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Not time to give up on Children's Festival yet

When Ilan County Commis-sioner Lu Kuo-hua (呂國華) announced he was putting an end to the Ilan International Children's Folklore and Folk Game Festival, I had mixed feelings about it. When I went back to my hometown, I went to the festival that put Ilan on the map.

In the Chinshui Water Park, where the festival was held, I saw fallen leaves, twigs and dust floating in a pond, but I didn't see anyone cleaning it up. The wooden floorboards weren't put together evenly -- I was afraid children might stumble and get hurt. The recent typhoon had caused a lot of grass to come loose, and I even saw some strange oil stains. Snacks and drinks sold in the park were very expensive. At the venue for children's games, there were a lot of exhibits, but few children actually playing.

I talked with a visitor at the festival, who said: "There are no children's folk games at the Children's Festival."

I decided to talk to some more visitors, and found that many people felt that the Children's Festival should include more Ilan culture, and that a Children's Festival without local Ilan flavor was no more than a general "water festival."

Is culture so abstract that it can't be included in the festival?

A taxi driver in Lotung (羅東) told me that in earlier years, the festival brought such heavy traffic that the road from the train station to the Chinshui Park had to be regulated by the police in the evening. This year, the roads were almost completely empty. I could imagine that in the years when the festival was thriving, visitors must have brought a lot of business, and a nice income for local residents.

This reminded me of how the festival came about in the first place. After some Ilan officials went to the Avignon Festival in France, they realized that the income earned in the one month of the festival could support the people of Avignon for an entire year. So after they came back to Taiwan, the started working on putting the festival together. Ilan's tourism bureau owes its very existence to the vision of the county government. The government initiated two key events -- The Children's Festival and the Folk Dance Art Festival -- and the rest is history.

The success of the festival made Ilan very proud, and it allowed the pan-green government to announce that it "guaranteed quality." Now the government says it wants to stop organizing the festival. Is it because the government is afraid of losing money? Or is it that the current Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) county commissioner just doesn't want to do it?

Personally, I think that after other counties and cities followed suit and organized water festivals around the most popular activity at the Ilan festival, it was to be expected that visitors would scatter to the different festivals, and that fewer people would come to Ilan.

The key question is how the Ilan government could have dealt with this. Now that Lu has announced he is putting an end to the festival, the key point comes to light -- there was no intention to continue to hold the festival. Without any intention, then of course there was no strong incentive or power to resolve the festival's difficulties.

As a citizen of Ilan, I want to tell the Ilan county commissioner that it would be a great waste of political capital if he were the person that put an end to the festival. He has the opportunity to take the festival in a whole new direction and to be the commissioner who could revive it by bringing out the local Ilan culture. He could be the one to replace an old dream with a new one.

Yu Ningkai is an Ilan native and a doctoral student at the National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of Taiwan History.

Translated by Anna Stiggelbout
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