The Road from Farming: My Search for Roots After Entering Society

I do not know what I will be able to write. I always feel that my life course is still so powerless, insignificant, and beyond my own control. It has been five months since I came to Wan'an in Chihshang. KABE, the brown dog, has gone from a tiny puppy that could fit into a saddlebag to a huge dog that still behaves like a child. As the second rice crop comes to an end, although my mind is still concerned about the grain on the drying yard that has not yet dried, on a hazy, chilly, rainy afternoon like this, I sit on the sofa, holding an old tabby cat curled up on my belly, and recall the big and small events of my past life.

After finishing military service, two close friends from high school and I took tents and sleeping bags and wandered around Europe. We spent more than 50 days with tap water and coarse-grain bread as hard as stone, enduring until we could bear it no longer before opening a can of tuna brought from Taiwan, and eating it with the feeling of treating it like caviar. Sometimes we walked; sometimes, if we were lucky, we got a ride from a kind old man. We cycled and camped along the great river flowing toward France. We climbed unexplored castles like adventurers and looked out into the distance. Ignoring the objections of the young woman renting out canoes, we insisted on canoeing in water less than 10 degrees cold... It was in this penniless posture, holding to the ambition of "It's now or never." that we traveled in a hard but profound way. Looking back now, I still feel that it was a once-in-a-lifetime young foolishness. What we saw and felt, once missed, would never exist again.

Back in Taiwan, I put on a suit and tie, sent in one resume interview, and soon began working as an office worker in Taipei. That really was a happy period of nine-to-five days, with normal and stable working hours, a section chief who looked after subordinates, and colleagues who worked harmoniously. It was not like many of my friends and seniors, who even now still suffer through daily overtime work, maneuvering through a life of scheming between superiors and subordinates. In short, contrary to the usual condition of Taiwan's white-collar class being exploited, I was fortunate enough to still have my second life after work. Because I had never been able to forget the scenes in Into the Wild, and could not forget the forests, lakes, and great grasslands I saw in Europe, I began, through a friend's recommendation, to take up mountain climbing, river tracing, and rock climbing.

My first river trace was at Shanghuang Creek in Yangmingshan. It was called river tracing, but it was actually going to pick up trash and clean the stream. In the rainy valley, we picked up garbage and put it into large and small burlap sacks, but the trash was stuck in stone crevices, hidden in the soil, and concealed across the endless mountain slopes, seemingly without end. The trash inside included everything from clothes and plastic shoes to porcelain bowls and even hospital syringes. Later I went four more times, before and after. Someone asked me why, when everyone liked to go on real river-tracing trips, I, a new rookie, would choose this kind of hard and completely uninteresting activity to join. At that time I always laughed blankly, not knowing how to answer.

Looking back now, at that time I was going through a low point in life, a low point of having just entered society but having no direction in life and not knowing where to go. I clearly knew that society had arranged a path for me, a so-called "civilized" life, but I could not stop questioning the legitimacy of that path. I often watched documentaries in movie theaters, truly witnessing polar bears helplessly drowning, the bright red blood of a beheaded narwhal spreading across pure white snow, poor people in garbage dumps making a living and using plastic sheeting as overcoats, and Indian farmers who, unable to pay for pesticides and with no way out, committed suicide... But strangely, after the movie ended and I walked out of SPOT-Taipei Film House, facing the noisy car lights on Zhongshan North Road and the gorgeous, warm lights of the hotel opposite, these images that had just shocked me on the screen seemed to instantly disappear and become a world completely unrelated to me.

I am not smart and have no foresight, but I cannot stop this doubt and this helplessness toward my own self-deceiving weakness. So when I saw with my own eyes Shanghuang Creek covered in garbage, and with my own hands turned over stones and soil to pick up that trash, for me it undoubtedly became a kind of redemption. In my heart, the scene from Spirited Away of bathing the river god kept appearing. Every piece of garbage pulled from the river god's body was something I had once used, as if all this garbage had been thrown away by me. Piece by piece, bag by bag, I picked them up again, letting the clear stream flow once more through my fingers. I really hoped I could see the river god from the water, bend down, and say sorry to Him.

I still remember that night I fell asleep exhausted, my heart full of emotion. And this happiness and satisfaction continued all the way to what should have been a blue Monday that week...