Finding Home at Tides End

The Sijhou community in Xindian, New Taipei, suffered a major fire in 1997 and repeated flooding afterwards. After years of campaigning by its members, a new site barely a hundred metres from the original was finally secured for a new settlement. Yet with the 2021 demolition deadline arriving, the day of moving in remained out of sight.

For Sijhou, “relocation” is not only a move in physical space but a profound ceremony of farewell, carrying homesickness and expectation along with apprehension and confusion about a life not yet known. There is dispersal and reunion, longing and contradiction, and considerable dramatic tension. It is not only an attachment to the past but the beginning of an untested future.

Through the community’s relocation we see not only the contradictions of identity faced by urban Indigenous people but the longer history of Indigenous migration through urbanisation. This is a record of space, culture and feeling intertwined, and a journey witnessed and written in the first person, telling how Sijhou built a way of living together unlike that of the surrounding lowland society, and how it persists at the city’s edge in a manner of its own.