Eagle Hand

My home village of Niudoushan in Chiayi was once a farming community known for its lotus roots. In the 1980s almost every household grew them; the area under cultivation and the number of growers were the highest in Taiwan, and large quantities were exported to Japan and Hong Kong. For the villagers, digging lotus root was like mining gold.

Eighty years have passed lightly over the bent backs of these farmers, and the prosperity of the lotus root is frozen in the past. The cultivated area has fallen from more than a hundred hectares to forty, and the number of growing households from more than a hundred to twenty-seven.

Some of the growers cannot let go of their attachment to the land and insist on growing something of their own worth. The deformed “eagle hands” of a farmer who has dug lotus root for decades are the mark of that labour. As young people leave for the north in large numbers, some young people from non-farming families choose to stay and find a way through the difficulty. Through cycles of disillusion and renewal, and through the long downturn of a traditional industry, they refuse to give in, and with a pair of eagle hands dig out the value and the dreams that history forgot.