The Good Taste of Pacilo, the Breadfruit, Is Worth a Try

Text and photos / Peng Yu-jung

Some plants and foods are tangled up with too much emotion. When you happen upon them unexpectedly in a foreign place, it feels like running into a childhood playmate from your hometown in the middle of a crowd, and for a moment you do not even know how to speak.

Every summer it bears golden-yellow fruit, and my mother would simmer it with small dried fish into a soup: the Breadfruit Tree (Bread Fruit Tree). To me and to many people who came from the east side of the island, it probably symbolizes home. When a close friend murmurs the common name "Pacilo," which comes from the mother tongue of the Pangcah (Amis) people, it is as if a summons, awakening in my mind the salty-sweet flavors of the long summer vacations of my entire childhood, and the fallen leaves on the school grounds on the first day back after summer break that no one could ever sweep clean.

The yellow aggregate fruit of the mulberry family, genus Artocarpus. When breadfruit season nears its end, summer ends along with it.

But as I grew older, as with so many things, food was no longer just food. Standing under the tree gazing up at Pacilo's tall, wildly growing canopy, what churned in my mind was already far more than taste and memory.

Perhaps in the yard of the old family home in Ji'an, Hualien, on the banks of the upper Dahan River at the vacant lot left after the Sa'owac tribe was forcibly demolished, or in a poor village on Boracay in the Philippines, far from the hotel coastline, where water pools everywhere, what I always think of is the tangled, root-like history of ethnic migration, persecution and forced displacement, development and destruction, the same predicament repeating endlessly, and the blending and learning between cultures.

The Nansei Amis group, whose territory lies near northern Hualien, calls the breadfruit Apalo, and it entered the tribe's food, language, personal names, place names and culture several hundred years ago. And I have always wondered: when did Pacilo enter the life of my own family, who are Han Chinese? It seems it took a full three generations before Pacilo gradually moved from being an exotic curiosity to becoming part of our everyday menu.

My family, like most Han people in Hualien, mostly said farewell to their elders in the west around the time of the Japanese colonial period, carrying dreams of starting over as "second-time migrants" to the east, even though what awaited most of them was hardship of a harder kind.

The founding ancestor of our family in Hualien, A-Gong (I am used to calling my grandfather A-Kon in Hakka), came from the Hakka village of Beipu in Hsinchu. In 1931, having said goodbye to his parents, who were both tenant farmers and camphor workers, he struck out alone and settled in the Qingshui and Gongqian area of Yoshino Village during the Japanese colonial period (roughly today's Fuxing and Qingfeng Villages). That year, he was fifteen. I guess that as a youth he may not have known why both banks of the extremely clear Qijiaowan Creek to the north were fertile fields growing so many tall trees with broad leaves and white sticky sap. When he was homesick, what he probably still thought of were the tung trees, paulownias and camphor trees.

The tall breadfruit tree is said to be able to grow to 30 m

At that time, although the land beneath my grandfather's feet was home to immigrant families from Japan and had been given the name "Yoshino," from the old hometown in the colonizing mother country, to ease their homesickness amid poverty, the breadfruit trees standing all around had not forgotten that twenty years earlier this had still been fertile soil where another people planted dry rice. After an anti-Japanese uprising in 1908 was put down in a bloody massacre, hundreds of people from two age groups (slal) of the strong Amis Qijiaowan community were killed, their houses completely destroyed by shelling, and they were forced to move south, scattering ever after across Guangrong, Shoufeng, Xikou and Guangfu in the southern rift valley and even Luye in Taitung. Their tears and cries all vanished into the cold northeast monsoon.

Afterward, "civilization," arriving with violence and with gongs and drums, established the first government-run immigrant village here and welcomed the first group of families from Tokushima Prefecture on Shikoku, Japan, who had paid a high deposit and were trying to escape the yearly flooding of the Yoshino River and lives of unbearable hardship. Like my grandfather, they secretly cherished dreams of starting over.

Mature Pacilo leaves split into feather-like lobes, which may help sunlight pass through, and also make it easier for water to drip off and for the tree to withstand wind.
It is monoecious, but has evolved so that male flowers open first and female flowers later, avoiding self-fertilization.

My A-Po (grandmother), who had been sold as a child bride, made her way from the Hakka village of Longtan in Taoyuan to the Jiaodongjiao area at the foot of the northern guard line during the Japanese colonial period (now requisitioned within today's Chiashan Air Force Base). Years later, her regretful mother sent her younger brother trudging to the east to find her sister and redeem her, but her sister had already resolved to marry the "cattle trader" who often came to the village to graze cattle, a Hakka man with an honest smile, dark skin, broad shoulders and the typical square jaw. He had attended school for a few years and could read and write a fine hand.

After they married, perhaps having learned it from the Amis people at the foot of the mountains to the north, A-Po planted a Pacilo tree with her own hands beside the drying yard at the home in Yoshino, and every summer it added calories for the eight hungry little ones. After the unripe male flowers were dried in the sun, they could be burned as a natural mosquito coil to smoke out insects.

Peeled Pacilo is still very sticky; the pale yellow part is the flesh, and by how light or dark it is you can judge whether it is overripe, since overripe fruit will be sweeter when cooked.
Inside the orange-red flesh there are seeds that taste like peanuts when bitten open, several dozen of them, which can also be dry-roasted separately.

A hundred kilometers to the south, my A-Ma (I am used to calling my maternal grandmother A-Ma in Southern Min), who grew up in Yuli, Hualien, after her widowed mother remarried, as far as I can remember never had the habit of adding Pacilo to the menu. It was only after my mother married into a Hakka village in the north that she began learning to freeze the Pacilo fruit and, wearing cotton gloves, peel it with a banana knife so her hands would not be covered in sticky sap. My second aunt, who married into Taipei, has often in recent years asked my mother to send 500 or 1,000 dollars' worth of peeled Pacilo by low-temperature delivery, to satisfy her craving and ease her homesickness.

And I have always felt that Pacilo is a kind of warm plant.

<To be continued>