A hammer is an essential tool in a carpenter’s toolbox. Since our hands are too tender and a rock too imprecise, a hammer can nail just the right spot.
On my recent trip to China and entering into our village home that has been unoccupied since the 1950s, I found two wooden mallets. No longer than 9 inches long, the heads are of wood and not of metal. I wondered what they were used for?
I knew that a gong mallet would have a round head covered with fabric to hit a gong. I have seen these in my childhood. At first, I thought that these wooden mallets were used to tenderize meat but I suspect that tough red meat was not common in southern Chinese diets those days.
After doing some internet research, I believe these hammers or more accurately, mallets were used to make furniture. They may have been used to drive a wooden chisel to join two pieces of wood together to make a chair or a stool. They could have been used to gently without marring the wood to create a table for meals and to engage in family conversations. I wonder if my grandfather whom I have never met might have used them to build furniture. And knowing how handy my mother was who lived in this house after marrying my father that she may have used them.
Peter, Paul, and Mary made Pete Seeger and Lee Hay’s 1949 song, “If I had a Hammer” famous. I used to sing it in college with my friend Bobby Baker at church pot-lucks. This hammer along with a bell ringing and a song singing call out peace, justice, and love in a dangerous world.
I wonder if these two mallets may symbolize for us to gently join together our lives and our world to be more loving, more peaceful, and more just.
Don Ng, 9.2.2026