WVU - ES: IFYE Program Newsletter

My host family cleverly finished the inside and outside of a giant metal storage box and furnished it as a guestroom complete with a shiny wooden floor and an air conditioner. Having run out of level ground, they leaned one corner of the room out over the drainage ditch onto a brick pillar. My door opens out to the smells of dishwater and chickens. The dishwater runs from the back corner of the kitchen across to the drainage ditch. The chickens occasionally wander about the cement walkway between my room and the kitchen.

About 15 feet to the left of my doorway is where my 24-year-old host brother butchers the chickens each morning. My host families are always amused when I tell them that my father chops chickens' heads off with an ax. My host brother, Ming-Dong, uses a heavy kitchen knife to make a quick cut at the front of the chicken's neck. The head stays on, even through cooking. Ming-Dong has tried to teach me his method of gutting by feel, and I try to help. However, after several mornings of practice I still have a hard time finding the lungs. He completely cleans five or six chickens in the time it takes me to finish one.

As I leave my room and turn right, I pass under a web of vines. Edible gourds hang down from an overhead trellis. "Sigua," or towel gourd, looks like a rough-skinned squash or zucchini. I have eaten it many times this summer and can report that, sliced and boiled, it tastes very good with rice. The other gourd hangs down two, three, even four feet long. It is named "shigua," or snake gourd, for its long and writhing shape. Beyond the gourd trellis, the longans are drying.

In Chinese their name means dragon eyes, but they are really just a sweet white fruit somewhat larger than a marble, surrounded by a tough brown skin. The longans are piled 10 inches deep on a rack of woven bamboo splints over wide brick chimneys. Slowly burning logs send their smoke up through the bamboo to dry the longans. My 54-year-old host father spends a lot of time here tending the fires and sorting the dried fruits for size and quality. He dries each batch of longans in the smoke for 24 hours. During this time, they have to be raked out and turned three times to bring the uppermost fruit closer to the heat.

To harvest the longans, my 30-year-old host brother, Shu-Yuan, balanced himself 10 or 15 feet up in a tree all morning, harvesting by the expedient method of breaking the small branches off and piling them, leaves, fruit, and all in big baskets. We spent my first few afternoons here snipping the longans off the branches in preparation for drying. But now the longan harvest is almost over. My host mother and aunt sit on low stools husking longans whose skins cracked in the drying process. Ming-Dong lugs huge pink gunny sacks of the dried fruits up to the attic.

Coming around to the front yard, I can look out over the little valley. I am up in the hills now and have left the rice paddies behind in the flat land. The horizon is filled with trees and a few loops of telephone wire. Behind me, the yard is cemented in except for a few holes left for trees and flowers. It serves as a parking lot for the small restaurant my family operates in addition to their farm. At 7:40 each morning a brightly painted van pulls up here to take my three-year-old nephew to nursery school.

Ming-Dong tells me that their farm is just one hectare, about two-and-a-half acres, and that this is a normal size for farms in Taiwan. These two-and-a-half acres are one side of a very steep hill. The fruit trees are up and down the hill from the flat area of the yard and buildings. My family has about 30 longan trees. A few papaya, banana, and guava trees are squeezed into odd spots, but most of the hillside is covered with starfruit trees. They form a continous ceiling of branches overhead. The waxy yellow starfruits are harvested in mid-September.

Even as these fruits ripen, some trees are already producing tiny pink flowers and tiny green fruits that will be ready to harvest early next year. I spent yesterday with Shu-Yuan thinning the young fruits. The next step will be to wire a small paper bag around each fruit to protect it from insects and pesticides.

In some places, the hillside is so steep I can't keep my footing, and I have to hang onto the tree as I work. Balanced on the hillside in among the fruit trees is a brick pig house with bamboo rafters and a cement tile roof.

My family has about two dozen "san zhu" or mountain pigs. These pigs are smaller than the ordinary kind and very hairy. The piglets are brown, black, and white, and spotted or striped like chipmunks. The pigs are appreciative consumers of the leftovers that come out of the restaurant.

The restaurant is a small, family place. There's no cash register. They keep the money in a can in the cupboard. Nor is there any menu. Customers come into the kitchen to talk with my host mother about what they want to eat. My family here consists of 11 people: grandmother, father, mother, mother's sister, two sons, their wives, and their three small children. Following Chinese tradition, the 27-year- old daughter lives with her husband's family. The family has rooms next to the restaurant.

Around lunch and supper time and sometimes until ten o'clock at night, nearly everybody is in and around the big kitchen. There's a crib in there for the babies, but my host mother often keeps her 14-month-old granddaughter strapped to her back while she works. It's a good way to get her to fall asleep. Even the old grandmother sits in the kitchen and watches, pitching in now and then to sweep up or to pick over a pile of fresh basil.

My two host brothers chop up the chicken and make the soups that the Taiwanese like to drink at the end of the meal. The older brother's wife and I help cut vegetables and carry dishes out to the tables. The younger brother's wife isn't in the kitchen. She had a new baby just three weeks ago so she is still taking a traditional one-month rest. She usually eats her meals separately from the rest of the family. She spends most of the day in her room, though she can come out for walks.

My host mother and aunt stand at the huge woks, basin-shaped frying pans used for preparing almost every Taiwanese dish. I like to lean on the counter and watch them toss the ingredients into the wok, then stir-fry them quickly. Each dish has its own order, its own combination. They never measure, never hesitate.

I try to learn the Chinese names of the ingredients as they go in. Some of them are familiar, like sweet corn, cabbage, garlic in great quantity, soy sauce, and eggplant. Others are new, like bamboo shoots, sweet potato leaves, and little white bee larvae. We talk above the vegetables. They want to know English words. Each time a new food comes up they ask if we have it in America.

They are surprised when I eat slivers of carrot raw. They almost never eat vegetables without cooking them. We stretch my meager Chinese to its limit, then use hand motions to get around words I don't know. Shu-Yuan's wife remembers a lot of the English she learned in school, but is afraid to test it out on me. She will sometimes spell words out rather than try to say them. Despite this difficulty, however, we have come to understand each other very well.

Windsong

Special thanks to the Jefferson Co. Leaders' Association, the Jefferson Co. 4-H Foundation, and the Ridge Runners 4-H Club for their generous help with trip expenses.