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When the northeast monsoon winds start to pick up, “salty mists” readily roll
in from the distant sea. Salt-imbued droplets soon descend and hang on
tenaciously to your skin. This brings a moist, sticky sensation that simply will
not go away.

Just like those salty mists, my hometown has clung to my mind all these years.
I’ve tried to break away from it but the attempt has never been quite
successful. Even when I walk on the streets of Taipei, I can feel salt seeping
into my skin and find a nostalgic taste of salt in my mouth. Deep inside me
always lies a yearning for homecoming, a longing to return to my homeland of
violent gusts of monsoon winds and all-encompassing shrouds of salty
mists—Penghu.

In 1958, I was born at Anzhai, a tiny village outside Magong, Penghu. The sea
was not far off of our house and the foreshore became my playground. As I
grew up, most people living in Penghu were poor. My family’s relatives and
friends were either farmers or fishermen. The only exceptions were civil

servants working for the government and schoolteachers who could manage a
comparatively comfortable living. Most people, I included, were mired in
poverty. Those who have been to Penghu must have left remembering either
the scorching sun in summer or violent gusts and waves in winter that make
fishing and farming all but impossible. The northeast monsoon winds bring
along mists that comprise skin-prickling sea salt and grains of sand. Women
charged with outdoor farming chores have to cover their faces for protection
and keep their heads down while moving ahead, one close after another in
single file, against the severity of monsoon winds.

Living on an impoverished island means that one must work really hard to
make life just a bit easier. This necessity hardens the people of Penghu with a
character of perseverance. Penghu’s soil is not good enough for rice so sweet
potatoes and peanuts are grown instead. During farming breaks, collecting
seashells on the foreshore is a common sideline for local women. A handsome
collection sold in the market easily generates an additional income for the
household. Even a scanty gathering can prove of value in bartering with
neighbors for their home-grown vegetables. Likewise, when there is an
abundance of fruits and vegetables in summer, any excess will be dried or
pickled for subsequent consumption in winter.

To help with the family finances, I began to do various odd jobs in my teens.
Most of the time I ended up an errand boy for fishing boats. When a fishing
boat returned with catches, I helped unload them onto the dock. My job was to
help clean the boat when it did not put out to sea. Next to Magong’s fishing
harbor were a couple of ice-making outfits that provided fishing boats with the
large quantity of ice blocks needed for freezing their catches. For a period of
time I was responsible for delivering their ice blocks to fishing boats about to
leave the harbor. My other odd jobs include joining local women to peel
basketfuls of shrimps and moving gravel as an underage laborer. All the
meager wages from my hard labor made an important part of my family’s

livelihood in those years.

When friends of my age enjoyed themselves as teenagers, I sweated on all
sorts of odd jobs days in, days out. Penghu virtually had nothing to offer. I was
desperate to escape—run away from this impoverished island. I told myself
that someday I would surely leave Penghu and work in a big city. As such,
after I turned 20 and became a conscript at Zuoying, Kaohsiung, I was
reluctant to go home. I would rather stay in Taiwan than be brought face-to-
face with that hometown of deficiency of mine again.

Until my drafting to Taiwan, I had virtually never seen mountains or rivers.
Neither had I taken a train ride ever. For someone from Penghu, all these
otherwise commonplace sights were both new and interesting. I managed to
save some money and buy my first camera in order to capture this scenery of
novelty. Sometimes when I went back to Penghu, I also brought along my
camera to take pictures. But at that time I was not aware that the lens actually
reflects what’s on my mind. It turns out that my Penghu photographs form a
trail leading to my years past.

The familiar people, occurrences, and objects in the photographs combine to
form the source of my emotions. Those mischievous children playing on
temple courts speak of my own childhood; the swarthy youngsters diving into
the sea hark back to the years when I was a teenager myself; the devout figures
of those on their knees praying remind me of my mother.

The earliest photograph in this book was taken in 1984. A typhoon was in
progress that day: the road was swamped with seawater and big waves were
beating against the boy standing next to a bus stop sign post. At that time,
Penghu simply did not have that many breakwaters in place yet. The distance
was short between man and sea. The beach or foreshore was often just outside
the house.

When I was small, a shoal was just a few steps away from home and we would
often catch fiddler crabs and mudskippers for fun. Without any department
store or market to speak of in Penghu, temple fairs were the most exciting
moments of the year that everyone looked forward to. Children would always
gather on temple courts during such festivities to be part of the bustle. Above
all, we would be treated to meat only on major religious festivals and the first
and fifteenth of every month on the lunar calendar. Indeed, faith trumps all
else on an island where livelihood is virtually dictated by divine providence. I
thus find nothing more intimate than all those eyes beseeching blessings from
the celestial powers. Penghu’s rough climate leaves on the faces of its residents
indelible marks that really represent nothing less than a perseverance never
yielding to their plight.

Most of the photographs in this book, which project what Penghu looks like in
my memory, were taken between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s. My
emotional link with this land seems to have been severed since both of my
parents were gone. All these black-and-white photographs are a record of
years gone by. It contains no traces of the resplendent fireworks festival in
summer that most tourists associate with Penghu. Instead, it is how a native
islander, after years of exile, sees his homeland: a landscape tinged with
desolation and destitution. In my mind, the rustic looks of fishing villages and
melancholy sights of deserted places epitomize the unrivaled beauty of
Penghu.

Penghu is no longer what it used to be even though salty mists continue to dim
its horizons in winter. These photographs taken some two or three decades
ago have been stored away and mostly kept away from the public eye until
now. Having accumulated numerous rolls of film over the years, I decide to
make a compilation out of them, summing up my feeling toward my homeland
that is so hard to put into words, for publication. In so doing, I’m actually

taking a retrospective look at life in my early 60s.

Hsieh San-Tai was born in Penghu,and left the archipelago for Taiwan for army duties
when he was 20 years old, where he saw high mountains, rivers, and trains for the first
time. With his horizons expanded, he also came into contact with Taiwanese homeland
literature , as he tried to lean about Taiwan through his own eyes and literary works. He
bought his first camera while serving in the army, and the camera has since become his
tool for exploring the world, replacing his eyes to document the land, people,events,and
things he sees.Hsieh started working in the media in Taipei at the age of 30, and was
fortunate to experience the shifting political climate in Taiwan during that time after
martial law was lifted. The process of fighting for democracy involved taking to the
streets to protest, with social movements on the rise, media censorship abolished. It was
an era of great uproar, as different media outlets began to emerge. Heieh, with camera in
hand, was out on the streets in person. Because of the solid training he had obtained from
this media work. Heieh did journalism work during the day, and in the afternoon, he
would roam the streets and document the changing city with his camera; he was fueled
with passion by photography.

Taking photos is like writing in a journal, with each selected moment faithfully
documented. The fact is photographs also reflect one’s life. Penghu is an archipelago
without much material resources, and having grown up in a modest family, Hsieh learned
as a child to depend in himself, earning measly income by taking om many labor-

intensive jobs. His lens reflects the lives of everyday people, farmers, workers, exuding a
sense of empathy. Women with their heads down working hard, workers with rough,
familiar faces that Hsieh has grown uo with, as he captures their touching faces with his
lens.