I recently attended a field trip with my fourth grade students from Herpuu Elementary School. We went to a couple of different sites across Kinmen throughout the day: Shueitou Village, Bicycle Story House, and Kinmen National Park. However, JinShuei Elementary School left the deepest impression on me. Not only was it architecturally beautiful, the history behind it was intriguing. JinShuei Elementary School is the largest Elementary School on Kinmen, and Kinmen citizens, who had immigrated to Southeast Asia in order to make some money, sent money home sponsored it.
Tour guides conducted the tour in Mandarin and Minnan, so I could only understand a portion. However, I learned about how so many Kinmen people worked overseas in countries like Malaysia and about how hard they worked just to send back a small amount of money to support their families.
How emigrants sent money back to their families through carriers was very interesting. Because they had to keep working, in the early days, they had to ask an acquaintance or friend to bring back the money for them. Unfortunately, not all of their acquaintances were the most trustworthy of people-they would sometimes keep some of the money. Thus, the emigrants would devise secret languages through pictures to tell their families how much money they sent back. This way, their families would know how much money to expect. Eventually, some people who ran pharmacies also set up a way for people to exchange currency and to send money back to their families in a safer and more reliable manner.
This part of the field trip spoke directly to me. My grandparents emigrated from China to Taiwan before the Cultural Revolution, and my parents emigrated from Taiwan to America in the late 1980s. While they did not emigrate specifically to make money to send back, the story of the Kinmen emigrants sparked an interest to try to learn more about the stories of my grandparents' and parents' emigration.
What I never realized or acknowledged before was the difficulty that both my grandparents and parents faced when moving to a completely new place. My admiration for the bravery and dedication of my grandparents, parents, and the Kinmen emigrants is profound.
Although I have visited many historical sites in Kinmen, I got the most out from Jinshuei. I related easily to the topic, and liked learning about the people rather than just the history of the island. I plan to learn more about the people of Kinmen.