On Yunlin, the county of clouds and trees
Plus, an exuberant, multilingual, and interactive opera organized by Shine Arts
As we mentioned last month, we recently spent a wonderful weekend in Yunlin, a part of the country foreign even to Albert, who grew up in Taiwan. In preparing for the trip, we asked a Taiwanese friend if he had any impressions of Yunlin. The friend paused for a long while. “It’s flat?” he answered.
It’s no coincidence that for most people, Taiwanese included, Yunlin registers as a blank. It’s one of the poorest counties on the western coast, due to decades of “northern migrations” (北漂)—a shorthand for the hollowing out of rural populations. In 2002, more than 190,000 people left to look for jobs in other areas. From 2000 to 2010, Yunlin lost more than 10 percent of its population, the most in the country.
But it wasn’t always this way. The area has a long history. Han Chinese pirates once used Yunlin as a harbor. Years later it became key to the Dutch, who used it to fortify their control. During the Qing rule of the island, governor Liu Ming-chuan valued the area enough to designate it a county, and named it Yunlin to reflect its abundance of clouds and forests.
During the Japanese colonial period, the area became an agricultural powerhouse. In 1907, the government built a sugar factory in Huwei, soon adding another (a sugar and alcohol factory this time). Within a year it was the largest sugar factory in Taiwan, and soon it was the largest in East and Southeast Asia. By the 1930s, Huwei was the third largest sugar producer in the world and was known as the Sugar Capital. Its flat plains and proximity to rivers make it ideal for cultivating sugarcane, paddy rice, peanuts (groundnuts), jute, and sweet potatoes.
After 1945, Chinese Nationalists took over the country. During the 228 incident, the largest confrontation between KMT government troops and the population occurred in Huwei. More than two thousand civilians holding bamboo sticks, samurai swords, and cooking knives fought well-armed KMT nationalists. After five or six days of intense conflict, the KMT quelled the uprising, executing dozens of its leaders without trial.
In the subsequent decades, the KMT embarked on a policy that’s known today as “favoring the north over the south,” concentrating economic development in northern cities. Yunlin’s economy suffered, remaining primarily agricultural, and its people missed out on the manufacturing and then high-tech booms that characterized Taiwan’s postwar development.
In the 1990s, over the vigorous protests of local environmental activists, the government authorized the Formosa Plastics Corporation to build the country’s largest oil refinery in Mailiao. By 2002, it was producing 450,000 barrels of oil a day. While the project certainly created jobs, local officials have charged that the majority of the tax revenues generated by the refinery go to the central government; a 2010 report from the Yunlin county government estimated that only 1.9 percent makes it back to the local community.
The overall impact on the environment has been devastating—the county has seen several major accidents in the past ten years alone—and traditional agricultural and fishing industries there have been severely disrupted. And of course, as our climate crisis deepens, pressure on the government to reduce production at the plant will further affect the region’s economy.
Beyond farmers, poverty, and pollution, Yunlin conjures another regional stereotype. Taiwan’s most notorious gangster, Lin Ching-biao, considered the “Godfather” of the Taiwanese underworld, hails from there. Lin was the subject of a popular 1983 film, 《台西風雲》, encouraging the view of Yunlin as a “hometown for gangsters.” Commenters in a viral thread in 2018 called it Taiwan’s Sicily.
*
In the past decade, local activists have sought to rehabilitate Yunlin. Some are locals who, wearied by life in the city, moved back home. The collective Haikou Fun Song, for instance, has undertaken the ambitious project of transforming a dilapidated market street in Taisi township, right on the sea, into an art and performance space, replete with studios and public art. We hope to visit in the future.
Others committed to revitalizing Yunlin include newcomers to the region, such as Jennifer Chen and her husband, Yu Hsi Ming. Yu’s father practiced traditional Chinese medicine, but Yu trained in Western medicine. A case of acute hepatitis left him at death’s door, he told us; one Western doctor took a look at him and said he’d be dead in a day. But his father gave him some herbs and he was cured. The experience converted him to Chinese medicine, and he went on to establish a successful medical practice in Taipei.
When a friend invited him start a practice in the town of Siluo, he decided to take the chance. In just over twenty years, he’s transformed a small business into a success: he told us that he has almost fifty thousand patients on file at his clinic, more than Siluo’s entire population! He also supplies other doctors with traditional Chinese herbs through a small factory he runs.
Born in Taipei, Jennifer went to the U.S. from high school through graduate school, and became an accountant. After returning to Taiwan, she became a high-level executive at Citibank Taiwan, and was about to take an assignment in London when she fell in love with Yu. (Her mother had made the match, but they genuinely hit it off.) She decided to quit her high-paying job and dedicate herself to promoting arts, music, and performance in Yunlin.
In 2013, the couple crowdfunded an event for children, and were surprised by the enthusiastic response. They co-founded Shine Arts with the goal of bringing world-class art and music to Yunlin. We first went there to check out a Mozart string quintet at Ensemble Hall (聲泊廳), a cultural hub for arts, music, independent film, and animation. Its tasteful, gorgeous modernist design calls to mind Scandinavian, Bauhaus, and Japanese influences. When we went, the space also exhibited the work of the wonderful Hakka artist Chung Shun-wen (鍾舜文).
“I reject the idea that the arts are only for the elite,” Jennifer told us. “The arts provide us a common ground; they resonate with every spirit and soul.” She and Yu hope to invert rural–urban relations, drawing artists and audiences from the city. “Rural people sometimes feel like second-class citizens. Why should we always have to go to Taipei or Kaohsiung to access the arts? We want people everywhere to think: The best arts and culture and be found here.” Dialogue—artists and musicians talking to people in the community—is a core part of this vision.
For anyone interested, there are performances in Yunlin throughout the year; if you’d like to come down with us, let’s organize a trip! It’s a straightforward high-speed rail ride from Taipei to Yunlin. We’re looking forward to hearing Bach’s Goldberg Variations next.
The kid-friendly interactive opera was a highlight of our year. We loved the setting: outdoors, no-frills, and aggressively unpretentious, at a public square in front of the Siluo Guangfu temple, devoted to the goddess Mazu. At one point, in the middle of a Puccini aria, an old guy—presumably a local who had no idea a major artistic operation was underway—biked in front of the stage. Everybody in the audience laughed. Passersby on motorcycles and bikes stopped to listen, staying to the very end.
The “stage” is actually a gigantic mobile float that travels on wheels between cities. Exuberant, multilingual, cheeky, and playful, the collaboratively written opera centers around three young people in the reservist national guard in Taiwan. They’re called up to serve because of China’s military drills. Two are men, and, in an homage to Mulan, the third is a woman masquerading as her father, who is too sick to fight. The characters sing in German, Italian, English, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Mandarin. There is an effervescent and playful mix of genres: retooled Verdi, Taiwanese pop; in one hilarious moment, a bit of a John Adams tune from Nixon in China. The music from soprano Camille Chueh-Yu Lai, baritone Yumeng Liao, tenor Yin-Chi Chang, baritone Yi-hseng Hsu, and pianist Peiyao Wang was glorious and the acting wonderful.
The acts were interspersed with asides to the audience—including a lesson on how to reach high notes—and guessing games: which of the two guys will the female soldier fall in love with? (Yes, yes, let’s set aside the heteronormative critique for now.) The interactive element, the soprano Camille Lai told us, was inspired by the video game Time Princess, which allows players to choose their story line.
Peiyao Wang, an international piano star whom we last saw play at Weiyuming and who has worked with John Adams, sent Adams some photos of the event. Adams replied immediately: “Finally, I can a reply to the 25-year-old question, ‘Has Nixon in China been performed in China?’ by saying, ‘Well better than that—it’s been performed in Taiwan!’”
What It’s Like to Parent in Taipei
We loved Cup of Jo’s interview with Kathy Cheng a.k.a Tricky Taipei. This bit about blunt relatives who comment on your appearance especially resonated:
If you go to a family meal, your relatives will comment on your appearance and flat out say, ‘Have you put on weight?’ — less as a question, more as an accusation. It’s brutal. When Claudia turned four, my dad told me, ‘I just told Claudia that her nostrils are big, and she said to me, Grandpa, I don’t like it when you say that.” He had a look of fear in his eyes. And I thought, oh my god, can we SAY that? I grew up just taking it! You put on a half smile and stand there silently and take it. But she didn’t, even from her own grandpa. She’s my hero.
Book Club: Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses
We’re looking forward to our book club about Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses on Friday, September 30th, 4 PM PDT/7 PM EST. Can’t wait! Please email us at broadandampleroad@gmail.com (or reply to this email) if you want to join.
On Yunlin, the county of clouds and trees
Michelle- loved that Cup of Jo interview as well and totally thought of you when I first read it!