by Wu Ming-Yi
Dahu called for Moon and Stone and soon they appeared. Dahu decided to go back to camp to get spikes, a rappeling rope and a headlamp: he had to see what was down there.
“Dad, look!” Umav said, pulling Dahu back to reality. She was pointing at the TV. Dahu looked up and hey, wasn’t that at the Seventh Sisid? Dahu could tell immediately: that was the view looking out from the Lighthouse.
The shot started panning across Alice’s house, stopping for a few seconds. Then a head appeared through the window. That was Alice.
Seemingly before she’d had time to react, Alice in the shot jumped out of the window and dropped into the sea. There was barely any splash to be seen on the screen. It was like a perfectly executed dive by a trained dolphin.
Atile’i sang to calculate the time he had been away from Wayo Wayo. According to the Sea Sage, in the olden days the islanders wrote a song for every star, and because the stars were just too many in the sky nobody could truly learn all the island songs. Someone who said he had sung a new song was surely a liar, for the islanders assumed that the song already existed and had suddenly been recollected. All songs on the island of Wayo Wayo were old songs, which is the reason why you sometimes start crying when you hear an unfamiliar island melody.
These days Atile’i had been singing one island song from the moment the sun was born to the moment it passed away. He kept singing until he couldn’t remember how many songs he had sung, nor did he know which songs his parents and people in the village had taught him and which he had improvised. The songs he sang went on and on, like the sea itself. While he was singing, Atile’i often thought that all would be well if Rasula were here: she would harmonize with his melody, and then together they would sing a new song. He didn’t notice at first, but he had started pinching his throat so he could sing Rasula’s part. When the song ended the sound of the sea breeze made him feel like an empty cave, or like a translucent shell some crab had shed and left behind on the beach.
At the same time, Atile’i noticed that his body was changing: his gums often bled and his joints ached, too. He could not swim as smoothly as before. Sometimes he even felt dizzy, like he was back on land. (Never had Atile’i felt dizzy at sea).
Several days later Atile’i discovered a suppurating wound on his left leg, right over the spot where he had drawn the island of Wayo Wayo. He took this to be a bad sign. Lately the weather had been getting warmer, so warm that he could no longer escape the torrid midday heat by hiding out in his “house.” Worse, the whole island emitted a blinding glare and exuded a horrible rotten stench that blended with the raw smell of the ocean. Atile’I kept vomiting, and his body became weaker and weaker. Atile’i also noticed a huge increase in the number of insects on the island, with flies and mosquitos everywhere, and the currents had become erratic, too. Was the island approaching another world?
Atile’i had learned long ago from the Sea Sage that there was another world besides Wayo Wayo, and the past couple of days the idea that he was approaching this other world had been occurring to him. He tried to suppress the thought while anticipating the possibility that he was approaching the place whence the white man came, the place whither the hell bird and the ghost ship hastened. The problem was, did Kabang still rule over this other world? Atile’i didn’t have the slightest idea, and there was nobody he could ask. So when he discovered people visiting the island every so often, no matter how far away they were, he chose to dive and wait it out beneath the island. He had dug lots of “wells” all around the island that went all the way down to the sea, so that he could take cover at a moment’s notice. Yet once in a while Atile’i still imagined himself getting trapped and taken away by another race of man: the idea of this happening had him in its clutches, like a sickness.
Lately the hell bird and the ghost ship had been appearing far too often! He saw them almost every day. Several times while underwater Atile’i had even encountered “men” tightly clad from head to toe in black attire. Atile’i did not know if they’d seen him. He just looked for a place to hide. He was much better at swimming than they were, but because they held glowing things in their hands that darted hither and thither like slithery sea snakes, he suspected they might have caught a glimpse of him. Are they looking for me? That’s impossible, for in all the world, only men of Wayo Wayo know that I exist, right? No, Kabang also knows, and so does the ocean, Atile’i thought.
Today was the peak of Atile’i’s unease. He was burning up, almost too weak to stand. He intuited that he had been spotted by a hell bird with a single wing on its head. The hell bird raised swirling squalls all over, until it actually stopped in the northwest, which Atile’i knew to be one of the island’s firmest spots. It was about a day-and-night’s journey on foot. Although it was quite far from Atile’i’s hideout, he knew he might be discovered very soon. He was not surprised the next day to hear noises coming from that direction. He summoned his last ounce of strength, picked up his spear gun, and uncovered the “land lane” near his house that led all the way down to the sea. He dove right on in.
Right then it started hailing. Great chunks of hail knocked fish leaping out of the water senseless, and in no time the ocean was covered with stunned or lifeless fish. Atile’i was floating in a seething sea of lifeless fish, as if he himself had transformed into an enormous fish.
12. Another Island
This was a summer the islanders would never forget. It all started one gloomy morning at the cusp of dawn when hail began falling to the south of Haven. Woken out of the deepest dreams, people walked outside or stood by their windows and looked out, bewildered at a seemingly shrunken world. Lit by the streetlamps, shooting hunks of hail pounded the seashore, glowing like mini-asteroids with a silver-blue light. Although the sound of the hail battering the corrugated iron roofs, the asphalt road, the stone steps by the beach, the streetlamps and the cars parked by the side of the road must have been deafening, somehow people’s memories of the scene that morning were like silent movies: nobody recalled hearing a thing.
The hail immediately blasted several holes in the roof of the Seventh Sisid, and the first ray of dawn beamed down onto Hafay’s coffee pot, as though the light had shattered it. Many of the reporters in the press contingent camped out on the beach were hurt. Arrangements had been made for senior correspondents to stay in a five-star hotel in town, so most of the reporters on the beach were relatively young; but one senior reporter fond of gesticulating on camera like she was playing mah-jong had somehow failed to make it back to the five-star hotel the night before. Still in the same outfit, she was stunned by a piece of hail the moment she stepped out of the tent and was immediately rushed to hospital. The incident later became tabloid fodder. Once squawky, she reportedly became unusually quiet, soft-spoken and lucid after the incident, and was soon relieved of her regular duties.
The teams at the beach were reporting live while dodging chunks of hail, so that the scenes the nationwide audience saw that morning were somewhat chaotic, with shaky video and reporters holding various objects over their heads for protection. Many viewers found the morning news at once shocking and hilarious.
The hailstorm stopped as soon as it had started, but because of the hail everyone missed the moment they’d all been waiting for, when the Trash Vortex hit the shore in several giant waves. The hail was also the reason why everyone scrambled up onto the road and escaped the deluge. For in the moments after the hail stopped, the storm clouds kept changing shape, with white, lead-hued and purplish-gray clouds gathering into a magnificent soaring thunderhead. It was a cloud like a floating myth, like an overwrought line of epic verse. When they remembered it later on, many coastal aboriginal villagers said they had never seen a cloud formation like that before, that it was more impressive than the vibrant sky on the eve of a typhoon. The cameramen were shooting this astounding sight, and all the while the monster wave was rolling toward the shore in the faint light of dawn. Many thought the wave explained why they did not seem to remember he
aring anything during the hailstorm: though its source was near, the sound of the hail was nothing compared to the sonic force augured by the wave. That wave spoke with a cosmic voice, as if the risen moon had been silently storing up sound ever since time began and now let it out, all at once, in one great burst. By the time people figured out that the sound was coming from the sea, the wave was already upon them.
It had been exhilarating for the news crews to report live on the hail. So when the great wave finally hit the shore and swept away everything in sight, they were all momentarily transfixed, as if their feet were shackled to the road.
At first Lily and Han were thrilled to be able to capture the moment when the hail was coming through the ceiling of the Seventh Sisid, but Hafay felt something wasn’t right when she looked out to sea. She rushed the two reporters up to the attic to safety. Her keen Pangcah intuition was soon proven right when the wave sloshed in, as if suddenly raising the height of the sea. It almost dragged the Seventh Sisid into the ocean when it receded. Knowing the wave would not just let it go at that, Hafay told Han to carry Lily, who was bawling hysterically, up to the road. Han dropped everything but his camera and tore up the beach with Lily on his back.
Grabbing the photo on the counter of her and Ina on the way out, Hafay evacuated just before the wall facing the Sea House fell. Everything else—her herbal medicine jars, her coffee stash, the cask in which she brewed millet wine, her mattress, a stack of letter paper and a stone she had brought back from the shore of that creek in Taipei—spilled out on the sand. As if in response, the Sea House itself half-collapsed, and all its contents—photos of Toto, the books on the shelf, Ohiyo’s little cardboard box, Thom’s climbing ropes, Alice’s first, self-published book of poetic juvenilia, and some old clothes she hadn’t had time to toss in the donation bin—got dumped onto the beach and mixed together with a hodgepodge of smelly plastic refuse that the wave had strewn upon the shore. It was as if all the world’s garbage had been collected here.
The wave only produced one or two crests before it subsided and allowed the beach to reappear. But buried in a grotesque agglomeration of junk, the beach was radically altered, giving people the misapprehension they had landed on a distant planet. Han reached the road, consigned Lily to the care of a group of onlookers from a nearby aboriginal village, and immediately started shooting the uncanny scene. In a shot near Alice’s Sea House, he noticed a dead bird and zoomed in for a close-up: it was a rare Chinese egret. Once an avid bird-watcher, he had personal reasons for holding the shot longer than the average videojournalist would have. He held it until a sodden black-and-white cat scrambled out through a crack in a fallen wall and scurried across the frame from left to right.
Alice was not in the shot of the Sea House. She’d regained consciousness in a hospital bed just in time to witness the live feed of this scene on television. She only hesitated a few seconds before pushing aside a young nurse who had just come in and, like someone who’s just seen something, rushing toward the front entrance.
13. Atile’i
Walking along the mountain path, Alice had been thinking she smelled something. How to describe it? That smell mingled the warmth of sunlight, the invasiveness of seawater, the stink of raw fish and the harshness of musk. It was an odd amalgam of contradictory odors that could never go together.
Alice now knew it was the youth’s smell. It was so strong that she seemed to be able to smell him even when he wasn’t by her side. Now Ohiyo was trying to squirm her way out of Alice’s embrace. Alice held her close, afraid she’d run off if put down, and walked a bit slower. Cats are really soft little creatures. Holding her reminded Alice of this one time in kindergarten when she had found a black kitten walking home from school. She took care of it for three days without telling anyone. When she got home on the third day, the kitten was gone, but nobody in her family, not her mum, dad or elder brother, would admit to tossing it out. Alice refused to eat; it got so serious that she fainted and had to be sent to the hospital to get an IV. She only started eating rice gruel again one evening when she discovered her mother in tears by the hospital bed praying for intercession of the Bodhisattva Guanyin. The kitten never did come back. From then on, whenever she saw a black cat on the street, she would think it was the one that had walked off or gotten thrown out.
She and the youth finally made it within sight of the Seaside House. He saw a crowd of people around when they were still a ways off, and motioned for Alice to look. Those were reporters and people who were there to clear the beach. Alice hesitated, then walked up a nearby rise and found where her conspicuous yellow car was parked.
“Looks as if Dahu charged the battery for me,” Alice said to herself.
She took a deep breath. So many fateful events in such a short time! As if something had been pushing her from behind. The path was slippery. A drizzle was falling, so faint it was barely visible to the naked eye. A flock of Japanese white-eyes flew by Alice and the youth up ahead from the right.
Alice tried to recall exactly what had happened that day when the cameras focused on her window. It wasn’t out of anger, nor was she trying to escape. Still less was she really trying to end her life. She’d been waiting for Ohiyo to get back from her walk, and it is very important to stay alive when you have a reason to wait. Maybe she just temporarily lost control of her own body.
Alice had always been like this. Similar things had happened to her a few times in university. One time her date had stood her up on Valentine’s Day. Befuddled, she paid the bill and bumped into the French window on the way out, startling everyone in the café. Back home, still not in her right mind, she had left the gas on, giving her family an awful fright. Her extreme reaction was just too much for her boyfriend, who soon proposed breaking up. Her mother remembered that as a girl Alice had gotten on really well with her maternal grandmother, so she decided to let Alice go stay with her grandmother for a while.
Alice never found out why her boyfriend had not kept the date. She could not even recall what he looked like. It was living in the fishing village she remembered. She could just close her eyes and the images would appear in her mind, gliding toward her: the village street; at the end of the street the temple to the sea goddess Matsu, built facing the sea; the mudflats crisscrossed with ruts from the buffalo carts, and the raw ocean breeze … Was this vision the earliest reason for her later insistence on living by the seashore?
When her mother took her home as a girl, Grandma would often take Alice oyster picking. She’d pick the oysters off the racks, put them in hempen sacks, then load the sacks onto the water buffalo cart one by one. The cart felt totally different on the mud: it was like rolling over something extremely soft, something living. Only long after did Alice realize that it felt really similar walking on the forest floor.
When Alice visited that time in university, some petrochemical firm had already moved in and reclaimed land for a refinery in another little village to the south. Life changed after the plant was finished: Grandma’s oyster field silted up more and more every year, occasionally an oily film slicked the ocean, and the sky was always hazy. Grandma had to drag the water buffalo into the icy sea every few days to check the racks or pick oysters. Oyster picking is toil, and the winter wind off the ocean is chill, but sitting in the cart laden with oysters on the way back, with the wheels leaving much deeper tracks in the mud, you had such a steady, satisfied feeling. After picking the oysters, Grandma would spend the whole afternoon sitting on a chair “shucking” them. Those tough-looking oysters were actually soft inside. In a few short months Alice got used to oyster soup, oyster omelette, oyster crisp, mud crab and yam greens planted in the backyard. The days passed, and at some point so did her boyfriend’s face.
Alice thought later maybe her personality changed in some subtle way during those days she spent at Grandma’s place. When she went back after her break, her classmates all felt she was different.
The year Thom and Alice started building the Seaside H
ouse, Alice’s brother called to inform her of Grandma’s death.
“What did she die of?”
“Of old age.”
“Of old age,” Alice said, as if reciting. Actually Grandma had suffered from lung and kidney disease for more than a decade. Most of the people in the village left the world on this account. So one holiday, Alice and Thom made a trip back to the fishing village on the other side of the island. Driving through, they could hardly see any open gates. There didn’t seem to be anyone there. From the seashore they saw that another petrochemical plant had been built to the north. Alice vaguely remembered protests against the plant over quite a number of years, but it got built in the end. Lots of bird-watchers used to visit the shore, huddling behind their telescopes as if anticipating the advent of some great change in their lives. But later, according to Ming, after the petrochemical plants, even the birds had changed direction.
The plants needed workers, not old people. One time when Alice went back for a visit, Grandma launched into a litany of the conditions the neighbors were suffering from. Usually a reserved person, Grandma just would not stop talking that day, like she was afraid she’d never get another chance. Alice listened, feeling that those old folks who’d left the world before Grandma had probably died of loneliness, and that loneliness had led to the other symptoms.
Thom stood on the strand. Mostly buried in the sand, the oyster rack only reached his calf. Grandma’s house, the water buffalo shed and the empty oyster racks seemed like an assemblage of monuments without anything to commemorate. And without anybody to maintain them, the bracken and the sandy muck were gradually encroaching.
