The Legend of Siganghai Koah-hiunn: Guarding the Original Intention of Home

Text / Chen Yanzhong (author of the independent publication "Visitor")

"Visitor": My Free-Traveling Life

In recent years, Taiwan, China has seen a wave of small magazines. Small print runs/circulation, content of no more than a hundred pages, a handful of sales channels, and irregular publication are their common features, while their themes and forms are quite diverse and rich: picture books, poetry collections, local gazetteers, photography collections, literary and artistic creations, and many more that are hard to fit into existing book categories.

Unlike the standard workflow of traditional magazines, in which several writers are gathered to conduct interviews and write drafts, then editors take over to polish and lay out the text, and finally the printing affairs are handled with the print shop to complete production, a small magazine can have one person handle all the above steps, or it can continue the traditional team approach, but the division of labor tends to be fluid and unrestricted.

I am very fortunate to have encountered such an era of many voices clamoring together, which has given me the courage, even without the crowning of a literary award or the endorsement of a publisher, to make myself the author of a publication, writing about the most popular contemporary theme: travel.

My travel experiences are not illustrious or glorious. Instead, they are like a bowl of mixed vegetable noodles that you can eat at a small stall at the mouth of an alley, containing thick-cut pork liver (grand tours, leisurely roaming), plum pork slices (street wandering, old-house visiting), large white shrimp (traveling through the charms of the years and life), and so on. It is simply a homely delicacy. You can finish eating (reading) it without any burden, yet after finishing it there is a lingering fragrance on the lips and teeth, and if the mood strikes, you can also follow the same method and cook a bowl yourself (take the same journey).

In particular, sometimes this bowl of noodles of mine has a little more scallion and garlic. The slight pungency you feel is the social criticism I cannot put down as a citizen. Also, the broth of this bowl of noodles may taste a little more layered, because I love pulling at the threads of history, turning what I see before me into a three-dimensional river of the times.

My free-traveling life: "Visitor" has reached issue number three. This time it goes to Siganghai, Tainan, for "koah-hiunn." Below is the opening statement for this issue. Friends interested in reading the complete content, please read issue number three of "Visitor."

(For the complete content of "The Legend of Siganghai Koah-hiunn," please read issue number three of "Visitor")