Tugou Rural Art Museum: Experience the Beauty of Art in the Countryside

It had been a long time since I felt like a child again, giddy and sleepless, counting down to tomorrow's outing. This was a day both eagerly awaited and feared, and the plan we had prepared for so long was finally about to unfold today: the Tugou Rural Art Museum was opening.

A debate wrestled inside my mind. If too few friends came, the sparse, lonely scene would surely be hard to bear; if too many came, I worried the quality of the visit would suffer, the community would turn into a tourist zone, with noise and litter getting out of hand. This small contradiction swung back and forth, like a farmer sliding the counterweight along the steelyard, cultivation and harvest always hard to balance.

The staff's meeting time was 7:30. For the farmers, they had already been working in the fields for quite a while; for the team members who had not yet adapted to the rural rhythm of life, 7:30 was a barely acceptable meeting time. Brains not yet switched on drove mouths that unconsciously opened to eat breakfast, amid abundant surprise and astonishment, hollow eyes fixed on the room full of congratulatory flower baskets in the Rural Sentiment Living Room, thinking how nice it would be if they could be exchanged for cash donations, since budget overruns had become a fixed topic at every work meeting. Even with the opening at hand, continuous fundraising had shifted from a phase-specific task during the preparation period to an ongoing routine.

Postscript:

1. Interview with Wu Mei-ying

Wu Mei-ying, a Tugou local, has been studying away from home since graduating from junior high school. She currently works in Taipei as a nurse. In her memory, when she was little the Rural Sentiment Living Room was a pigsty, and she even played there and watched the pigs bathe! Now it has become the Rural Sentiment Living Room, and she even found a relative's wedding photo on the wall, which felt especially remarkable. Tugou in her childhood was simple and unremarkable, but through everyone's efforts this plain village has become colorful and helped the old farmers find happiness and pride. She hopes more people will see their achievements and give them recognition and support.

2. About the wife who used her feet to make milk

Wu Mei-ying is unmarried, and the man determined to complete the mission was a friend of her aunt. The scene in the text is entirely the author's imagination, stated here to avoid misleading anyone's youth or happiness.