Life on Dadu Mountain

One day in the fourth month of the fortieth year of the Republic, the newly arrived squad leader and several of my husband’s colleagues came to find me and asked me to go with them to Dadu Mountain to look for houses, so that all the dependents could move up the mountain with the unit.

They felt that as a native of the province I could communicate more easily in the language. By then I had been pregnant for more than three months, but to help everyone I gladly agreed. From Lukang we went to Changhua, then took the northbound train and got off at Dadu station. Across the main road was a hillside.

Our group came to the foot of the slope, found an ox-cart track, and slowly walked uphill along it. Dadu Mountain is about five hundred metres above sea level; we walked for more than an hour and finally reached Shuijing Village, where we were to look. We paid a visit to the village head and told him our purpose, asking him to help solve our housing problem.

The village head took us through the whole village; not one person was willing to rent a house to us, because we were mainland people, soldiers’ families.

There was truly no other way; we had to ask the police and the village head to step in and make a semi-forced allocation before the locals reluctantly cleared out the rooms where they usually shut up their cattle and sheep for us to live in. The mountain people farmed at the time; the houses were mud-block dwellings with thatched roofs.

What we were assigned was the last room of a three-wing courtyard, originally where the livestock came back at nightfall. To rent the house to us, the landlord had to take the cattle and sheep elsewhere and fix up the room for us to live in.

All the dependents moved to Dadu Mountain and settled down in the sixth month of the fortieth year of the Republic. The first great matter of life on the mountain was water. I asked the landlord where we could draw water.

He had his daughter Ah Hsueh carry a pair of buckets and told us to follow her to the well to draw water.

Shuijing Village was built along a long, winding, uneven ox-cart road; on both sides every household was a three-wing courtyard. The house we were given was at the village head; the well where we drew water was at the village tail—a distance of about a kilometre and a half between them.

At the village tail we still had to go down more than a hundred stone steps before we reached the well.

We set down the buckets, filled them with water; my husband shouldered the water and walked back, slowly climbing the stone steps.

The steps were paved with stones a foot and a half wide; halfway there was no level ground where you could set the buckets down to rest. My husband had never done work like this; halfway up both legs began to tremble. Gasping for breath he reached the level ground at the top of the steps, sat on the ground panting for a long while, and only then managed to carry one bucket of water home. The landlord saw that we had no strength to draw water and suggested to us: “For one load of water a day, my daughter Ah Hsueh will carry it; ten dollars a month for wages—if that suits you, she can start tomorrow.” My husband and I discussed it and decided to ask Ah Hsueh to carry water for us. Families better off in the village had electric lights; poorer ones used kerosene lamps. Where we lived there was no electricity, only a kerosene lamp.

At first we were very unused to it, because at night the smoke from the kerosene lamp would turn the white mosquito net black. There were four villages on the mountain; from today’s Chenggong Ridge to Tunghai University, all were called Dadu Mountain.

In the forties everyone lived very hard; only when you walked down the mountain was there transport. Among the four villages, only Shuijing Village had a natural well; the other three had only ponds. In the rainy season the ponds would fill with water, but the water was muddy yellow earth; you poured it into the water jar and had to settle it with alum before you had clean water to use.

In summer if it did not rain for a while and the pond water was used up, people from the three villages all had to come to Shuijing Village to queue for water, so those drawing water never stopped for twenty-four hours.

People from the neighbouring villages first carried water from Shuijing Village up to higher ground, then took it back by ox cart. This situation lasted about one or two months each year; when the rainy season began and their village ponds had water again, they no longer had to go back and forth drawing water.

In that era everyone lived like this and did not feel it bitter. There was also an interesting rule: the village pond could let cattle soak in the water, but ducks and geese were not allowed to swim in it; if one was caught, the fine was fifty cents.

I suppose it was because ducks and geese would defecate in the water and pollute it?