The Happy Mountain is, by all practical accounts, invisible. Located around a seaside highway in northeast Taiwan, Happy Mountain doesn't have any visible mapping points. The people who live there are primarily elders of Amis (Pangcah), cohabiting with the natural environment and sustainably living off the rich resources found between the sea and mountains. They subsist off collecting wild vegetables and seafood, as well as building different types homes by collecting recycled construction materials for the last thirty years.
In Taiwan, many of the urban indigenous tribes are dotted around suburban areas of cities. The typical reason they came to live in these suburban areas —away from their hometowns such as Hualien and Taitung— was to make a better living wage as manual laborers, namely off of the early boom in urban construction. Due to nostalgia and homesickness, these laborers gradually started to gather, one by one, in Happy Mountain due to its geographical similarity with their hometowns.
This type of movement is not unlike how their ancestors began to gather and live together in the past, forced on by the continued development of their country by outside occupation. After those major early develops waned in Taiwan, the land was no longer seen as belonging to these migrant laborers. Instead, the land came into the possession of the government and became just another piece of capital. Therefore, these laborers have now been deemed illegal occupants, treated without the proper respect, for their sacrifices and years of hard work for the collective good of Taiwan. As it stands today, every resident who make The Happy Mountain their home are being accused of illegally occupying National property and face losing the place they worked so hard to call home.
From the outside looking in, Happy Mountain seems like a utopian space, complete with a rare balance found in other parts of Taiwan, that being a harmony and peace within the dedication to sustainability. If anything, the hard work of these people have made it more attractive to outsiders, who now envy and look forward to living there.
En Man's entry into this space was to simply explore this area, soon finding a mysterious house of glass abandoned on the high point of mountain, shrouded within a foggy political atmosphere. En Man uses this kind of loose exploration in order to gradually and unpretentiously build experiences tied to this mountain area and, in so doing, try to recognize and understand the process of mapping from outside to inside, as if looking for the path to some form of hometown.
In 2008, a group of people got to know each other on the occasion of Wild Strawberries Movement. In 2009, they collaborated to run the Go Straight Café as an experimental and open space for the purpose of organizing a community and taking actions. 2012, Go Straight Café closed down. Since then, individuals drifted from one café to another, sitting on unfamiliar sofas till they met each other again. In 2014, Halfway Café hit the road.
Halfway Café is a project as well as a platform for those who lost in directions or languages finding their own place. In order to continue creating publicness, Halfway made an analogy of itself and a country and develops four political routes: currency, mutual aids wall, farming and night canteen.
Above all, Halfway Night Canteen bases on a concept of “a store with another store”(a country inside another country) and puts individual/public self-governance into practice. From Monday to Sunday, a chef of each day cooks thematic meals related to their background in-store. Here, food is a medium for delivering beliefs. It can activate any possibilities and even revolutions. It discloses values that we choose to survive.
a publishing project
En Maan Chang was fascinated by Halfway. She explored the proposed a collaboration. Firstly, she became resident-chef in Halfway Night canteen and got to know the community and the space better. She lately interviewed night canteen chefs and edited it for publishing a trial issue of Halfway Night Recipes in order to understand an individual/collective’s attitude, knowledge, experiences as well as the culture and political position behind. Her intention was to picture a networking and portray a community conscious and even a collective consciousness of utopia.
