THE ANTIPODES 6

6 min readJul 28, 2022

LAGUNA NAICK NECK

The antipode of Laguna Naick Neck is the ocean on the north of Taiwan. It doesn’t matter, even if there is no town or story on the other side, this one can’t be left out of my project.

If someone had told me I would find a Taiwanese in Formosa, I would have laughed. Well, I did. A few minutes’ drive from Laguna Blanca, I found José Cheng.

José Cheng is 72 years old. He tells me, in Spanish with a touch of Mandarin, that he arrived in Argentina in 1976 when he was 27. José, born as Xiang Yi Chang, had a very comfortable life when growing up in Taiwan. Most of his family members were medical doctors. His parents, his four uncles, his brother, his cousin. Even his daughter is now a doctor. But he decided to drop out of school and enjoy life first. He tells me, “I lived very comfortably, my parents had money, I didn’t need to work. I was quite useless”. At that time the money was abundant, but in the ’70s the Taiwanese government began to charge high taxes to professionals so his family started having financial issues. José and some other relatives decided to emigrate. They had uncles in Argentina and chose to try there. “My brother, my cousin and friends came first. They went to Paraguay where they got their visas to then enter Argentina. They were the ones who helped us come in. They opened the path for us. I knew almost nothing about Argentina. I only knew the ABC. A: Argentina, B: Brazil, C: Chile. At that time there were not many Taiwanese here. I was the 83rd to enter. A lucky number”, says Cheng, who at that time did not speak any Spanish.

At first, José Cheng and his family settled in Pilar, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. They tried to grow Chinese mushrooms, vegetables, and later seedless watermelons using a technique that an acquaintance from the Institute of Agricultural Technology in China had taught him. Cheng says that those years were very frustrating because many times they lost all of their production due to frost damage. “Everything was hard as stone.”

“As things weren’t going well in Buenos Aires, we decided to try our luck elsewhere. We were 7: my cousins, my brother-in-law and I. We went to the Japanese cooperative in Buenos Aires to see if they could help us. My brother-in-law spoke Japanese. They convinced us to go to Misiones province in the north-east of Argentina. There we found a Japanese cooperative that was dedicated to planting trees to make paper. But we didn’t know anything about trees and that project would take us between 15 to 20 years’ time. It was a project that would help our children or grandchildren, but we needed the money at that time. Those Japanese were subsidized by their government, but nobody helped us. We were looking for other alternatives to cultivate in that area but it was difficult to plant vegetables in the mountains where the water runs fast.”

They kept looking for ideas and realized that they could plant yerba mate, but they didn’t know anything about it and it was little money for such a complicated job. “Then the Japanese from Misiones told us that in Espinillo, Formosa, there were other Japanese engineers who had worked for the Institute of Agricultural Technology in Paraguay. We looked at the map and we found out it was possible to go by bus. We went from Misiones to Espinillo through Clorinda. We arrived at noon. We were starving. The trip was much longer than we had imagined and we had nothing to eat. We asked around where the Japanese man lived, they told us that his house was 300 meters away. When we arrived we realized that this Japanese man was not the one we were looking for. They told us that the other one lived 15 km away. There were no buses running, so we had no option but to walk. It was very hot and we had no water.

We arrived at his house but he wasn’t there. We only found his wife with their two young children. She told us that he was in Buenos Aires to sell his production. He would return the next day. The Japanese and the Chinese are like siblings. It’s as if we had the same blood. The lady asked us if we had already eaten and my brother-in-law lied, he said that we had. I couldn’t believe he said that, I was starving! There were tomatoes, vegetables, even chickens in the property. She could have killed one of those chickens and she could have cooked it with the garden vegetables. On our way out we took some tomatoes from the plants and ate them desperately. On the way to town we knocked at doors to ask if anyone had anything to eat, but no one had. We were starving and exhausted.”

Thanks to the help of that Japanese man, José along with his six partners were able to find some land to buy. At first they had a few hectares where they grew tomatoes, lettuce and other vegetables that then sold in Buenos Aires. At that time José’s father lived with him. They also had a few inconveniences like losing a few productions due to frost. The damages were very hard for them. They had no money. José fell several times, but he got back up.

Years ago he separated from his partners and he is alone with his wife and an assistant with whom he has been working for 20 years. While Cheng is telling me all that, his assistant is worried because they lost a lot of unripe mangoes due to the previous night’s storm. José is a little worried, but he has experienced bigger losses. Thanks to the casuarina trees that he had planted all around the farm, the losses have not been devastating. However, his wife is very stressed about that loss. She goes in and out of the house, she makes a couple of phone calls, she talks to her assistant. She puts her hands on her head. The assistant tells her, “I don’t want you to get upset, but I’m not going to lie to you. We lost about the equivalent of a crate of mangoes,” and she shakes her head and enters the house.

José Cheng’s “Frutasia” has 100 hectares. 50 of those are full of mangoes of all kinds and sizes; 20 of lychee, guava and dragon fruit, among others. A large quantity and variety of exotic fruits. “I am the champion of exotic fruits in South America.” They have come to visit him from all over the world. “From April to July I can send approximately 7000 fruits to Chinatown in Buenos Aires. All fruits are bio, I do not use chemical fertilizers. For the past 20 years I have been using natural fertilizers produced by my brother in Buenos Aires. It’s not necessary to wash the fruit before eating it.”

He says that he is old now, he is diabetic and he doesn’t know who will continue with Frutasia. He feels that nobody wants to take over. His children will not continue. He doesn’t like Buenos Aires. He is happy to be in Formosa and he might stay there for good.

José Cheng has a son called Alejandro who lives in Chinatown of Buenos Aires. He has a bar. José also has a daughter who is a doctor and lives in California. “My daughter is very smart. She studied in Buenos Aires, she did a Masters degree in Los Angeles. She has a Senior position at the hospital as a General Practitioner, she is also a university professor. Her husband is also a doctor.”

Before I go, José wants to show me the plantations. Those trees gave him so much. Those trees already make history. The history where José is the protagonist in the other Formosa.

November 15, 2019.