Promoting culture
The farmers and the farmers' association have been working diligently to promote Sanhsing's boutique farming and leisure farming industries. A group of locals with a great love for Sanhsing's traditional culture have also been working hard to revive it.
One Friday night over the summer break, while others were enjoying the end of the week, the six-member "Parisanan Association" assembled for a meeting. The Ilan County Government was about to send their "Parisa Road Naming" proposal to a referendum, and the meeting was to plan a door-to-door leaflet distribution to each and every household, imploring the people to back the restoration of Highway 7C's original Aboriginal name, "Parisa."
As the association's executive director Huang Jui-chiang points out, the full 12-kilometer length of Highway 7C had been divided into 13 sections, each with their own name, which had long confused visitors from outside the area. Taking this into consideration, the county government proposed earlier this year to rename the entire highway "Parisa Road," but this proposal met with strong opposition. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the county government decided to open the proposal to public submissions.
"'Parisa' in the Atayal language means 'beautiful bamboo fence,' and was the old name for Sanhsing. During the Japanese occupation, since the Japanese deemed the pronunciation inappropriate, they added a 'nan' to the end. Then, somehow, this beautiful name for the road got twisted into 'balesai' [roughly, 'mashed guava'] for no apparent reason. It's unbelievably annoying," explains Huang Jui-chiang. But Huang, along with others, didn't just settle for being annoyed-they were stirred to action in the face of the political battle of wills over the area.
To find the historical origins of "Parisa," Huang Jui-chiang-a teacher of Chinese literature at Ilan Senior High-spent days poring through historical documents. He discovered that from Liu Mingchuan's term in office as governor of Taiwan during the Qing Dynasty, over 100 years ago, until the Japanese occupation, the area was administered under the name "Parisa." Thus a basis for the struggle for that name was found. Although the vote to change the name "Highway 7C" to "Parisa Road" failed by a narrow margin, Huang isn't in the least bit disheartened, instead feeling that this is a necessary step in developing local residents' cultural consciousness.
The Parisanan Association was established in 1999, with an eye toward conservation of Sanhsing's culture and environment, and community building, amongst other things. Among their members they count teachers, doctors, clergymen, entrepreneurs, and orchardists. From this association came the establishment of a community choir, a tree rescue effort, and a fight for the restoration of the Taipingshan Forest Railway-the association holds high ideals.
"Our position is to build community consciousness, and to provide impetus for community action," explains current association head Wen Shu-ling. Although they currently exert limited influence, this consciousness is not something that grows overnight, and over her four years of participation with the association, she herself has learned a lot and her own community consciousness has grown greatly through their activities.
For example, for the "Restore the Honor of Stonework" effort by the association to promote the old "stonework culture," they encouraged the townsfolk to put the abundant stones from Lanyang River to use in their everyday lives. If, going along the roads, one could often see stone-crafted flowerpots and stone-crafted replicas of local-style haystacks, the rustic charm of Sanhsing would be greatly increased.
Bunch after bunch of full green onions, bearing the GAP seal of approval demonstrating the high quality of Sanhsing onions, are leading Taiwan's trend toward boutique farming.