Taiwan Today

For 300 years, residents around Wanggong Fishing Port in Fangyuan Township, Changhua County in central Taiwan have made a living by farming oysters. Each year, they produce approximately 35,000 metric tons of oysters from the 3,000 hectares of oyster beds in a tidal area where the county meets the Taiwan Strait. Since oysters in Taiwan are mainly sold for their flesh, the harvests are taken to the village, where they are shucked, mostly by local women, before they are shipped to seafood markets around the island. Statistics from the Council of Agriculture show that Wanggong, with an annual production value of NT$400 million (US$13 million), is one of Taiwan’s largest oyster producers.

While the oyster trade is the way most Wanggong residents earn their living, the shells have been a major problem. A small part of the 20,000 metric tons of oyster shells produced in Wanggong every year is used to breed the next generation of oysters. Some of the shells are sold at dirt-cheap prices to factories, where they are ground into powder and mixed with fertilizer or construction materials, but most are dumped in nearby open areas. In the past decade or so, however, visitors to Wanggong have found that local people are putting oyster shells to new use by crafting them into ornaments and other souvenirs.

Local resident Yu Chi (余季) is credited with developing the craft. Born in Wanggong in 1952, Yu left his hometown after completing his junior high school education. The young man had a passion for art and entered the National Academy of Arts (now National Taiwan University of Arts) in New Taipei City, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Western painting. The pursuit of art gave way to the practicalities of earning a living after his graduation, however. Yu worked as a magazine editor and a theater group manager before he entered the real-estate business as a land developer operating in Taiwan, mainland China and New York City. Business was good, but in 1997, Yu decided to return to Wanggong with his wife Liang Feng-rong (梁鳳蓉). “My father was elderly and suffering from diabetes, so I thought I could keep him company for a few years,” he says. The couple, while taking care of Yu’s father, also ran the family’s grocery store, which is just a five-minute walk from the port.

Life at Wanggong did not take much getting used to for Yu, but it was a problem for Liang, who had worked as an operating theater nurse at Taipei City’s Tri-Service General Hospital before following her husband to Wanggong. “Moving from a city that never sleeps to a small village where everything became quiet after sunset was a huge change,” Liang says. “For more than a year, before I finally adjusted to the environment, I wondered if I was suffering extreme depression.” As she saw it, Wanggong was simply a remote fishing port that smelled bad and did not even have a public library. Liang’s observation was not far from the truth, as oyster farming is a tough, smelly job with an unstable income, and most young people leave the town for other jobs. The remaining population is composed mostly of elderly people and children. Of the working-age men who still live there, many are married to immigrant spouses, since few Taiwanese women want to live in the rural town.

Eye on Community

Yu’s father passed away five years after Yu returned to Wanggong, but instead of following their original plan to return to a big city, the couple decided to stay. “I guess after five years, we were quite used to the simple lifestyle here and started to appreciate it,” Liang says. Meanwhile, they started to put time into community development projects supported by various government schemes aimed at helping rural communities make the best use of local resources. With his experience in organizing commercial activities, Yu came up with the idea of promoting tourism to Wanggong based on oyster cuisine. The project did attract some tourists, but was helpful only to those who run restaurants on Wanggong’s main street. “Tourists came, ate and went,” Yu says. “Wanggong left little more of an impression than that of a place for some oyster dishes.” In fact, a large number of the residents were reluctant to promote Wanggong, and thought of the traffic and congestion brought by tourists on holidays and weekends as just interruptions to their daily routine. “A key element for any community empowerment project is to get the residents involved,” Yu says. “Obviously, we didn’t have enough support because people didn’t want to change the way they and their forebears had lived for the past several centuries.”

Oyster Culture

Disappointed but not discouraged, the couple decided to give local development another try from a cultural angle. Yu notes that Wanggong is all about oysters, so there is no doubt that it has an “oyster culture,” though even Wanggong residents see farming the creatures as a business rather than a way of life. The challenge was to find a way for visitors as well as locals to recognize Wanggong’s oyster farming as a unique aspect of local culture that should be valued as more than just a source of seafood.

As an outsider, Liang says she was better able to think about the village outside the box. One of the things she first considered was how to make use of the piles of oyster shells. “They may be of little value from a business viewpoint,” she says. “But if you see oyster farming as a culture, the shells are definitely part of it.” Thinking of the many souvenirs made of seashells she had seen, Liang asked Yu if he could turn oyster shells into some kind of handicraft. Yu’s answer, however, was not very encouraging. “The problem was that oyster shells are not beautiful shells,” he says. “If you ask me, they are probably among the ugliest of all seashells.”

Still, Yu eventually bought some paper clay, or clay to which paper fibers have been added, and gave it a try, soon coming up with several models. Yu’s first works were figurines of some of the elderly people who would gather and chat in front of his father’s grocery store. He used the paper clay to shape the faces, while cleaned and dried oyster shells were transformed into their robes or hats. After some more experimentation, Yu realized that the rough outer surface of oyster shells, though lacking the beautiful colors or shapes of most other seashells, could be made to resemble the look of bird feathers. Applying the shells onto bodies made of paper clay, he began to replicate some of the waterfowl seen around Wanggong such as egrets and black-winged stilts.

Initially, Yu created the figures as a hobby, but in 2002, a team of central government officials happened to see them when the group was visiting the town as part of an investigation of Taiwan’s coastal resources. The team members encouraged Yu to apply for funding from the Council for Cultural Affairs (now Ministry of Culture) to develop the craft into a unique cultural creative product for Wanggong, with the project receiving an initial grant of NT$400,000 (US$13,000). With the money, Yu renovated his father’s grocery store and set up the Oyster Culture Association in 2004 to exhibit his works and share the techniques of crafting them. Before the hobby could become a viable business, however, there were a number of issues to be resolved.

The first thing to be considered was the production cost. Oyster shells were free, but paper clay was too expensive. After some experimentation, Liang found an inexpensive replacement for it by mixing oyster shell powder into a type of clay. There were also technical problems, as what seemed to be easy for Yu to craft was difficult for others. Yu explains that the key to making an animal or human figurine lies in finding the correct proportions for each part of the subject. To make the process easier for the average person he designed several basic waterfowl shapes with wire. With a pre-shaped wire base, anyone could easily add clay to form its body and neck, and oyster shells for the wings. At the same time, the technique allows a degree of creativity in the way individual workers apply the clay and oyster shells.

Yu says that establishing a simple, standard procedure to craft the oyster shell figurines was important as it allows him to recruit workers based on their economic circumstances rather than artistic ability. “The purpose here is not to create as much profit as we can, but to provide as many jobs as we can,” he says. Since its establishment, the Oyster Culture Association has provided jobs not only to several new immigrants, but also senior citizens and a number of indigenous people who relocated to Wanggong after their homes were destroyed by the devastating earthquake that rocked Taiwan on September 21, 1999.

In order to create more jobs for the community, Yu applied for ongoing employment subsidies from the Council of Labor Affairs (CLA). Lu Thúy Phân, who has worked for the Oyster Culture Association since 2005, was one of the first recruited under the CLA project. Lu, who is from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, married a Taiwanese national and moved to Wanggong in 1999 at the age of 23. Like most other new immigrants to Wanggong, Lu divided her time among doing household chores, taking care of her children and in-laws, and shucking oysters. The pay for shucking oysters is NT$20 (US$0.70) per bowl, or approximately 700 grams, of oyster flesh, which translates to perhaps NT$300 (US$10) per day. “The first thing I learned here was that the value of oysters is in the flesh and the shells were garbage,” she says. “I was amazed when I saw that they’d managed to turn garbage into artworks and wanted to give it a try.”

Becoming a Local

Currently, in addition to making handicrafts, Lu is responsible for tutoring new employees, teaching do-it-yourself courses aimed at tourists and helping develop new designs. She makes about NT$20,000 (US$690) a month, but money is not the only reward. “The social circle for new immigrants like me was very small,” she says. “Working here allows us to meet people, to learn more about Wanggong’s culture and heritage, and really become ‘locals.’”

The Oyster Culture Association recruits and trains its own employees, participates in shows to promote agricultural products and tourism, and offers lessons in the craft to community residents and students from local elementary and junior high schools as part of their extracurricular activities. “Making something with oyster shells was new to these people,” Yu says. “They weren’t sure if there would be much of a market for the handicraft.”

Many of the doubts were erased with the market success of the association’s Lucky Chicken, which Yu designed in late 2004 to welcome 2005, the Year of the Rooster in the Chinese zodiac. To boost attention for the oyster shell handicrafts, Yu invited Su Yong-liang (蘇永良), a sculptor from Wanggong’s neighboring township of Lugang, to create a giant Lucky Chicken at the entrance of the port. The installation, made of a bamboo skeleton, polystyrene filling and some 3,000 oyster shells as the feathers, seems to have been lucky enough to ensure good sales of the oyster shell handicrafts. According to Yu, selling the creations now generates between 20 and 25 percent of the association’s income. With funds from various government projects, fees for guided tours and tuition for DIY courses, the association is able to provide 16 jobs to local residents.

Along with handicrafts made of oyster shells, Yu and Liang have organized several special events to promote Wanggong’s oyster culture. The annual Wanggong Fish and Fire Festival, for example, has become a very popular summer event since it was first held in 2005. Over two days, visitors to the festival are treated to pop music performances, fireworks shows, seafood meals and oyster art. The Oyster Culture Association has also designed day-trip programs to help tourists gain a more in-depth experience of the area. In addition to the famous oyster cuisine, visitors can learn about Wanggong’s oyster farming history and the rich ecosystem of the tidal area. At low tide, tourists can ride oyster carts to the oyster beds and harvest the shellfish themselves. Since 2004, Yu and Liang have recruited several oyster farmers as interpreters for the ecological and oyster bed tours. “There’s no better guide than these oyster farmers who have worked for four or even five decades here and know oyster farming, the ecosystem of the tidal area and everything else about Wanggong,” Liang says.

The increasing number of tourists, market success of oyster shell handicrafts and popularity of the festival have translated into more support for the Oyster Culture Association’s attempt to breathe new life into the community. Interestingly, it all started from a “useless” and lifeless oyster shell.

Write to Jim Hwang at cyhuang03@mofa.gov.tw