The town of Meinung (美濃) is only an hour's drive from Kaohsiung, in southern Taiwan. But this small agricultural community seems worlds apart from Kaohsiung's crowded, industrialized, urban environment.
Surrounded by mountains and rivers, the town shows few signs of commercial activity: there are no karaoke or KTV parlors, no movie posters, and few hotels or restaurants. Instead, rice paddies stretch toward the horizon, dotted with traditional U-shaped brick homes. Women dressed in loose, dark pants and bamboo hats ferry their children to and from school on bicycles. Other women work in the fields, their faces and necks covered with bright-patterned scarves as protection against the hot sun. Elderly people sit chatting and drinking tea in front of their houses, where the doors are always open for children to run in and out.
Although there are signs of modernization—motorcycles sometimes zip between the bicycles and more families are moving into concrete apartment buildings—the majority of residents in this town of fifty-thousand continue to lead the traditional agricultural life that they brought here more than two centuries ago.
Meinung maintains a self-sufficient economy by growing rice, bananas, vegetables, and tobacco. Although each household no longer raises pigs and livestock as it once did, nearly every farmer's home has its own vegetable garden in the back yard, so the family cook can simply step outside to pick sweet potatoes or cabbage for the evening meal. Compared with the radical changes that have taken place on the rest of the island in recent years, Meinung is different. "There is a change in the outward appearance, but the deep-rooted beliefs and family structure have changed very little," says Huang Sen-sung (黃森松), 42, publisher of Today's Meinung, a weekly community newspaper.
A man begins the day with a traditional worship ritual in front of his old-style house. As with many Hakka homes, words along each side of the door record the past achievements of the family.
Meinung's continued traditional outlook is due not only to its agricultural nature. Another important reason for the slow pace of change is the community's culturally homogenous population: 95 percent are Hakka, a Chinese ethnic minority group with a culture and language distinctly different from other groups in Taiwan. Although there are several Hakka communities on the island, Meinung has retained its traditional customs and language more successfully than any other.
Hakka settlers first came to Meinung in 1737, when about two hundred pioneers moved northward from Wulo, a small village in far southern Taiwan. These pioneers were descendants of Hakka who immigrated to Taiwan from Kwangtung province in the late seventeenth century. When they arrived in Meinung, they quickly settled down to carry on their tradition as hard-working farmers, finding the area's dry weather ideal for growing tobacco. Today, Meinung is the island's largest tobacco growing area, producing about one-quarter of the island's crop. It's a job that keeps farmers here busy nine months of the year, from ploughing and sowing to picking, drying, and curing the leaves to packaging and transporting them. "Growing tobacco is tedious work," says one long-time farmer. But despite the labor involved, many Meinung farmers have for decades relied on tobacco as their major source of income.
Visitors to Meinung often notice towers that look like small brick houses standing atop many farmer's homes. These are actually ovens for curing the tobacco leaves. Although more farmers are beginning to use electricity to heat the ovens, many still use the traditional wood-fired method. When the ovens are in use in winter, smoke leaks out of a tiny ventilation window and whirls up into the air.
Meinung's traditional farming life means a heavy workload for the women. "Women in Meinung work [in the fields] until they die," says Chiu Kuo-yuan (邱國源), a local legal and financial agent. Driving along a newly paved road, Chiu points to an elderly Hakka woman who has just finished her day's work in the garden next to her house and is washing her clothes by an irrigation ditch on the side of the road. And publisher Huang Sen-sung says his mother, in her late sixties, still labors in the family's one-and-a-half hectare tobacco field, where she works side by side with several other women. "I tell her to rest, but she won't listen," Huang says. "She says there would be no one to talk to if she no longer grew tobacco."
The traditional Hakka respect for learning is evident in the town's four "Respect for Words" pavilions, which were once used to burn printed paper. The Hakka believe old newspapers and books should never be simply thrown out with the household trash.
The reputation for diligence among Meinung women is known throughout the area. When people in the village began to intermarry with outsiders about twenty years ago, Huang says, there was a popular saying: "When you want to marry off a daughter, don't marry her to Meinung; when you want to get a wife, be sure to get a girl from Meinung."
People in Meinung still hold fast to traditional family and community bonds. Because of the emphasis on large families, children often run into their aunts and uncles or other relatives when they are outside of the house. "It's difficult to go astray," Chiu says. "If a boy smokes on one end of the village, when he gets home ten minutes later, his mother will be ready to punish him. She will already have heard about his behavior from some relative."
Children are reminded of their responsibilities in other ways as well. In a traditional Hakka home, along the top of the entrance to the main hall there is a carved wood or stone panel showing the name of the place where the family originated, usually a city or village in mainland China. And along each side of the door are recorded the important achievements of the family's ancestors, for example, their literary or military reputation. "These serve as examples for the offspring to imitate," Chiu explains.
Even when Meinung families move into modern concrete apartments, they often continue to have several related families living together. Sometimes, the old brick home is left standing because it is too difficult to divide the property among as many as thirty family members. "That's why development is slow compared with other towns in Taiwan," Chiu says.
When there are disagreements over land ownership, they are resolved according to traditional practice. The emphasis is on maintaining harmony in the community rather than on enforcing legal standards. Even today, there are no lawyers in Meinung. "Family arguments, marital problems, land disputes, or financial problems all go to private counselors," Chiu says. These mediators are usually community leaders or others of high standing in the village.
The traditional Hakka respect for education is also strongly evident in Meinung, where the literacy rate is unusually high for an isolated farming village. "Stress on learning is a distinct Hakka tradition," Huang says. "To improve their social and economic status, people use every means to give their children a good education." In the past four decades, eighty Meinung natives have gone on to receive doctorates and hundreds have earned master's degrees. Many of those who leave to pursue a higher education end up settling elsewhere, returning to Meinung only to visit relatives.
Although just an hour by car from crowded, industrialized Kaohsiung, Meinung's natural beauty and old agricultural lifestyle seem worlds apart.
The high value placed on learning is also reflected in the reverence the Hakka have for any form of the written word, from newspapers to scholarly books. Traditionally, any paper with writing on it that was to be discarded was always burned rather than simply thrown out with the household trash. Although Meinung residents seldom follow this practice today, the town still has four "Respect for Words" pavilions, special shrines for this purpose. There are four such shrines in the town, one of which has been listed as a historical site.
What makes Meinung most distinctly Hakka, however, is the language. Hakka is spoken everywhere except in school, where classes are taught in the official Mandarin dialect. "We don't discriminate against other ethnic groups," says high school teacher Chung Tieh-min (鍾鐵民), whose father, Chung Li-ho, was a famous Hakka novelist. "But if an outsider moves to Meinung and plans to stay long, he must learn to speak Hakka." The dialect is spoken even in government offices, despite signs hanging on the wall that read, "Please speak Mandarin when handling official business." Chung Hsin-tsai (鍾新財), chief of the Meinung township, recalls what happened when he opened his first official meeting using Mandarin. "I was hissed by the older representatives," he says. "I was younger and had received my education in Mandarin. But they ask me to speak Hakka even at public occasions."
The traditional lifestyle of Meinung has its drawbacks, especially for young people, who find few recreational diversions. Many of them end up moving to bigger cities around the island. As a result, the population has grown by only ten thousand people in the last forty years.
Lee Hung-chun is among the young Meinung Hakka who have returned to explore their roots—"I came back because I saw there was room for developing the traditional art of making paper umbrellas."
Even the current fifty thousand population figure is misleading. In fact, only about thirty thousand people reside in Meinung, mostly senior citizens, women, and children. Modern farming techniques and mechanized equipment allow the men to spend less time in the field, and more time in neighboring towns, where they work in industry. Many of these men come home to Meinung only once every week or two. "In the past, it took more than ten people and one month to harvest a crop of rice," says township chief Chung Hsin-tsai. "Now it takes several workers two to three days. That gives people time to find a second job."
In recent years, however, some well-educated young people have been returning home to Meinung, many of them drawn by a desire to explore their Hakka roots. Huang Sen-sung is one of them. While studying for a graduate degree in journalism, Huang read about the development of community newspapers in the United States and decided to start the first such paper in Taiwan. He founded Today's Meinung in 1974, but had to stop publishing the next year in order to fulfill his two-year military service. He restarted the paper in 1976, then closed it again in 1981 because of a lack of funds and qualified staff. After working for ten years as a journalist in Taipei and Kaohsiung, Huang returned two years ago to start up the weekly for a third time. "I see Meinung as a big book that I will study for the rest of my life," he says.
Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞), 27, also saw the opportunity for pursuing a special interest in Meinung. "I came back because I saw there was room for developing the traditional art of making paper umbrellas," he says. The paper umbrella industry was once very prosperous in Meinung and attracted many tourists. Lee is among those who are trying to revive it. He learned the art while studying at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei and now owns Yuan Hsiang Yuan, the largest of five paper umbrella makers in Meinung.
To an outsider, traditions may seem strong in Meinung, but to local residents, things have changed greatly in the past few decades. What hasn't been lost is the pride that many residents have in the traditional culture that Meinung represents. "We do not reject change. A living culture changes with time—so it is with Hakka culture in Meinung," says Chung Tieh-min. "As long as we speak Hakka, share the same community consciousness, and are able to promote our cultural heritage, no matter how it changes or what face it may take on, deep in our hearts, we know it is Hakka."