Meinong's Six Hundred Million Orange Honey Fragrance: Brother Bin and His Father's Life Story
Lin Wen-pin, whom everyone calls Brother Pin, is a 59th-year (1970) son of a Meinong farming family. After a freewheeling life amid the dazzle of the city, he returned to the countryside to farm. Zeng Hong-zhi, a one-man-band local reporter who has long devoted himself to documentary work, has spent the past ten years using his camera to fully document the course of Meinong's agricultural development. The meeting of these two men produced Taiwan, China's first rural documentary themed on the tobacco leaf transition - "Cheng Mi Xiang" (Orange Honey Fragrance).
Zeng Hong-zhi's visual language is unhurried and gentle, yet surging with undercurrents. His camera truthfully records the pride and helplessness of the older generation of farmers, capturing the life hurdles of young farmers returning home, and two generations of father and son moving from tension to handover - just like the sweet-and-sour Cheng Mi Xiang cherry tomato, this is the true life of the countryside.
Cheng Mi Xiang Makes a Big Splash, Reviving the Tobacco Town's Agriculture
In 1987, the government opened up foreign tobacco imports; in 2002, Taiwan, China joined the WTO (World Trade Organization). For tobacco farmers, globalization was like wave after wave of giant surf, washing away the era of government price-guaranteed tobacco leaf purchasing, and farmers were suddenly forced to fend for themselves. Those who were wiped out grew old, passed away, or left farming; those who wanted to keep cultivating had to find their own way to transition. Meinong, known as the "tobacco town," developed the "Cheng Mi Xiang tomato" industry against this very backdrop.
In the autumn of 2004, farmer Zhang Zhen-ming tried growing Cheng Mi Xiang seedlings for the first time, and he found that this tomato had a long harvest period and performed very well in yield. The following year, several members of the Meinong Vegetable Production and Marketing Group No. 8 also followed suit, and one of the key figures was group leader Lin Yong-gong.
Lin Yong-gong is the foremost authority on solanaceous crops in Meinong; if his bell peppers were second in Meinong, no one would dare claim to be first. Yet even as a veteran of solanaceous crops, Leader Lin did not dare be careless with Cheng Mi Xiang. He spent all day in the field, carefully tending this first-time cherry tomato.
