truck.

“So I visited her family, we had a nice lunch and walked on the padi field. It was Chinese New Year and we visited her other relatives, who served drinks and snacks.

“It was wonderful. People were very welcoming and it just felt comfortable,” she said.

Carstens’ trip came about when she was looking for a place to do her PhD in the late 1970s, a few years after completing her Master’s in Singapore.

“I was looking for a village because I wanted to live with the villagers and get to know them better,” she said, adding she was then told of this Hakka village in Kelantan.

To prepare for this, she even went all the way to Taiwan to learn the dialect.

On arriving at the village, she said she was offered accommodation by a villager and stayed for a year.

Since then, Carstens – now a professor at the Anthropology Department of Portland State University – made nine more visits to the town with the last trip in 2020.

“It has changed a lot with the construction of more shops and houses, and the people are more proud off their Hakka identity,” she said.

She noted that back in the old days, the people were reluctant to talk about their clan, most probably due to the influence of “outsiders” that villagers needed to assimilate into the local society.

“Now, they are so proud of being Hakkas, and they even set up a website to promote the culture,” she added.

But what did not change were the friendly faces, big smiles and warm hospitality extended to her, she said.

Carstens has published eight papers about her research and experiences in Pulai, the town and its people.

She shared some of her works with the audience during a presentation on “Making Hakka Women Visible” at the “Development and Future of Sinology in the 21st Century” conference here Sunday (Oct 29).

The two-day event over the weekend was held in conjunction with the 60th anniversary of Universiti Malaya’s Chinese Studies Department.

Carstens has also carried out other research in Malaysia. Her long-term ethnographic research with ethnic Chinese in the country focused on issues of identity, religion, mass media and multilingual practices, among others.