Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association

In 1933, a Japanese colonial official introduced the giant African snail (Achatina fulica), originally from East Africa, to Taiwan from Singapore to be raised for food. Since 2009, I have given presentations on this snail, including projects involving recipes, embroidery, maps, interviews, collaborations, and multimedia work. My inspiration comes from my Paiwan (an Indigenous group in Taiwan) mother, who would always gather snails after the rain, cook them, and give them to my siblings and me to eat. Snails were the starting point for my research into my maternal bloodline, which is part of the Taiwanese Indigenous bloodline. From there, I considered how the path of the snail’s dispersal is comparable to the route of imperial expansion in the Pacific, and looked at Taiwan’s history and its relationship to the world. This paper considers my evolving project centered around the giant African snail and offers my thoughts on how traditional Indigenous Taiwanese cooking and sewing practices may be reinterpreted as a strategy for resisting colonisation.