The beauty and pride once owned by a good old man

That day, since there was no one to meet yet, I went for a stroll around the streets. In this small village where the tail ridge of the great mountain range meets the alluvial plain, along both sides of the provincial highway there are, besides the usual few routes heading up the mountain, many blind alleys and wonderfully interconnected little paths that I had never walked during the tight hours of work.

If you ask me what difference it makes for Gongliao Township to have become Gongliao District, apart from the faded "Village" characters of the twin jade name on the green landmarks having been patched over with the crisp word "Li," an appointed district chief will also act differently from the locally elected heads of the past, though for now the pace and scale of life have on the surface not changed much because of it. Yet the villages and townships of the past in fact meant centers of daily life in their own right, self-sufficient in the supplies they used most; tucked away in a home with mountains and streams, a village could still live an independent and simple life of its own. Even Shuangyu Li, cut through by two provincial highways down the hill, is still a "satoyama" environment where woods, bamboo groves, rivers and streams, and houses interlace, and still has more than 309 species of birds, living together with this settlement that has depended on nature for a hundred years. Gongliao "District," Shuangyu "Li" - what does this gradual change mean? I watch it in these few years, one moment land expropriation, the next an expressway; with this kind of constant change in service of the functions attached to the metropolis, the residents have little say, especially as the ease of living is hollowed out, all construction prepared for the fleeting coming and going of tourists, and the cohesion of the village and the settled peace of home are crumbling.

These tiny, almost negligible things - "some things are majestic and magnificent, some things exist only in the present moment.[Note]" That kind of confidence, like that of Hyundokbeo, comes from decades on one's own land, having gone through every trial that exists only in the present, adjusting step by step, planning and building a homeland that secures food and shelter from wind and rain for one's own family, and so it has its overall majestic and magnificent appearance. This ease and confidence, at the very moment when a village is abruptly transformed into a border district of a special municipality, is the beauty most easily lost. Changes to the homeland are decided by others; the work on the homeland has only the majesty and magnificence on the drawings, without careful consideration of each different present moment; the work crews are responsible only for the owner's instant acceptance inspection, or at most a year or two of warranty, without the pressure of public opinion from the neighbors of the village that could be passed down for ten or a hundred years. What disappears is probably not only the old man's confident smile, but also the village that lives in peace, self-reliant, and carefully tended, and the community's resilience after each disaster and change, that subtle balance that must be obtained from the power of the environment and the fineness of daily life.

This thing about to pass away - what a beautiful pride it once was!