The Last Hands of Tai O

Tai O, also known as the “Venice of the East”.

When I stepped off the bus, the air carried the scent of salt. Long deserted boats bobbled gently against the rusty metal stilts of houses. Stray cats darted between fishing nets, and above them, lines of shrimp paste bricks dried under the sun like offerings. Call it what you want… this place was barely living.

Camera slung around my neck, I wandered past trays of shrimp drying under the sun. I stopped in front of an old man stirring a heavy vat with a wooden paddle, his hands browned and calloused by years of salt and labor. As I observed him, never once did he look up. But in his veiny skin, I read a story. I couldn’t help but imagine this village in its prime: when these docks echoed with voices, when children raced across the wooden bridges, when shrimp paste wasn’t a relic but a livelihood. Still, he stirred on.

Psychologist Erik Erikson refers to this stage of life as “generativity”: the adult desire to pass something on to the future and leave their fingerprints on the world. And in that moment, I realized: the man wasn’t just making shrimp paste. He was keeping a tradition and memory alive.

After what felt like an eternity, the man finally paused. He leaned the paddle against the rim of the vat and wiped his sweat-streaked brow with the back of his hand. I seized the moment to engage in conversation. His voice was gentle and warm. We spoke not just of shrimp paste, but of his story, his frustrations.

He told me how most of the village’s youth had left. Drawn to higher wages, city lights, glass towers, chasing something that fishing and getting your hands dirty doesn’t give. Shrimp paste doesn’t get you promoted. It doesn’t fill LinkedIn profiles. There are no job fairs for preserving heritage. So the knowledge stays behind with the elders, aging in the minds and muscles of those too old and too attached to leave. They stir the paste each day, maybe a little slower now, wondering if they’re the last ones who’ll ever know how.

Erikson tells us that the opposite of generativity is “stagnation”, when one’s efforts feel unseen, and when there is no one to receive what’s passed down. Here in Tai O, I could feel that tension. The boats still bobbed. The bricks still dried. But the line between preservation and decay felt thinner than ever. The motions continued, but meaning flickered. When no one is watching, even purpose begins to rust.

The economy explains why young people leave, but it doesn’t explain what gets lost when they do. This where the concept of transmission comes in. Most cultural psychologists would agree that transmission is the process where individuals acquire and pass on cultural knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and values from one generation to the next through modeling and storytelling. But that process naturally breaks when the audience disappears. When there’s no apprentice, no one willing to take it up, the tradition fades. In a society that prizes reinvention, tradition often feels like a burden. And so it is laid down, gently, like something no longer needed.

They call Tai O the Venice of the East for its stilted homes and canals, but its true beauty isn’t in how it looks. It’s in remembrance of the past, of a culture that may soon be lost. Walking through the quiet stilt village, I began to see my role differently: not just a visitor, but a witness. I couldn’t make shrimp paste, but I could preserve what it looked like to do so.

As the sun dipped below the horizon, I passed the same old man again. He was alone, kneeling by a row of drying bricks, checking their texture with his practiced fingers. The store around him was nearly silent, save for the creak of the bamboo racks in the breeze. I didn’t lift my camera. I just watched in quiet mourning. It wasn’t just that his hands were old. It was that there were no other hands beside his.