Zhou the Millionaire II

“Hey, come over here quick,” he shouted to her wife in the kitchen from their grocery store, where he was making a full inventory.

“Wait until I finish washing the dishes and bowls,” she shouted back from the kitchen.

“No, no. Right now!”

She hurried into the store only to find her husband counting shining silver pieces under the dim light of a small oil lamp. He was picking up the silver piece by piece from one bamboo hamper of rice noodles he had taken back from Banka. There was only silver in the hamper. There were no rice noodles in the hamper.

“How come you have it?” the awed wife asked.

“I don't know. It's just there.”

After counting all the silver pieces, the couple tried to look for more in the other hampers. He bought four hampers of rice noodles at Banka. The first one he checked was full of rice noodles. It's the second one that contained the silver. The other two hampers contained nothing but rice noodles, which the Hoklo eat with hard boiled eggs and roast pig's feet ritually on their birthdays. They do so also to mark the end of a bad luck streak, such as a prison term. All told, the lucky grocer found three hundred taels of silver. That's a lot of money.

With the bonanza, Zhou purchased large junks to start an export-import business between Banka and Amoy. He made money from his new Taiwan-China trade venture. The proceeds from the trade were reinvested. He bought hectare after hectare of land and hired tenant farmers to grow rice. In less than half a dozen years, he was a millionaire, the only one in Guting.

But the couple could not live happily ever after.

They were married for a decade and a half, but had no offspring. Filial piety was an almost sacred value in those days. An unfilial son has three sins, so an ages-old saying goes, and the worst of them is without a son to carry on the family line. If a couple had no son, they had to have a daughter and ask a man to marry into their family. In this case, the husband had to adopt his wife's family name to carry on the line. Of course, the couple could adopt a son, or a daughter and get a husband for her with their family name.

Zhou the Millionaire had to have an heir. If he didn't, he would be a very unfilial son himself. But the henpecked husband dared not try to persuade his wife to let him have a concubine or two to sire a son or daughter. It's lawful to have concubines then, and Zhou the Millionaire could afford as any concubines as he wished.

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