Leaving a Way Home for Farmers - Three Stories of Anti-Expropriation in Tamsui
From afar I saw an elderly woman carrying a bundle of firewood walking along an earth-yellow ridge between the fields. Under the heavy gray sky, it felt as though I had arrived in the countryside of Guizhou. I planned to park my scooter in front of the Lu family's old house as arranged, then walk over to interview her, but unexpectedly she headed toward me instead, and it turned out she was the Lu family's daughter-in-law.
According to the Lu family descendants: the Lu ancestors came from Tong'an in Quanzhou more than 200 years ago, first settling in Dagala, the area around today's Wanhua South Airport. After growing rich through business, and for reasons no one quite knows, they moved more than 100 years ago to the present-day Zhouzi, built a large three-sided courtyard house, and reclaimed several jia of farmland in the surrounding area. They also owned a large stone tidal weir by the sea, which supported several dozen Lu family descendants at the time, and the line has now passed down to the ninth generation.
Born in the Year of the Horse and now in her early 70s, the woman was originally surnamed Li, from far-off Yunlin. When I asked her why she had married so far from home, she smiled without answering, only saying that she married into the Lu family at 22, and that her husband died in a car accident when the children were still very small. Fortunately it was an extended family, and her parents-in-law helped care for the children, so she went to work as a factory woman in an electronics plant in Zhuwei. But in her 60s she was laid off by her boss; from then on she grew vegetables at home to feed herself, taking the surplus by bus to sell on the streets of Tamsui, setting up here and setting up there, shuffling aside whenever she took someone else's spot, and earning enough to get by. She said all this lightly, but I imagine this whole chain of events must once have tormented her, yet she pulled through each one, and now she has to face the government's land expropriation.
Leaflet opposing the "Danhai Phase 2 development project" + petition opinion form (announcement)