Pickled Mustard Greens Memories in a Time Jar: The Hakka Goodness of Da Nanpu

After the New Year, I left my grandmother's house in Meinong, set aside the scorching southern weather, set aside the tomato fields and the scorched earth (what it looks like after the red beans are harvested) and other scenery, put on a padded coat, and headed for Dananpu in Nanzhuang Township, Miaoli, a place surrounded by mountains.

It is also a Hakka village and also speaks the Sixian dialect, but it has a different look. There are no tomato fields, yet in the fields there are large patches of green-leafed mustard greens; there is no winter melon simmered in soy sauce, but you can see elderly women vigorously rubbing mustard greens to make salted vegetables.

I think the Hakka really are masters of pickling! In the corners of my old home there are also jars of pickled radish, bamboo shoots, plums, tofu and so on. When relatives and friends come back, they share them, and they can also be added to everyday meals. And among all Hakka settlements, Miaoli is known for pickling.

In addition, the Dananpu Rural Office hopes to lead high school students who have not yet received an introduction to rural culture, but who may go straight to the city to study, to use winter and summer vacations to enter the countryside through interviews and surveys on different themes (this year, salted vegetables), to experience a different way of life, to think about the plight of the countryside under the mindset of urban development, and to become aware of the relationship between the food self-sufficiency rate and food culture.

 (After cutting the mustard greens, we set off to get ready for pickling~)

Mustard greens have the longest and largest leaves of all leafy vegetables, so they are also called "long-year vegetables" and are one of the indispensable auspicious dishes during the New Year. Depending on the difference in sun-drying, pickling time and method, the same mustard greens can be made into salted vegetables, fu cai, and meigan cai, and people generally use "salted vegetables" as a general term for all three. Depending on how they are cooked, they can be stir-fried directly, made into soup, or used in dishes such as meigan cai pork belly.

On the last day of the camp, we specially asked the local uncle and aunt who do catering to cook a banquet-style meal. When I drank the "pickled mustard green and pork tripe soup," I was truly stirred inside. It was a soup I had never been able to drink after leaving the south and going north to study for many years. It was the soup my late grandmother loved most to cook for the children! You cannot order it in snack shops in Taipei, and it is even less likely in student cafeterias (mostly it is mixed soup). That day the mystery was finally revealed! It turns out this is made from mustard greens! If we do not take part in actual interviews and surveys, grow vegetables, or cook for ourselves, we really cannot come to know the countryside and understand such a wonderful plant and culture.

Thinking of my grandmother also pulls me back to the first two days of the camp. Because the Dananpu Wenwu Temple was going to worship the Jade Emperor on the eighth day of the first lunar month, ingredients were prepared in the afternoon to make offerings to the gods. The elderly woman there invited us to eat qi ba (mochi), and while shaping it and putting it into the bowl, she said to us, "My grandson loves to eat this too!" Elders always remember what their children like to eat, but how many children today earnestly remember what their elders love to eat?

(Learning to make salted vegetables. One plant above and one below, rub salt evenly over every part, and rub them against each other until water comes out and they soften)

Thanks to these high school kids, I took the chance after the New Year to get some good exercise, leave the desk and move my body. After weeding, a group of us played "red light, green light" in the fields. It felt so good to run and fall in the grass, to stretch the muscles and run hard. With both feet on the earth, both hands can embrace the sky. Then we took them to climb a small hill, where we saw crested serpent eagles circling in the air and heard the rustling of wind through the trees and grass, as if it were a symphony of mountain spirits.

This simple way of exercising is far better than on a standard PU track, with its "competition" and "you have to finish or you will be laughed at," and it can stimulate the senses, letting you "feel" being surrounded by nature, rather than only using "mental awareness" to memorize from the geography textbook: what is a hill, a tableland, a plain, and so on.

What made me happy was that on the last day, at the results presentation, through the films "The Price of Deliciousness" and "Savage Game -- Land Expropriation Law" and through their actual visits, the children came to recognize the importance of protecting the environment and culture. One child from National Dali High School in Taichung even quoted a passage to express her feelings:

"We live in such a high-tech, mechanized age. If we continue to destroy the ecology and do not protect it well, then when the last river is polluted, the last fish is caught, and the last tree is cut down, only to discover that money cannot be eaten, it will already be too late."

Another child's impression was: "Transportation is inconvenient, but it is full of strong human warmth." One elderly woman even gave each of the children a portion of pickled vegetables and meigan cai! But it is also this human warmth that requires special care when interacting with local people. When they want to eat snacks and crackers, they should take turns spending evenly among the three grocery stores in the village, so as not to favor any one of them. The closed and local character of the village reflects a different mode of getting along from urban life.

(Because the Miaoli mountain area was an early coal mining site, everyone was taken to visit Uncle A-Fu's coal mine museum.)

During the interview process, I noticed two interesting things: one is the elderly women's ability to learn. You would think that with age they would take in less of new things than young people, but through television the elderly women watch popular current programs such as "Mom and Dad Are Stunned" or Korean dramas, and they even learned Mandarin to communicate with their grandchildren when they came home for the New Year for convenience in talking (by contrast, young people still cannot really speak Hakka, which is truly shameful).

The second is the issue of gender. Why is it women who pickle salted vegetables, as if women cannot escape the gender role of cooking food and the kitchen? I also saw that the village residential phone directory was all men's names. When chatting with the elderly women, when I finally asked how to address them, they often first answered me, "My husband's surname is X." Only after a pause would they say, "My surname is X." This left me not knowing how to address them. I hope that in the future I can understand more about interaction between the sexes in the countryside.

What I found rather regrettable is that those who make salted vegetables are mostly older women. Young people have left their hometowns to work, and when asked about their children, they all say they have not learned and do not know how to make it. Will we have to buy finished products processed all at once in large factories from supermarkets in the future? Although it is convenient, the production process cannot guarantee safety from pesticide residues, and it lacks the handmade warmth of the elderly women and the smiles of hoping the recipient will accept it. Will the traditional pickled foods of this generation become fewer and fewer as memories fade?

Note: On the third Sunday of every month, Dananpu sells the elderly women's handmade foods on behalf of them at the [Bend Down Life Festival]. Long beans, water salted vegetables, meigan cai and more are waiting for everyone!

Dananpu Rural Office Facebook
Dananpu Rural Office, Miaoli Youth Association ~ Dananpu Winter Vacation [High School Rural Exploration Camp]
Miaoli Youth Reading Group