Everybody says that the scenery is magnificent, but when I came here as a child in 1934, I thought it was pretty desolate: no electricity, no running water, just oxcarts on gravel roads and straw huts.

Chengkung has been built up since then, and the changes in living conditions are easy to see. Housing, for instance, has gone from straw, to boards, to brick, to apartments and now to Western-style houses. But in my mind, progress is still slow. They've been paving the coastal road here from Taitung for ten years now. That's why the East has been called "the back of the mountains."

Since it's such a remote place, why did I come here? That's because of my father. He was a fish processor in Keelung before he came here and taught people his techniques. And that's why I've never had to pay for fish here.

That's the kind of a place Chengkung is. Over half the people are Ami aborigines, and the population has stayed at around 22,000 for the past twenty years.

I've lived here for nearly fifty years, so there's no need to say that everything here, big and small, is of special significance to me. Like that aquatic products testing station by the harbor, for example. When they were trying to decide where to build it in 1974, the choice was between Hualien and us. Hualien sent their city council chairman, and Chengkung had only me, this township secretary. During dinner I talked to the future director of the station about fish, and whether he was persuaded by my knowledge or moved by my sincerity I don't know, but the station wound up here.

Getting the testing station was a big deal, but all kinds of little things often require help from us government people to solve as well. For example, harpoons were listed as weapons under the new firearms and weapons regulations that came out in 1983. It sounds funny to tell it, but the fishermen had to carry their harpoons to the police station and register them every time they wanted to go out fishing. After I did some calling and running around, the controls on harpoons were finally relaxed.

It's little problems like that which we grass-roots workers usually have to deal with, but they sometimes affect a person's livelihood or have long-term consequences. Determining the aborigines' genealogies is an example.

When the aborigines were asked to change their original names to Chinese names in 1945, they didn't pay much attention to it. Sometimes they asked the registration officials to fill in a name for them, and one family might wind up with several different surnames.

As the aborigines moved into the flatlands, the problem grew more serious. Relatives couldn't find each other, and first cousins might get engaged without knowing it.

That's why a couple of years ago I started trying to track down the Amis' family trees. I've been here so long that I remember a lot of the older generation-- what families they belonged to and where they stood in the pecking order. In fact, many aborigines kid me that I'm more up on it than they are!

Sometimes I feel that working in a township administration is like being at the bottom of an inverted pyramid: there's a lot of work here and not many of us to go around, and there are all these "in-laws" pressing down on top of us. But every time I think of how I'm working for my hometown--not where I was born, but where I grew up--all my gripes seem to go away.

[Picture Caption]

"When I first came here, over there was . . ." Wang Ho-sheng talks about the past.