游擊文化

Those Who Stay: Rural Elderly’s Life Stories
留下來的人：偏鄉高齡者的生命紀事

Author Kang Shu-Ya
Illustration Shen En-Min
ISBN: 978-626-97775-5-6
Date: 1/2024
Pages: 252
Length:  79,242

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• Nominated for the 2024 Taiwan Literature Awards
• This book focuses on the elderly in Taishi Village, Changhua County, a rural area in Taiwan facing economic, educational, and infrastructural decline. The book explores their aging experiences, examining the connection between body, self, and community identity, and the interaction between people and place. It records how they adjust their lives in response to these changes, shaped by their past beliefs, identities, and values.

This book focused on the elderly at Taishi Village, Changhua County. Taishi Village is an aging community and one of Taiwan’s many declining rural areas. The villagers of Taishi are marginalized in terms of economy, education, infrastructure, health, and population structure. In such a rural area, how do the elderly live out their later years?

By exploring their aging experiences, the author investigated the connection between body and self/ community identity, as well as the interaction between human beings and place through body practicing. The elderly individuals depicted in this book were born in the 1930s and 1940s. They grew up farming and most r only had a few years of elementary education. In their later years, due to the dramatic changes in Taiwanese society, they find it difficult to follow the traditional family model of agricultural society, where labor responsibilities are passed on to the next generation. They also can no longer rely on being surrounded by their children and grandchildren to support them in their old age.

The later stages of their lives are vastly different from those of their ancestors and also distinct from the experiences of the elderly in urban areas. They not only need to develop ways to cope with aging in the current social context but also face numerous challenges. This book records how these elderly individuals adjust their life order in response to life changes, and how their past has shaped their beliefs, identities, and values as they navigate their later years.

Kang Shu-Ya

Born in 1994 in Taipei, She hold a master’s degree from the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University and a master’s in Cultural Heritage Studies from Leiden University in the Netherlands. Currently, they are pursuing a Ph.D. in Anthropology at University College London.

Kang’s academic interests include grassroots empowerment, public participation, and human-environmental relationships.