A "utopian" community
The human warmth of these guesthouse owners is a rarity in a commercial society that thrives on competition, and it is indicative of one of the major traits of the Jenju community.
According to the community's website, it is striving to "build human relationships based on loyalty and forgiveness, and to create a cultural arena with honesty at its core." It is surprising to see such idealistic development objectives on a website, but when you actually enter the community, you discover that these goals are anything but hot air, and encounter the possibility of actually realizing a modern "Peach Blossom Shangri-la."
Lee Hou-chin has been the driving force behind the community's development, and for him the experience has truly been a dream-come-true.
The soft-spoken Lee studied sociology at university, and for more than 20 years has built his career around social work. In the 1990s, while running an Ilan halfway house, he also began training as a counselor to better help people deal with psychological disorders. Lee then returned to his hometown of Tungshan in 1997 and established a counseling center.
In 1999, Tungshan attempted to hold an election for the position of executive director, but no one wanted to run. Lee was both interested and a professional social worker-when they offered him the job, he happily accepted.
Granted the opportunity to give something back to his hometown, Lee looked back to his studies and put together a blueprint for community development. "In the old days, the influence of Confucian thought on farming villages led to an emphasis on honesty, loyalty and forgiveness," says Lee. "But in recent times, this spirit has been largely lost. Even though a few farming villages preserve this kind of culture, almost no one is talking about how to renew this spirit and pass it on in a commercial society."
According to Lee, community work is an educational process that awakens people to their own interests, helps them develop their potential and gets them involved in the community. But many Taiwanese communities are run in a way that ignores the importance of human interactions, with the result that projects are often derailed by "human" factors such as factionalization or inter-personal conflicts. Lee therefore made reestablishing Confucian ethics in the community his objective.
"Jenju's development process has been different from that of other communities," says Lee. He explains that they had a clear goal right from the outset; their focus was squarely on human relationships and ethics. Of course, they encountered conflicts as they were moving towards a harmonious community, and when they did, they had to remove the pressures that tradition placed on interactions, and replace those customs with more open, more truly honest ways of communicating. Members of the community had to learn to treat both themselves and others with respect, and had to incorporate these changes into their lives.
The simple elegance of Jenju's rice-straw painting and rice-straw decorations have caught the eye of many a visitor.