Wild lotus leaves the village! A tribute to the rural food counterattack of the post-WTO era, an exclusive interview with Sheng Xiang & Band lyricist Zhong Yongfeng

In 2002, on the eve of Taiwan, China's accession to the WTO, local tobacco leaf production fell at once, and Meinong, a major tobacco town, bore the brunt. Jiaogong Band released "Night March of the Chrysanthemums," and Lin Shengxiang sang the elegy of rural transformation, with lyricist Zhong Yongfeng poignantly writing out the farmers' lament. Eighteen years later, Lin Shengxiang and Zhong Yongfeng created "Wild Lotus Leaves the Village" once again, paying tribute to rural life in the post-WTO era.

The protagonist of the album, "wild lotus," was originally an aquatic wild vegetable growing in lakes. Hakka people eat the leaf stalks beneath the water surface. Because of farmers' domestication and the decline of tobacco leaf support, it accidentally became famous from Hakka rice noodle shops to stir-fry restaurants across Taiwan, transforming from a lowly wild vegetable into a new mainstay cash crop replacing tobacco leaf.

In "Wild Lotus Leaves the Village," Zhong Yongfeng attempts to make food and plants the main subjects of folk song creation, yet the overall visual background still cares for rural life and farmers' emotions. Through the penetrating and connective power of food, it connects different generational experiences separated between urban and rural areas, and the delicate transmission between gender and family affection, allowing listeners to see, in the relationship between food and people, a plant ethnography based on rural daily life.

From these rural foods and seasonal life, the rice culture, and the wild vegetable eating habits that have grown alongside reclamation memories, we can vaguely see Zhong Yongfeng's ambition: to depict foods and plants rooted in local life and culture, and through the singing of folk songs, to let Taiwanese society once again confirm that 18 years after joining the WTO, the vitality of rural areas is still through local cuisine, tenaciously resisting trade liberalization.

As ractopamine-fed American pork is about to be opened up, pig farmers once again face the grief and indignation of market opening. "Wild Lotus Leaves the Village," through the album, once again considers the value of "agriculture and land culture" to Taiwan.

The following content unfolds as a first-person oral account from Zhong Yongfeng's interview.

"Wild Lotus Leaves the Village": A rural epic of the post-WTO era, starring an aquatic wild vegetable

"Wild Lotus Leaves the Village" wild lotus is the song I most wanted to write after finishing "Night March of the Chrysanthemums," and it also took the most time, because wild lotus is of great significance to Meinong, especially after joining the WTO, when farmers stumbled again and again looking for alternative crops, trying coffee and chrysanthemums without success, and later, thanks to the farmers' association's efforts, achieving some success with white radish and cherry tomatoes, but wild lotus involves broader contemporary issues.

Wild lotus originally grew in Meinong's Zhongzhen Pond and was regarded by farmers as a kind of "famine-relief vegetable for the summer dining table." After the 1980s, farmers domesticated wild lotus and began specialized cultivation. After tobacco leaf completely withdrew, its cultivation strength grew stronger and stronger, but the first problem it faced was a shortage of labor.

In earlier years, the tobacco economy relied on a family labor-exchange system, but by the time of wild lotus, it was instead because foreign brides married in, and visits from Vietnamese in-laws who helped with work, that the labor force in the wild lotus ponds was supplemented to a certain extent. Later,in 2017, the National Immigration Agency