野莲出庄

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共11首歌曲

艺人: 生祥乐队
语种: 客家语
厂牌: StreetVoice / 山下民谣
发行时间: 2020年11月28日
专辑类别: 录音室专辑

专辑介绍

烟草没落，人出庄。

2000年代中我在嘉义的海产摊初遇破布子炒水莲、山苏又蒸鱼，记忆被撞开了裂缝。除了静素躺在饭桌上与母亲相对眼，没想到对面乌尚可如此灵活！更纳闷：我们不常吃的野莲，何以出庄且易名？困惑中，我夹一颗对面乌入嘴，儿时的涩苦在舌根处转甘甜，令我不禁揣想：难道离家够久、吃苦够多，才得品尝对面乌？

那滋味引我再度回家。

我回返母亲独自采收、制作对面乌，以及每餐一碟的场景，试图探究她的心境。我跟著她走出除草后的第一期稻田，腰夹的脸盆上挤满挑好的野菜。她疲惫，但几丝惬意流露。我领会水田的赏赐，不再排斥连吃一周斛菜或冇筒梗炒黄豆酱。七月半，我安静看她备料，蒸芋头粄，不再质疑家里人愈少、粄却愈厚，明了那是对外出子女的召唤与祝福。年三十下午，我忍住玩兴，盯著屋后的大铝锅，乖乖掌火。母亲在灶下忙进忙出，姊姊们已催紧手脚，仍不免招念。我面前这一锅大封，不只是我对食物的至高期待，更是家族团聚的圆心，以及长媳的年终考评。我不能失手啊！必须把火喂好、喂稳。

社造牵线，去阿里山拜访邹族，主人留客午饭。村长端出我本以为客家地道的树豆汤，食物地域观随被破解，提醒我穿越乡愁之必要。我拜会本土种黄豆的复育者，探访几位回乡开设豆腐坊的朋友。他们难忘豆腐郎吆喝，以及植物蛋白质之于社区的重要；他们倡议的保种运动，连接了母亲挂晒在窗櫺上的各种蔬果种子。几位原住民采集文化的研究者解开我的野菜边界，放打乌子流浪。期间，美浓爱乡协进会的朋友呼应创作计画，广泛访谈，证实了食物传统的坚韧延续力。他们关注后烟草时代，农民寻找另类经济作物的历程，理解野莲产业的在地意义，及其全球化机会与困境。

食物的部首是“女”--她们是食物的主要采集者、制作者、保存者与教育者。但面帕粄连系父亲：考试、缴烟得意，他带去粄仔店；稿赏工人，叫我去包回来。凡此，面帕粄总造成米食最高级感。工作至嘉义，必吃火鸡肉饭；看各家以自制鸡油淋饭，亦予我同样印象。

生祥读词，联想日本的“B级美食”比赛，主角是非主流的乡土菜肴。我们的食物场景若有配乐，亦当是在地流行音乐：流动摊车的叫卖声与随取音乐、婚宴场上的中西混种音乐，以及李文古笑科剧、金光布袋戏、神明生日晚会中的戏仿音乐等等，生祥总称为“B级音乐”。

那么，就请乘著B级音乐，听我们唱这些食物与人的流浪故事。

“Water Snowflake Goes to Market”

Tobacco declined, and water snowflake went to market.

It was in the 2000s at the seafood stall in Chiayi that I first came across bird-catcher berries stir-fried with water snowflake, steamed with fish, and with fern leaves , knocking open a hole in my memory. I had never imagined that these pickled berries that looked like eyeballs, could do so much more than sitting still on a table of vegetarian dishes and stare back at my mother looking back toward them. And more puzzling still: how could the “water snowflake” that we hardly ate at all back home have left the village, changed its name, and flooded the market? In my perplexity, I picked up a pickled berry with my chopsticks, and let the astringent flavor I remembered from childhood roll around the base of my tongue until it slowly revealed its sweetness. I suppose it’s only after you’ve left home for a long time and suffered your share of bitterness that you can savor the taste of bird-catcher berries?

That taste drew me back home once again.

I return to when my mother would personally pick and prepare bird-catcher berries to lay out a small plate of them at every meal. What would she have been feeling then? I follow her out of the rice paddies after the first weeding, with a little wash basin tied to her apron filled with wild greens she had carefully picked from the ground. Tired, but not without letting slip a certain satisfaction. I understand now the bounty of the paddies, and will no longer be so reluctant to eat pondweed and gooseweed with soybean paste all week long. When the Ghost Festival comes, I sit quietly and watch her prepare the ingredients for taro root dumplings, and no longer wonder why they get thicker and more appetizing the fewer people are left at home — the better to call those who have gone out into the world to come back, and to bless them. On the afternoon before New Year’s eve, I can hardly hold back my excitement as the great big double-alloy stew pot is set up in the back yard, and I dutifully help kindle the fire underneath. Mother bustles back and forth around the stove, and my sisters quicken their movements to match, but not fast enough to avoid her scolding. This pot of sugarcane bottom braised stew in front of me means not only the best thing one could ever hope to eat, but also the hope of family togetherness, and an annual trial for the wife of the family’s eldest son. There’s no room for error — I have to feed the flames well and keep the heat steady!

In the course of making contacts for community development, I go to Ahlishan to pay my respects to the indigenous Zou people, and my hosts invite me to stay for lunch. The village head brings out a platter of what I mistake at first for an authentic Hakka-style pigeon pea stew. My ideas about which foods belong where are displaced, and I am reminded that I need to get beyond my own homesickness. I visit someone who has revived a local variety of soybean and I call on some friends who have come back to the village to open a tofu workshop. The unforgettable sound of the itinerant tofu guy calling his wares; the importance of vegetable-derived protein to the community; their advocacy for the preservation of local cultivars; these call to mind how my mother used to hang all kinds of seeds from the window-frames to dry. A few researchers of the indigenous culture of foraging break open the boundaries of how I had understood vegetables in the wild, and set bird berries free to wander the land. Meanwhile, friends from the Meinung People’s Association are calling for us to create a plan and seek out dialogue on how to shore up the resilience and sustainability of our foodways and culinary traditions. They are focused on a new era after tobacco, on the experience of farmers who have been looking to create alternative economies and crops, and on what it has meant locally for Meinung to produce water snowflake, and the promises or pitfalls that lie ahead on the global market.

The essential component of the character for food is “woman” 女, for they are the foragers, producers, preservers, and educators. But “face-towel noodles” are tied to my father. When test scores or tobacco harvests were high, it was he who would elatedly take us to celebrate at the rice-noodle stall. When the workers in the field were to be rewarded, he would have me bring them noodles. All of this gave me the feeling that “face-towel noodles” were the very best thing that can be made out of rice. When I moved to Chiayi to work, I had to try the famous turkey rice there, and observing how each stall specializing in this dish made their own special chicken schmaltz to drizzle over rice, I started to have the same impression.

When Sheng-xiang read the lyrics, he was reminded of Japan’s “Grade B cuisine” competitions in which the contestants were all sorts of non-mainstream and local specialties. If our food has a soundtrack, it would be local pop music; the advertising jingles and notifications to customers that their order is ready broadcast from portable food carts; the mingled Eastern and Western sounds of outdoor wedding parties along with Li Wengu’s raucous comedic skits; the opera tunes that ring in the birthdays of our gods at temple festivals and shrines, and the like. Sheng-Xiang calls all these kinds of sounds grade B-music.

Well then — please let our grade B-music transport you into the vagabond stories we sing here about food and about people.

野莲出庄

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