I was born in Sanshia, then a small village with rice paddies and fields where farmers grew a variety of vegetables. At that time my parents had little money to buy a house, so they just rent an apartment there for about 8 years, and moved from one place to another due to several reasons, primarily financial problems. I would consider it as my hometown, because I had lived there for 16 years, over half of my age, although I had lived in several countries in Taiwan.
Sanshia was underdeveloped 18 years ago, with a large amount of land being used for agricultural purposes, which I just mentioned, so there were gullies everywhere. I still remember clearly when I was a little boy, I liked to go to the gully nearby to catch “Thailand shrimps”, a kind of shrimp that cannot be eaten, but its colors vary, from dark blue to crimson, which is very attractive to me. I, then a six-year-old kid, went down to the gully with a basin. Sometimes the shrimp was silly enough to catch if you put the basin down to the water so the water would be induced to the basin, and so did the shrimps. But not all the shrimps were that easy to catch; sometimes they hid right into the rocks when seeing you, while sometimes they raised their big claws bluffing. But I tried to use both my hands to catch them skillfully, with one hand pretending to catch them but prevent myself from being nipped, and the other catching from its back, a position where the claws of the shrimps cannot reach. One time when I was about to go home with my basin full of shrimps, my mom saw me. I went toward my mom and showed her what I had caught proudly. But my mom suddenly threw all the shrimps into the gully.
Of course you can imagine how the ending was after I was caught going down the gully to catch shrimps. I was often punished by my mom for my naughty behaviors, but that never prevented me from fooling around. One time I saw a tiny bitter melon, and I found it so cute, so I pulled it down with all my strength. But one of the kids in the country witnessed it, and said, “Oh-oh, you’re dead. I’ll go tell my mom about it.” I managed to convince him not to tell someone about it, and succeeded. But unfortunately the farmer who planted the bitter melon found it missing, so he went around the village all along with a sickle, yelling that he would kill the kid who had grabbed the bitter melon. My father, having known the truth, came out and settled the problem with the angry farmer. How brave my father!
At that time Sanshia was really a paradise for kids. They could dig out sweet potatoes and collect several pieces of wood to bake them. On the ground you could see several kids playing baseball with wood sticks and running with their bare feet. I liked to play games outside with my neighbors’ kids. Sometimes just wandering around and collecting some plants to play or catching some insects would be fun enough. I hardly got bored, because in that kind of environment you could even play everything, whether it was right or wrong.
But someday a deserted land was covered with a mountain of sands, which was about three floors high. I didn’t know why, but just found it fun to climb to the top and threw the plastic bag into the air and saw it drift away or build a sand castle and destroyed it, and then came down suddenly when some adults came angrily.
The sand mountain didn’t last long; it somehow disappeared, day by day, little by little. And a building was gradually formed in the land nearby. The gully I liked to go to was reconstructed with cement, and so were others. Those lands full of rice and vegetables somehow vanished gradually, too. And that was just the very time when my family bought a new apartment and moved out.
My family did not move away from Sanshia, actually, but I hardly had a chance to go back to where I used to live. When I did have the chance to go there, the environment I was familiar with was not there anymore. All the countryside scenes were replaced by concrete buildings and busy streets. The sweet potato fields were gone, and the Thailand shrimps, ones that should have never existed in Taiwan, found no places to hide and “went extinction”.
Looking back, I found my story just like a small simulation of the development of the city. The once poor and pure countryside, with the economic prosperity of the times during the previous decade, was transformed into a modernized city and it is still growing. What‘s used to be there, good or bad, was all replaced. People not only gained something beneficial, but also gained something controversial. It’s really hard to define whether the overall change is good to people in Sanshia. But I believe that any person would not despise where s/he was born. After all, the hometown is just like everyone’s mother; we will not look down to our mothers due to their looks.
I’m now living in Taoyuan. Nevertheless, I still often go back to Sanshia to visit my friends and my classmates. And I believe that it will only be a matter of time that I go back to the country where I was born to live. |
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