The salmon puppet show begins!
“The Third Prince Ao Bing, son of the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, wields his divine dragon claws with consummate skill. In an instant all you can see are dense black clouds, driving wind and crashing rain, sand blowing and rocks being moved….” With this thrilling background narration, the puppet Ao Bing, representing a typhoon, crashes down on husband and wife Ah Gui and Gui Sao, a pair of Formosan landlocked salmon, separating them from one another. “Ah! My husband, my poor husband!” Gui Sao cannot help but wail. Following close on this, symbols of disaster after disaster for the salmon come on stage—the predatory tawny fish-owl, and threats to the salmon’s habitat from check dams, pesticides, and excessive land clearance for farming. The salmon couple pass through many tribulations but also receive lots of help, and finally their drama comes to a happy ending.
Lin Fen-in, a retired teacher from Miaoli Senior High School who wrote the Ah Gui script, says: “The most difficult thing about writing an environmental drama is that besides being entertaining and having a story to tell, it must also have meaning in terms of ecological education.” Recalling how she got the idea for the story, it turns out that the earliest embryo of this play was inspired by the collapse of a check dam, which morphed into a story like the legend of Meng Jiang Nü, whose tears broke down a part of the Great Wall of China as she wept for her dead husband. But the director at the time, Assistant Professor Li Tso-wen of Chungyu University of Film and Arts, thought that it was necessary to add some elements of conflict and opposition in order to attract audiences, and moreover that the most eye-catching thing about Taiwanese puppetry is the fighting.
So Lin Fen-in gave new thought to how to bring conflict and tension into the plot, and came up with additional storylines like the typhoon, pesticides, and habitat destruction.
The puppetry performances at Shei-Pa National Park opened up promotion of environmental education to a larger public. Cho Hsiao-chuan, a staffer in the park’s Interpretation and Education Section, says: “Once some researchers from the Industrial Technology Research Institute came here to take a class, and after seeing the puppet show, they told us they were very surprised to see there could be this kind of creative class in a government agency, and the play had deepened their understanding of the Formosan landlocked salmon.”
The Formosan landlocked salmon, a relict survivor from the ice age and a national treasure.