The sun was blistering, even though it was only 10 in the morning. The women standing on the wet, glistening concrete weren't interested in tanning. They wore picturesque grass coolie hats, and scarves swathed their faces as completely as the most fundamentalist Muslim could desire. They wore big rubber boots. They carried evil looking hooks.
This was Tungkang, a major fishing port serving Taiwan's southwest and one of the main coastal towns of Pingtung County. Everyone I asked about Pingtung before my visit had been enthusiastic: "It's very rural, the real Taiwan," they said. But when asked about places to visit, there was usually an embarrassed pause. "There is always Kenting," some said, referring to Taiwan's premier seaside resort and a place about as far removed from the "real Taiwan" as can be imagined.
What I was seeing in Tungkang looked real enough to me. The tuna fleet had come in. They were bringing in sushi on the bone. Farther along, boats were unloading the carcasses of headless shark, obscene in their frozen stiffness.
PHOTO: IAN BARTHOLOMEW, TAIPEI TIMES
They slid down ramps, then slipped along the wet concrete until deftly caught by a couple of hook wielding women and dragged off into a huge concrete hanger that is the wholesale market. Piles of shark carcasses lay in heaps, steaming from the dry ice constantly heaped on them from a truck parked nearby.
The shark was low-grade stuff, handled roughly, sold in huge lots and shifted around with earth-moving equipment. All except the highly prized fins, which were lopped off with huge cleavers and thrown into piles to be sold separately.
There was greater excitement at the other end of the hanger where fishmongers auctioned tuna. At least these were recognizably fish, though they were sliced open, their bellies stuffed with ice.
PHOTO: IAN BARTHOLOMEW, TAIPEI TIMES
A young man, hair tightly permed, a look of calm professionalism on his face, examined the fish as the hooks dragged them in.
"How do you tell the quality?" I asked. The permed man pushed a small cutting of fish into my hand. He had just taken it from the fish's tail with a hollow awl about the width of a thick knitting needle.
He stuck this into his boot when it was not in use.
PHOTO: IAN BARTHOLOMEW, TAIPEI TIMES
"Eat it!" said a fat man, his laughing mouth bloody with betel nut juice and his vest pulled up over his stomach, the easier to scratch it. Knowing where the knitting needle was kept, I wasn't too keen on this. But he seemed willing to talk, so I pressed him for more information. He spoke with a thick accent that even my local friends found hard to handle.
"He's one of the best," the old man said with evident pride. Testing the flesh of the tuna, his son would decide whether they would bid for a fish and how much they would be willing to pay. Prices for top-of-the-line tuna were over NT$400 a kilo straight off the boat. "This prime stuff is destined for Japan. These prices are too high for the local market," the old man said. "We have two refrigeration trucks, and when they are full, we ship the lot off to Japan."
"Four ninety ... four eighty ... four seventy ...", a ship's skipper counted down over a carcass that lay next to a scale. The first distributor to accept the price would carry off the fish. They stood around it, prodding it, shaking their heads when a blemish revealed itself. This one wouldn't fetch top dollar.
PHOTO: IAN BARTHOLOMEW, TAIPEI TIMES
This was no more than a glimpse of an arcane world that lies behind the delicately presented sashimi at your local Japanese restaurant. The heat of the sun, the smell of fish and the blood and water seeping into our sandals eventually overpowered our interest in the market. There were other sights to see, including Pingtung's answer to the great Matsu pilgrimage that engulfs central Taiwan around May. This is the Tunglung Temple (
The king boat was already complete, sitting in a hanger in the temple's massive front court. At nearly 20 feet in length and more than 10 feet in width with ship's timbers of cypress, it is as large as a small yacht and is a scale model of a fully-rigged Chinese sampan of old. Peering inside, the boat is filled with detailed carved figures of the crew. Built, carved and painted totally by volunteer labor, it is a thing of beauty. Completed two years ago, it is now only a few months away from destruction -- its fate an unsettling contradiction to the spirit of modern materialism.
The dates for the week-long ceremony are chosen by casting divination blocks, a temple warden told us. He explained the coincidence that the festival started and finished on a Sunday by saying, "of course we try and find good days for the god's approval." The God King, despite dating his existence from nearly a millennium ago, is clearly aware that weekends are a good time to party.
Driving around Pingtung, it seems impossible to get away from the spirit world. In addition to the God King, temples dot the landscape in a profusion that is exceptional even on this temple infested island. At virtually every street corner stands a temple to the earth god, indicative of the close he earth god, indicative of the close ties the people still maintain with the land. A neon-lit cubicle placed at the center of a cross-roads, an old bunyan tree with a red stole or a rock with incense before it all serve the same purpose -- a little reminder that man is constantly in need of divine aid against evil spirits.
But during the torrid months of the betel nut harvest when I visited, another kind of evil weighed more heavily on the minds of local farmers. Betel nut thieves. "You have to be careful walking around betel nut fields," a local acquaintance told me. "You might be taken for a thief marking out trees with ripe fruit."
We went back at night to sit with an old couple in their field as they protected their crop. "When prices peak, a betel nut can sell for NT$12, when eggs sell for NT$2," the farmer said. The field of trees, many heavy with bunches of the green nut, represented a lot of money. "Thieves come in the night to collect the ripe fruit from marked trees," the old farmer said. He had an old rifle in his hut for just such an occasion. He'd never used it.
Walking back, the lights coming periodically from various fields -- some set to timers, others switched on by owners on patrol -- looked like oversized will-o'-the-wisps. It was a potent reminder that for all the surface modernity, Pingtung still harked back to the wild-west days when the sheriff was too far away to do any good and government was little more than a myth.
This impression was reinforced the next day by a little bit of history. First there was a special Sunday mass at a small Catholic church in Wanchin. It wasn't just that delegations from all over Taiwan had arrived that made it special though; it was the unique showcase of local ethnic diversity shown by Paiwan aborigines in full regalia as well as Pingpu Aboriginals and local Chinese. Father Juan Carlos Martinez, one of three Spanish priests, said, "it is a little like in Latin America. There is an element of local belief."
Tied to a blue agricultural truck, a benign Jesus looked down on his flock resplendent in full tribal headdress of beaded headband and feathers. On the grounds of the church, people prostrated themselves before an image of the Virgin Mary, their fervor almost frightening given customary Chinese restraint.
The Wanchin church, which has been under the care of Spanish priests since it was founded in 1861, is a stronghold of aboriginal culture. "The church was burnt down a couple of times early on because of conflict with local Hakka communities," Father Martinez said, referring to another ethnic group that has strong roots in the area.
Our next stop was another memorial to past conflict -- one of the few remaining Hakka "roundhouse" communities. My guide, a Hakka himself, had trouble rooting out the "roundhouse" now broken up by the exigencies of urban planning in the now totally unremarkable town of Fengtien.
But when we found it, the echo of past insecurity could be easily seen.
In the early days, some Hakka communities built their houses in concentric circles, a new ring added as new arrivals made it necessary. The outer wall of each was a fortress against the outside world. Some old people lived in the few sound houses that remained in the circle, amid many that had become derelict. "The young people come back at New Year," a bent old lady told us, after her initial suspicion had been allayed. There didn't seem to be anybody else about in the complex of 20 or more houses. She'd lived there all her life and didn't want to move, despite greater comforts elsewhere. Rifle slits were built into the lintel of the main gate and the wooden stands where riflemen once lay could still be seen.
The old woman's eyes watched us out through the gate. They were the eyes of a frontiersman who never truly trust any but their own. It was a look that summed up what little I had seen in Pingtung -- a glimpse of the hardy, twisted and knurled roots from which modern Taiwan has grown.
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