The Man with the Compound Eyes (23 page)

It’s been raining a lot the past few years. Some places will get several hundred millimeters of precipitation in a single day when there’s no typhoon. Summer’s gotten extremely hot and long, and there’s a shower almost every day. My friend Ming told me that some of his bird-watching friends have discovered that certain migratory birds can’t even recognize the coastline anymore, because it’s changing too fast. They hesitate before they land. It’s in a sorry state, but this is our island home.

I also brought this to show you. Here. It’s a digital photo frame. The things it displays are called photographs, and the photographs inside it are images of the past. Interesting, don’t you think? These are my folks. And this is the place where they finally settled down in Taipei. It was called the Chung Hwa Market. We were really poor when I was little. My parents worked as hard as they could to send my brother and me through school. They thought that we’d do well in life if we got an education. My dad apprenticed in an electrical supply store. While he was out with the boss repairing air conditioners, my mother sold little egg-shaped sponge cakes in the market. My dad’s boss let us a room on the third floor, probably about the size of this hut. My mother had us stay home and study instead of minding the cake stand, except on holidays. Both my brother and I really liked baking those cakes. You bake the one side, turn it over, then you bake the other. They smelled so good! I’ll buy you some next time I go into town.

Look, this was my home in the Chung Hwa Market. We only had one bed. Mum, Dad, my brother and I all slept on the same bed. When I was a girl I often dreamed of leaving that home.

This is Thom, my husband, and this is our son, Toto. He was still an infant at the time.

Are there mountains on your island? The thing we’re on right now is called a mountain, and that tall pointy place in the photo is a mountain.

This is a “true touch” topographical map. Try touching it. Doesn’t it feel upraised, furry, wet? Some places feel hard. In the past you could just draw something pointy on a map and that was a mountain, but feel it now: that’s what a mountain is supposed to feel like. Taiwan is a small island, but the mountains here are just incredible. My husband and son really loved mountain climbing. One day they went climbing and never came back.

My good friend Dahu found Thom’s body a while ago, but my son has completely vanished, like a leaf blown into the forest, never to return. They only went for a visit, not expecting that the mountain would have them stay forever, I sometimes think.

Since then I’ve mostly been living alone in that house by the sea. At first we called it the Seaside House, but later the sea level rose and other people started calling it the Sea House. Now I call it Alice’s Island.

To tell you the truth, I felt so much sadder losing my son than I did when my mother passed away. Your mother must be devastated. If my son were still here, he might be as tall as you in a few years. You know, I’m a second child, just like you. If you don’t mind counting girls, that is.

Ah, not a cloud in the sky. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen such a clear sky. The
Nalusa
is so beautiful and bright this evening. People on Wayo Wayo see the same
Nalusa
. Do you realize, Atile’i, that the
Nalusa
you see now is the same
Nalusa
you saw on Gesi Gesi?

Sometimes I talk and talk and I think he can understand everything I’ve said. It’s not understanding in the linguistic sense, but in some other sense.

One morning he said, “
Ohiyo
, good morning.” (I taught him how to say this). And I replied,
“i-Wagudoma-siliyamala”
(It’s very fair at sea today). We’ve gotten used to using each other’s language or mixing the two languages together.

In talking to Atile’i I’ve noticed that he often seems to repeat greeting queries. He keeps asking me,
“i-Wagudoma-silisaluga?”
—a question that may mean, “Is the weather fair at sea today?” to which the other person is supposed to reply
“i-Wagudoma-siliyamala.”
At first I was puzzled, because we weren’t going out to sea, so what did it matter if the weather at sea was fair or not. But you’re still supposed to reply, “Very fair.” Sometimes when the weather isn’t fair at all, when it’s raining and the waves are watching the island coldly from afar, Atile’i will still smile and say, “The weather at sea today is very fair.”

Atile’i looked really happy that day, maybe because I gave him pen and paper of his own. He kept asking me, “Is the weather fair at sea today?” And I kept replying. Three minutes later, he asked again, for the sixth time. The seventh query came less than five minutes later.

I didn’t mean to ignore him, but my mind was wandering. Not having received my reply, Atile’i looked humiliated, as if he’d been snubbed by his best friend. He had to confront me.

“You must reply: ‘Very fair.’ ”

“But I already did.”

“When someone asks, ‘Is the weather fair at sea today?’ And you hear. When you hear you must reply, ‘Very fair.’ ”

“Even if it’s
raining as hard as it is now
, you still have to reply in this way?”

“Yes.”

“Even if you don’t feel like replying?”

“Yes.”

We both gazed out at the sea, which seemed to be slowly bringing rain. Every so often a breaker would come rolling in. Following a silence of ten waves, Atile’i asked me another time, “Is the weather fair at sea today?”

“Very fair,” I replied and for the first time I realized I could ask him back. “Is the weather fair on your sea today?”

“Yes it is,
extremely fair
,” Atile’i replied.

I don’t know why, but right at that moment we both began to cry.

When I started to “categorize” all this trash I was amazed at all the strange, smashed-up stuff that turned up: the body panel of a scooter, a stroller, condoms, needles, bras, nylons, etc. I often wonder who the owners were and in what circumstances they threw these things out. I remember one time in the army I made a bet with a comrade that if I had the guts to wear a bra to bayonet practice he had to treat the whole company to drinks. Well, I really did it and we all laughed our heads off. That evening when I sneaked out to buy a midnight snack with a buddy, I scrunched up that pink lace bra and tossed it into the ocean. Sometimes I get this crazy idea it’s floated back here with the Trash Vortex.

I find lots of people are misled by news reports into thinking that the only materials that won’t decompose are plastics. My observation these past few days is that artificial fibers in general are also amazingly durable. And there are lots of things in plastic bags or styrofoam containers that are still particularly intact. I’ve found things like rings, glasses, watches and cell phones—these get sorted as “intact valuables.” I hear someone even found gold! That’s why there are so many outsiders on the beach these days: they think they can find treasures in the trash. But I’m more concerned about the residents of the tribal villages. They once depended on coastal planting and fishing to make a living, and now they can only get by picking through the trash on the beach. It’s hard to escape an occupation, and once
you’re used to a certain lifestyle it’s hard to change. That’s what Millet told me, anyway.

I brought Millet here, too, when we were still together. We went for a few strolls along this exact same stretch of beach. This one time, one of her earrings fell out. We searched all over the beach, but instead of finding it we lost the other earring. I kissed one of her ringless ears and she squinted at me like a sleepy cat. I wonder if that pair of earrings is still somewhere on the beach.

Sometimes we also find living creatures trapped in the trash. Some fish seem to have survived in plastic bags for quite a long time. We discovered a nearly complete whale skeleton as well. What we find most often is dead sea turtles, ordinary green sea turtles as well as loggerheads and leatherbacks. The meat has usually been eaten, leaving only an empty shell behind. We notify the marine biologists, who come right away and measure the shells on the beach. These shells won’t rot anytime soon: in the end all they’ll do for these poor creatures is prove they once existed.

Each piece of trash that floated here seems to have brought a story with it from across the sea, because anything that’s been thrown away has its own tale to tell.

For the past week, various experts have been gathering on the beach. There are specialists in ocean currents, littoral biology, plastics, etc. Today there was a team of trash experts from Germany who have reportedly come to “study” the trash we’ve sorted. They took samples, which had to be clearly labeled, indicating where each thing was found and how much it weighs. I hear one of the trash experts wrote a cultural history of Germany based on a landfill in the Ruhr. He recommended that the trash on the beach be sorted according to “function” not recycling value, because who knows? Maybe some day it might be an important source for the study of the cultural history of globalization.

Our public officials, it seems, authorized the team to take a certain quantity of samples while refusing to implement an overly fussy trash-sorting system. They need to get this taken care of before the upcoming election. Some of the higher-ups told us privately that all we have to do is sort the trash into recyclable valuables and worthless junk, then divide the
junk into combustibles and noncombustibles, and to do it as quickly as possible. “Junk is junk even after you’ve sorted it. What good does it do to study this stuff?” they said.

Though “Restore the Shore, Formosa!” (the stupid slogan the government came up with to get everyone involved in the “beach cleanup”) seems to be in full swing, I hear the expert assessment is that it’ll take more than a century for the coast to return to normal. For myself, I doubt whether there is even such a thing as “normal” anymore. Does the Seventh Sisid count as part of “normal?”

You know Hai Lee, the writer of ocean literature? He often visits the area around the Seventh Sisid, right? The past few days he’s been bringing students and volunteers to gather creatures that washed up dead on the beach. They’ve found shrimp, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, brittle stars, hermit crabs and true crabs. He says there are many species he’s never seen before. I asked him whether the sea would return to normal someday, and he said there’s no such thing as normal anymore: everything’s changed.

I said that’s not what my father taught me. My father said there were two things in this world that would never change: the mountains and the sea.

According to Bunun tradition, a man who doesn’t know how to hunt is not a real man. The Atayal call us “shadows,” because our hunting skills are so refined. But my father often said that the first thing to hunting isn’t learning how to hunt but getting to know the mountains.

Father said that during the colonial era the Japanese kept forcing the Bunun to move around for fear we would unite against the authorities. They even forced us to cultivate rice, just to prevent us from getting to know the mountains. Once we got used to paddy agriculture, the status of a hunter plummeted, and the Bunun people knew the mountains less and less. And mountains will not protect a person who does not know them.

My father said that traditionally Bunun kids start young, learning diverse mountain lore until they are old enough to participate in the hunt. That’s the year they undergo the ear-shooting ritual, which is like a qualifying examination to become a hunter.

I will always remember that year, the first time I was allowed to take part in the ear-shooting ritual. The elders put the targets in the ritual ground. There were six ears in all: at the top a pair of deer ears, in the middle a pair of roebuck ears, and at the bottom a goat ear and a wild boar ear. The goat ear was a furry little thing, so adorable. We stood so close that for a Bunun kid who had gotten trained in the use of a bow and arrow it should have been almost impossible to miss. My father was an ace marksman, both with a gun and with a bow. From the time I picked up a bow and arrow as a boy I was always told I had my father’s shooting stance. The elders took turns carrying us kids to face the targets, and the arrows would pierce the ears with a thunk. They carried my brother out and his arrow hit an ear, a deer ear. Then it was my turn. I picked up the bow with supreme confidence and aimed, but in the instant I shot for some reason my bow sagged. I hit the goat ear instead!

The goat ear was so cute and tiny and I went and shot it.

Everyone was dumbfounded, and my father’s face colored. Why? Because for the ear-shooting ritual you have to shoot either a deer ear or a roebuck ear. If you miss and shoot a wild boar ear it means you’ll get scared whenever you see a boar. And a boy who shoots a goat ear will always walk along the brink of a cliff, just like a mountain goat.

I shot the goat ear. My father wouldn’t talk to me for what seemed like forever. I thought he was mad at me. Only later did I realize he was actually worried for me.

My father is a
Lavian
, the captain of a hunting party. Our hunting ground is huge. We pile
badan
around it. See those piles of reeds over there? They mark our territory. Though I’m my father’s son, the title of
Lavian
is not hereditary. Whether a young hunter can become
Lavian
or not depends on many things—hunting, cooperation and leadership skills, and much else. Only the best young hunter has a chance to become
Lavian
. Although I had shot the goat ear, I still performed the best in the hunting ground. But I sensed that my father remained very worried. He thought that shooting the goat ear was bad luck that would come back and haunt me.

One time we tried to round up a large boar infamous for its repeated
getaways. It had killed a number of hunting dogs, and once it even managed to escape after taking a couple of my father’s bullets. My father said it was
Hanito
, an evil spirit, and that you shouldn’t look it in the eyes when you shot it or you would become enthralled.