He Xinjie: My Rural Reconstruction Work in Typhoon Morakot Disaster Areas

Lead image/ Ho Hsin-chieh  Interviewing during the reconstruction of Liugui, where adults and children alike hope for good road quality

When NewsMarket invited me to write an article on the theme of "youth aiding agriculture," I was of course more than willing, but hearing the topic made me feel I really could not casually agree to it.

It has now been a full year since I became a reporter for the Morakot Independent News Network. Although the reconstruction areas are mostly farming villages, and I have written several reports on agricultural reconstruction and food from the disaster areas, I really do not think that is enough to call myself a case of "youth aiding agriculture." On the land of Taiwan, there must be many young people who support Taiwan's agriculture more solidly and earnestly than I do, and who are more qualified than I am to be included in NewsMarket's series on aiding agriculture. The story of what happened to me over this past year does not match the positive image of youth aiding agriculture at all. Still, perhaps this is not only an experience that happened to me; I only hope that this thoroughly un-passionate article can give a little comfort, and a little possibility of starting again, to those who feel the same way.

Many people know that this assignment to report on location in the farming villages of the south actually caused me quite serious maladjustment. This story has to begin with a small rupture between my identity and reality. My hometown is Penghu, which not only fits the basic definition of a rural area, but is a rural area within a rural area, an offshore island. Until last year, I never doubted my love for my hometown or my identification as a Penghu person; I also believed that if my family had not insisted on sending me to Taipei for school starting in elementary school (though every September I would inevitably cry and fuss at Magong Airport, begging to go back to Penghu for elementary school), I would certainly have become a "true" Penghu child running under the Penghu sun and leaving home only for university.

But life cannot be reversed, and youth comes only once. In the end, like many Penghu children, I was sent away from my hometown as a child and came to Taipei to study, and to this day I have never again lived long-term in Penghu. Although in my heart I always quietly disliked Taipei, and always insisted to others that I was a Penghu person, more than ten years of living in Taipei had already washed away most of the rural memories that perhaps once briefly existed in me, only I never knew it.

It was not until my first month on the job at the Morakot news network, when, wanting to understand the environment and local workers, I signed up for the rural workshop at Cishan-Meining Community College. At the time, I still naively believed that I would certainly be happy working in a rural area. When the instructor mentioned the Penghu dish of salted small squid, and a student said, "I used to think this squid was so salty, and only later did I understand its flavor," I secretly felt proud: "Ha, I grew up eating this, and I always thought it was delicious!" This was my lifelong pride and mistaken belief: I am a Penghu person / grew up in the countryside, I am not a Taipei person / city person.

However, only later did I realize that on that day I was not entirely wrong in my understanding either.

In the year that followed, I began interviewing, documenting, and reporting in Liugui and Jiaxian in the Morakot disaster area. Riding a motorcycle along the banks of the Laonong River and the Nanzixian River, constantly getting lost, turning back, calling interviewees, and stopping to wait out the afternoon thunderstorms, I only then realized that my body had already forgotten rural life. In last year's diary, I seem to have written: "...Tomorrow I have to set out for Kaohsiung again, and in my heart I still feel tired and resistant. Strange rooms, uneasy sleep, broken roads, unreasonable torrential rain, distant villages, and, my new friends, after suffering, with eyes that occasionally hold sadness, making one utterly exhausted..." and other such records of despair.

Such a story does not fit the mold of "youth aiding agriculture" at all. A young person who promises to work on location should actually have to rush back to Taipei to get a good night's sleep, so that both body and mind can rest. Such a situation would surely invite plenty of ridicule - after all, when you want to do something out of step with the times, ridicule is unavoidable - a person who joins social movements in Taipei, who always holds suspicion toward modern urban civilization, who has lived in Taipei for more than ten years and still insists her hometown is Penghu, should in the end have to return to a rented room in Taipei before she can sleep well. Such a situation truly cannot be blamed on anyone else and cannot be escaped. The only message it conveys is this: I am no longer that five-year-old Penghu child crying at the airport to "go home for elementary school," but a standard twenty-five-year-old Taipei graduate student.

Taipei, this city that has tamed countless rural-to-urban migrants, finally tamed me too, erasing bit by bit over a long period my path back home. Although every winter and summer vacation (the modern school's gift of free time to children) I returned to the countryside, although I still occasionally disliked Taipei, although in university (and still now) I ran around shouting for the Lesheng Sanatorium, so similar to traditional fishing-village architecture, although as a child I swore every day that when I grew up (with unclear meaning) I would go back to Penghu to work; even so, when I was suffering on the winding mountain roads of rural Kaohsiung and thinking: I really want to "go back to Taipei" to sleep, I realized that for the person I was then, the road home had already completely changed shape. Just like the land eroded and scoured by Typhoon Morakot, although the physical space had not disappeared, the familiar path from childhood had already vanished.

Under such painful realization and with much bodily discomfort, I still continued working at the Morakot news network. Gradually, I discovered that for me, the happiest part of this work was the moments when interviewees invited me to eat.

Liugui is a famous fruit and vegetable producing area in the south, where farmers worked hand in hand to rebuild after the disaster

Riding from my rented room in Meinong to Liugui or Jiaxian took more than half an hour, and sometimes I ended up eating lunch out. The urban areas of Liugui and Jiaxian have some restaurants, but if I had to interview in villages outside the town center, on weekdays there was often not a single snack shop in the village. At such times, almost every uncle and aunt would warmly press me to stay for lunch: "Anyway, there's nothing to eat around here, and it's already starting to pour! Just stay and eat, and wait for the rain to stop while you're at it." Under countless such warm invitations, lunchtime became my happiest moment of the day. Not only because there was somewhere to solve lunch and wait out the annoying afternoon thundershower; it was really that farmhouse dishes made heavy use of lard, simple and savory, and went extremely well with rice; after the meal the hosts would also bring out fresh fruit in season - and if it was not grown by the hosts themselves, it had certainly been sent over by the neighbor next door.

Liugui and Jiaxian are famous fruit and vegetable producing areas in the south. Golden mango, pearl wax apple, longan, passion fruit, and lychee are all sweet, fragrant, and incomparably delicious. Perhaps my hearty eating gave everyone a certain sense of accomplishment, for many aunts would usually also bring out their own pickled agricultural products to share on top of that, everything from private-recipe pickles, dried fruit, juice, preserved fruits, to mountain tea, all brought out and sent into the belly of this unfamiliar young reporter.

Farm families in these areas are similar to those elsewhere in Taiwan: usually only the elderly are at home farming, and the house is filled with traces of children and grandchildren who occasionally come back to stay for a while. My behavior of devouring these home-style foods happened to be exactly the duty a grandchild owes to grandparents: eat up all the homegrown products they prepared with care, and wear a satisfied expression. After a lunch like this, everyone often let go of the tension and stiffness of interviewing and being interviewed - when every farmer talks about their fields and food, it is often the most at ease and relaxed moment, and the moment when words most worth recording are most likely to appear.

Gradually, more and more agricultural products given to me by farm families filled my backpack, and I also handed in several articles about smallholder reconstruction and food from the disaster areas. I began to become more and more familiar with my reporting area (naturally not entirely because of eating), slowly passed the stage of "Should I actually resign?", and safely got through my first year in the south.

Looking back today once more at the "Penghu salted small squid" incident at last year's Cishan-Meining Community College rural workshop, on the one hand it fully proves that last year's confidence truly could not withstand the test of reality: even though in Meinong, Liugui, and Jiaxian I received everyone's warm and proper care, I had long since become accustomed to being a Taipei person, and if I wanted to "return home," it would surely be a long and arduous journey of clearing a path anew; but on the other hand, my confidence was not entirely baseless either. Food and taste are the only place in my whole body that still remembers rural life.

I am not especially attached to Taipei's Western steaks or fast-food drinks; the only thing I truly appreciate is a traditional fried egg cooked in lard. When modernity and city life, like a debris flow, completely washed away and eroded my childhood memories of growing up in Penghu, only these farmhouse side dishes were familiar old friends. I think of my family: although we bought an apartment building in Taipei and smoothly sent the children one by one into Taipei's universities, we often liked to use the new-style large oven to bake smelly dried fish, drooling as it baked, and then immediately tear and bite and gnaw away at that dried fish, which by urban standards was unbearably fishy, leaving only a house full of the wild flavor of sea breeze.

Of course, we should not embrace nostalgia and say that this is enough, that although we abandon our native place step by step and turn without looking back toward modern civilization, at least local-flavor meals accompany us. But in my experience, taste is the last fortress, and food is the starting point of change, giving one the strength to carry a body unsuited to rural life and continue resisting Taipei life's taming of me.

NewsMarket's founding idea is to create a platform for sales and for the exchange of ideas for Taiwan's "food and small farmers," which happens to echo distantly with my own gluttonous story, so, not ashamed of its clumsiness, I write this article. I also hope to draw out better contributions, and to give some courage to those young people who aspire to return to farming but, like me, are troubled by being really far too pampered.

Further reading   Youth Aiding Agriculture series

01  Ho Hsin-chieh: The Morakot disaster area, rural reconstruction, and me
02  Chen Wei-pin: A farmer's son, getting to know the countryside anew
03  Liu Kuan-cheng: Grassroots practice linking countryside and campus