Some relatives visited that night. Uncle/aunt (Mr/Mrs Chan) from Seremban were here to visit working son who stayed at our place a few weeks until he found a room to rent. Accompanied by uncle/aunt (Mr/Mrs Tam) of Farrer Rd. They phoned to ask for address etc. Father picked up phone and gave instructions. But they took more than half an hour to find our house. They didn’t actually have our address and that was not clarified during the call. Only got number 28 from father, no street name. They thought street was Haji Salam, then Limau Purut. Our phone was not put back properly by father after use so they could not call back.
Anyway, when they settled down uncle/aunt Chan were expressing their appreciation for Uncle Tam’s time to drive them around and for waiting in station from 6.45am to 9am due to 2 hours delay of KTM train from Seremban.
When I tried to introduce Wai Ling to everyone I asked Aunt Chan for the proper Chinese relationship name that Wai Ling should use to address the visitors. Uncle Tam suddenly said “What is the relationship between 2 unrelated men who married 2 sisters? None. There is no blood tie at all. If they get along they are friends. If not, they are enemies. That’s that”. I said “You are right in a way but…”. I decided against continuing further as I wasn’t sure what the point was. He obviously thought he had said something really enlightening.
On further thought I realised that he was probably trying to say that there’s not much point in trying to figure out the proper ‘addresses’ to use as it has no bearing on whether 2 persons get along with each other. The Tam brothers are known to like to make 'smart alec' statements like that.
He may be right in a way but the thing to note is that the wise people who came up with the idea of naming the relationships among people thousands of years ago were less interested in Uncle Tam's narrow scheme of things. They were more forward looking and enlightened. The intention was for future generations to know where & how near/far they are related to each other. It obviously makes it easier for one to figure out how closely people are related to each other without a long description. Imagine explaining ‘biao jiu fu’ as ‘son of my maternal mother’s sister’s son’.
But more importantly, the naming convention helps to make sure that genetic diversity is maintained by avoiding marriages that are too close to one’s family. This is therefore a convenient and effective way of remembering the family tree. In the old days, few families could or can afford to maintain written records and there were little or no central government records. Few people knew how to write and cheap paper did not even exist. On top of that, it’s not convenient to initiate a search of written family and government records every time you run into some one! Not during modern times let alone hundreds of years ago.
The need for maintaining genetic diversity is a very serious and important matter. The price for not recognizing it can be seen in the difference in the characteristics of the various races around us (this may not be the only reason but I firmly believe that it is probably the most critical). Some Indian Tamils, Malays and Muslims for example do not have the concept of a family name. A child’s name has only its fathers’ name in it instead of family name. The state of present day Tamils and Malays in general is that they are educationally & economically under-achieving compared to the other races. They have proportionally more cases of drug abuse and incest committed by fathers, grandfathers & relatives. Likewise, we see the failure of the Muslim civilisation in less than 2 thousand years of its existence. A similar issue exists for some Indian groups like the Tamils where the caste system and the non-existence of a family name combine to keep them in a perennial state of relative disadvantage and submission to the upper castes.
Imagine this scenario. It is a few hundred or a thousand years back. People live in small villages separated by distances. Without technology, everyone is busy making ends meet and transportation is bad. So, there is little travel beyond the confines of their little village. Interaction and relationships are therefore within a relatively small geographical area or population pool. Consequently, the risk of marrying very close within the family tree will be pretty high too.
Further imagine that that society does not appreciate the importance of genetic diversity and therefore does not make use of family names and an extensive verbal system for identifying the various segment/members of the family tree. It will then not be difficult to imagine that there will be little safeguards against one producing off-springs with another person who is actually very close. Repeated over time, that can only lead to a degeneration of the gene pool of the people.
I bet my every dollar that Uncle Tam did not appreciate that. Arrogant poor guy.
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