Yu Guangzhong's "Rush Tangerines of Engchoon (余光中的『永春蘆柑』)

Whilst on the tunnel bus from Sheung Wan to the Kowloon City Magistracy yesterday morning, I leaved through one of the early poem collection of Yu Guangzhong "The Lotus God" (藕神). I was surprised to find there a poem about a fruit from my native county which I never knew before. It's called "rush or reed tangerine" (蘆柑). It reminds me of a Spanish poem by Neruda on the orange I previously translated. It has a very different feel though. So I took out my note pad and started the translation. The following is the result.

 

     永春蘆柑                      The Rush Tangerines of Engchoon 

 

一對孿生的綠孩子         A pair of twin laddies in green

鄉人送來我手中             delivered into my hands by villagers              

圓滚滚的肚皮                 their roundish bellies

釀著甜津津的夢            filled with sweety sweet dreams

 

夢見天真的綠油油        I dreamt that sheen of guiless green

熟成誘惑的金閃閃        has ripened into the alluring glitter of gold

把半山的果園                heating half a hillful of orchard              

烘成暖洋洋的冬天        into a warm and cosy winter 

 

向山縣慷慨的母體       From the bounteous mother earth of the hill county

用深根吮汲乳香 with deep roots, they're sucking at the perfume of its breasts

爬上茂枝，密葉          climbing up thriving twigs, dense leaves

向高坡索討陽光          seeking sunlight from the steep slopes

 

輕的變重，酸的變甘  Light turning heavy, sour turning sweet

直到脹孕的果腹          until the bulging bellies of the fruit        

再也包不住                 can no longer hold 

蠢 蠢不安的瓤瓣        those unruly portions of their pulp

 

於是村姑上梯來         then up come the village lassies in  ladders

來採滿筐的金果        to pick basketfuls of the golden fruit

去引清垂涎的饞客    to lure drooling gluttons

安慰乾喉與燥舌        soothing dry throats and parched tongues

Translating this poem has been a very special experience for me. Through learning about the ethnic origin of the poet Yu Guangzhong and the Engchoon tangerine, I have started on a different kind of journey. It's a journey to trace my own roots in China. 

Engchoon or Yongchun is a hilly county somewhere in the Fujian Province of South China. I was told by my father that that was where our family originally came from and that it was a very poor mountanous country and that was why my grandparents emigrated from there to Malaysia. I have never been there. To me, that place has no reality and appeared to be just a mysterious name which I heard my father mention once or twice when I was small. They appear to be just two Chinese characters which I had to fill in whenever there were any school or other official application forms which required me to write those two characters in the spaces reserved for putting in my "place of origin". It is the first time that I learn, from reading this poem, that our county is famous for this type of rush or reed tangerines. I was told by my father that he was born in Penang, Malaysia and that my grandfather went there from Yongchun for in late 19th century, before the 1911 Revolution and worked first as a Chinese herbalist and then as an insurance broker and that he contributed almost his entire lifesavings towards the cause of the Chinese Revolution when Dr. Sen Yat Sen went there to seek donations from overseas Chinese for the Revolution. I still remember a photograph hung high against the wall of of a rectangular pillar separating the sitting room from the verandah of the house in which I was born. It was a photograph of my grandfather, a man with a high rounded forehead, short hair. with a Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx style thick moutache above his lips, seated in a stately posture on a mahogany chair, looking straight into the camera with a pair of eyes which appeared to be staring at us wherever we were in the sitting room. He was wearing a Chung Shan style suit. There were all kinds of medals pinned below his upper left breast pocket and together with him were a number of important looking people and one of the people in the photograph was Dr. Sun Yat Sen. As a child, I was always wondering why he was given those rows of medals.  I remember having been told by one of my elder brothers by one of my father's wives that he had been to a village in Engchoon in which all its inhabitants bore the same surname as our own. 

According to the Wikipedia:

Yongchun County (永春县) is a county of Fujian province with 桃城鎮 as the seat of its  county government. Many overseas Chinese in south-east Asia have ancestors from Yongchun. The largest Yongchun population outside of China is at Muar town at Muar district at the northwest of Johore Bahru in southern part of Peninsula Malaysia (right above Singapore) with approximately 150,000 people. Besides Muar, Malaysians/Singaporeans of Yongchun (Engchoon) origin are also scattered all over other parts of Malaysia. Yongchun (Engchoon) Associations ( 永春会馆） can be found throughout many parts of Malaysia and Singapore.

The rush tangerine is the specialty of Engchoon or Yongchun, which is also famous for the "buddha hand melon" and a kind of incense called 篾香 and woven paper painting which ranks. along with Soochow embroidery and Hangzhou silk embroidery and the bamboo painting of Szechuan, as one of the four most famous types of woven or embroidered painting in China. In Taipei, there is a famous high school called Taipei Municipal Yongchun High School which has French as one of the compulory foreign languages in its curriculum. There is also a metro station by the name of Yongchun Station in Taipei, evidencing the importance of the Yongchun people in the city.

The poet probably went there some time and was brought these roundish fruit in gold which are members of the citrus fruit family. The sight of the tangerine started the motor of his imagination running and we have this rather sensuous poem of the roots of the tangerine tree sucking at the breast of mother earth and ripening into these marbles of gold to tempt thirsty throats. Below is a photograph of the tangerine tree.