Imagine for a moment the desperation felt by ordinary peasant farmers in southeastern China during the first decade of the twentieth century, when living conditions had become untenable for poor farmers throughout the region. During extended periods of drought, the land lay parched; when the rains returned, the rivers flooded the lowlands. Either way, year after year, the conditions for harvesting crops were disastrous. Without rice to eat, life became desperate. To make matters worse, the general lawlessness of the region gave rise to raids by marauding gangs of armed men looting depleted grain supplies.

Sia Eung, the eldest son of an ethnic Hokkien family, grew up in a village in Fujian province alongside a river which flooded its banks so often that the rice crops frequently failed, leaving his family to survive on a meager harvest each year. As typhoons swept in over the mountains and onto the low-lying countryside, storm winds blew without respite, and dense, lashing rain fell steadily for months, drenching everything. When water levels rose until they overflowed the river’s banks, the rushing current started devouring the embankment, pulling the land into the surging torrent. The river swelled and flowed faster as its momentum grew, gobbling up everything in its path and spilling over so far that it inundated the rice fields.

The ensuing floods washed everything away, not just the family’s fields but their home as well. Everything the family owned ended up floating in the middle of the river. All that remained of their house above water was the thatched roof stubbornly hanging on against the floodtide. Half-starved farm animals clung to the debris floating in the water, and human corpses, beginning to bloat and rot, bobbed in the swirling eddies. When the rain stopped, the sun beat down, and wafts of stench drifted off the river. The scenes of destruction were reminiscent of what the Buddha realized on the night of his enlightenment: that the cycle of birth and death resembles an ocean of suffering.

After the flood, the young man’s family packed what few possessions they had left and trekked across the high mountains into the next valley to stay with relatives and try to start their lives anew. There, they built thatched huts in the open fields and eked a living out of the land. The following year drought descended, scorching the land and shriveling their crops.

When he could no longer endure the feelings of despair, Sia Eung reached a pivotal moment in his young life. One morning, as dawn broke across the barren fields, he bid a tearful goodbye to his parents and left home in search of a better future. He set out on foot over the parched floodplain south of his home, hiking through the flat, hard landscape scarred with the stubble of a drought-stricken rice crop. Full of youth, he was strong and capable of walking long distances without tiring. He took few possessions with him, only some extra clothes stuffed in his Chinese traveling case, a tall, rounded basket made of woven bamboo that he carried suspended from a shoulder-pole. Sia Eung was twenty-two years old and on his own.

Like so many young men of that era, he joined a mass migration fleeing the severe hardships of southern China in search of greener, fresher pastures in the lands of Southeast Asia. He had heard from the tales of previous migrants that lands to the far south were peaceful and plentiful. His plan was simple: keep walking south until he reached the sea, then stow away in the hold of a merchant vessel sailing southwest and plying its trade at cities and towns along the eastern coast of the Southeast Asian mainland. When a favorable opportunity presented itself, he intended to disembark and seek employment on the mainland...