The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

  The year after the flood, Hafay’s Ina took her back to the east coast. Instead of going back to the village, Ina decided to stay in town. She applied for a job in a massage parlor and rented a studio apartment. Every day when Hafay got up Ina would have breakfast ready for her. She would have just gotten off work, her hair looking exactly the same as when she’d left the night before.

  Sometimes Hafay wondered whether people were right to say that you could choose your own life. Could you really? After losing her Ina, what else could Hafay do but follow in her footsteps? And if she had not spent those few years in that line of work, how could she possibly have saved so much money so quickly, enough to build the Seventh Sisid? Life is sometimes a trade-off. I give you something of mine in exchange for something of yours, or I borrow from the future to get what I don’t have now. Sometimes after all the trading is done, you get back something you’d given up, Hafay sometimes thought.

  Hafay did not shed a single tear when she saw the Seventh Sisid collapse, probably because she’d had a premonition that one day the house would have to be returned, most suitably to the sea.

  That day, after helping Hafay clean up the things that had fallen out of the Seventh Sisid, Dahu drove Alice’s car to school, charged the battery, drove back and parked it. Then he walked over and sat down by Hafay, handing her a lunchbox. In all this time, Hafay’s eyes had not for a single instant left the place where her house had been.

  Dahu asked: “You got a place to stay?”

  Hafay shook her head.

  “Stay with us then, for the time being. I’ve moved to a Bunun village down south in Tai-tung. The people in the village are building traditional houses. I’ve built one myself, but nobody’s living in them yet. I can live in mine for now, and you and Umav can stay with my Uncle Anu. There’s air con at his place, so it’s more comfortable. If Alice comes back and doesn’t have a place to stay, I’ll invite her to come crash there, too,” Dahu said, all in a rush.

  Hafay shook her head and said, “I can go stay at an inn.”

  “Don’t get on the bad side of your bank account, Hafay. Don’t quarrel with your bread and butter. It’ll take some time to rebuild, but maybe if you save some money the Seventh Sisid can be restored.”

  Hafay didn’t say a word, or respond in any way.

  “We’re still alive, right?” Dahu loaded the things he had gathered into the backseat, then opened the door to the passenger side. Many years later, Hafay would recall that Dahu’s gesture just meant so much to her, because at the time she was unable to decide anything for herself. She really needed someone to open the door for her.

  They drove south along the coast. Hafay faced the driver’s side, gazing past Dahu’s melancholy profile through the window out to sea. Only now did she realize that the Trash Vortex or whatever it was called had pretty much covered the shoreline. The garbage glittered in the sunshine like it was encrusted with jewels. Dahu did not say anything to Hafay the entire way, while in the backseat his daughter Umav slept on Hafay’s chaotic pile of luggage.

  When they were almost at Deer County in Tai-tung, Hafay said, “At least I’ve still got the coffee machine.” Dahu burst out laughing.

  “Why’re you going back to the village?” Hafay asked.

  Dahu said, “I’ve been away a long time. I started out with a plan to go to the city and get an education, then after I graduated I just wanted to come back to the village to teach elementary school. I didn’t expect to fall in love with my wife. She was the reason I left the village again.” In a quiet voice, Dahu started telling Hafay about him and Millet, as the headlights probed the long, nearly straight highway ahead.

  “I can make a bit more driving the taxi in Haven, but lately I’ve been thinking: Forget it, you know? The good thing about the village is that you’re welcome there no matter when you go back, and no matter what kind of job you do you can always scrape by. As it happens I’ve got an uncle here, Uncle Anu. He went to the city when he was young to get himself a master’s degree, just like me, and one year when he was back for a visit he heard there was this really nice piece of land that a consortium wanted to build a columbarium on. Uncle Anu managed to get a loan to buy the land. He borrowed some from friends and the rest from the bank. He does tours there at a place he calls the Forest Church. He teaches the city folk about the Bunun lifestyle, how we plant millet, how we hunt and build our houses. It’s been a while now. I’ve been coming down and helping out every chance I get. Now I’ll just move back here for good. Besides, Umav has kids to play with in the village.”

  “You haven’t mentioned this to Alice, have you?”

  “Not yet. This is something I just decided recently.”

  Everything is just getting started, Hafay thought.

  It was already evening when they got to the village. Dahu gently shook Umav awake, and friends in the village were making dinner for everyone, not just for Hafay and Dahu, but also for some tribespeople who’d just gotten back from cleaning up the beach.

  Then a stocky middle-aged fellow with a childlike grin walked over and slapped Dahu on the back. Dahu introduced them: “Anu, Bunun.” Dahu pointed at Hafay and said, “Hafay, Pangcah.”

  Anu was a talkative fellow. He got Hafay to listen to him when she was feeling depressed and did not want to listen to anything. He told her all about why he had founded the Forest Church, what problems he’d had, how much money he still owed, how many times the bank had tried to seize his house, and so on.

  “My house almost got auctioned off quite a number of times.”

  “Then why didn’t it?”

  “Nobody’s interested. Who would want to buy it, in this location? Only Bunun people would be willing to live here. Ha ha! It’s rotten luck for the bank. I hear the loan officer that approved my mortgage lost his job!” he said, laughing, and Hafay could not help laughing along with him.

  “There are only two kinds of people who would loan money to Anu: angels and fools,” Dahu said.

  Soon Anu was lying on the floor, drunk, and wouldn’t budge. His friends and relatives all went home. Dahu took Hafay to the guest room, which had two single beds, one for Hafay and the other for Umav.

  Hafay lay on the bed but just couldn’t get to sleep, not expecting that Umav would also be having a sleepless night. Umav was sitting up in bed, watching the moonlight outside.

  “Auntie Hafay, want to take a walk in the Forest Church?”

  “The church? Right now?”

  “Yeah, now.”

  “Do you have keys?”

  Umav looked at Hafay, surprised. “How could there be keys to the forest?”

  They walked to the end of the road, passed a mesa with a view of the river valley below, and came to stand in front of two towering trees. Umav said, “This is the gate.” Hafay realized she had gotten it all wrong: the Forest Church was a tract of woodland without even so much as a fence around it. The two of them stood there as if they had turned into a couple of animals.

  “I thought it was a real church.”

  “What do you mean, a real church? Are there false churches, too?”

  “That’s not what I meant …” Hafay said. “What’s inside?”

  “Walking trees,” said Umav.

  16. Hafay

  “Once upon a time, there was a girl who always took her basket along when she went to work in the fields, but very mysteriously would never allow anyone to peek inside. But a nosy neighbor wondered why there was always a handsome young man helping the girl plow and plant when she was working. So the neighbor went behind the girl’s back and told her Ina.”

  “What was the girl planting?”

  “Millet, I guess.”

  “My dad says that you don’t really have to plant millet; we can just scatter the seeds around.”

  “Probably where the girl was living they had to pick up stones and turn the soil and plant the seeds.”

  “I guess she would never admit that there was someone helping her.”

>   “Good guess. You’re so smart, Umav. The girl just denied everything. Her Ina had a funny feeling about her daughter’s basket, and suspected it might have something to do with the handsome young man the nosy neighbor had told her about. One day the girl got sick. She tossed the basket by her pillow and lay in bed. Her curious Ina waited until she was fast asleep, then took off the cover and looked inside. She could hardly believe her eyes: inside the basket was a fish, two feet long and seven inches wide.”

  “How big is that?”

  “This big.” Hafay showed Umav with her hands, and Umav was obviously satisfied. “My dad has caught way bigger.”

  “The mother cooked and ate the fish, and then put the bones back in the basket. When the daughter woke up and discovered the fish was gone she went and asked her mother, ‘Where’s my fish, Ina?’ Her Ina told her off, yelling, ‘What an ungrateful daughter you are! The other day when we pounded mochi sticky rice there wasn’t anything to go with it, and there you were hiding a great big fish from me. How dare you!’ ”

  “The daughter must have been angry because her mother got her all wrong.”

  “Maybe she got angry at her Ina, or maybe there was some other reason, but in any event, the daughter was so sad when she heard what her Ina had done that she swallowed the bones in the basket and died. Turns out that handsome man was a fish in human form.”

  “Why not a handsome man in fish form?” Umav asked.

  “That makes sense, too. My Ina told me the story, but I forgot to ask her why it wasn’t the other way around. Umav, you’re so bright.”

  Dahu couldn’t stop chuckling. Pangcah and Bunun people are both fond of making up stories. When he was a kid Dahu asked his father: “Who did you hear the story from?”

  “From the elders.”

  “Who did the elders hear the story from?”

  “From even older elders.”

  “But the even older elders were children once, too, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, they were, Dahu.”

  “So they heard the story, too.”

  Dahu’s father thought it over and said, “Dahu’s right, even the oldest elders were children once. A story can take children places they’ve never been before and tell them about things that happened to folks even older than their elders.”

  Dahu had noticed that Umav was really paying attention when Hafay told her the story. She wasn’t like that with other people. She really seemed to trust Hafay. The first day Hafay came to stay with them Dahu was a bit worried, but the next day when he heard Umav had taken her to the Forest Church in the middle of the night, his mind was set to rest. He knew the sacred trees there awakened fear, awe and caution, and that nobody who had seen those trees would want to end her life.

  These past few days Dahu had gone back and forth between Deer County and Haven more times than he could count. The stench along the shoreline was getting worse, and it was especially stuffy there. The concrete wave-dispersal tetrapods piled along a long stretch of the east coast made the cleanup work all the more difficult. A few environmental groups with chapters operating in several local high schools and universities threw themselves into the coastal cleanup. It was heartwarming to see young people all along the way relaying the trash away, but there just weren’t enough vehicles. It wasn’t looking like the shore would return to its former self anytime soon.

  Dahu’s junior high school classmate Ali was a primary supervisor at a deep ocean water company. He came to the cleanup site to carry out an inspection wearing the latest model of respirator. “I’m telling you, it’s not in the papers yet, but over ninety per cent of our pumps and pipes are devastated. The pipes are covered in trash from the vortex. We put an underwater camera down and it’s not a pretty sight: the bottom’s done for.”

  “Worse than the county government says?”

  “Dahu, don’t be so naive! How could the county government possibly tell the truth? Seriously, I’m worried that my boss is going to just leave the pipes in the Pacific and take the hell off.”

  “I can’t say for anyone else, but I believe your boss has it in him, absolutely.”

  “Christ, the County Mayor is probably going to up and leave one of these days.”

  The sea once had the power to put fear in the hearts of the people living along the coast, and to change their fates, but now it had turned into a demented old man with some teeth missing. The wind blew up light plastic bags that had dried in the sun. They were like flowers, unbearably putrid flowers. Having lived all that time in Haven, Dahu always felt half-Pangcah himself, and now he couldn’t help worrying about his Pangcah friends. How would they survive? And what would become of their long-imperiled fishing culture?

  Ali picked up a section of hard plastic tubing that had probably floated around in the ocean for decades and said, “We can process glass bottles easily, but nobody knows what to do about these older plastic tubes. You know what? The past few years the government’s poured tons of funding into reducing the amount of garbage in the vortex, but it’s actually a scam. Think about it. Where is the trash supposed to be buried after it’s been cleaned up? All the incinerators, landfills and advanced trash-sorting facilities on the island wouldn’t have enough capacity to digest it all. You think Ilan and Taipei will welcome the garbage out of the goodness of their hearts? Dammit! Japan and China have been passing the buck, but garbage is fair, and now the ocean currents have broken the vortex up and everyone’s getting what’s coming to him.”

  On the last trip before dark, Dahu discovered that Alice’s bright yellow car was not where he’d parked it. She must have taken it. Just then his cell phone rang, and sure enough it was Alice.

  “Dahu, can you let me stay in your hunting hut?”

  “Sure, but it hasn’t been used in a long time. I hope it’s still habitable.”

  “Great. Thank you, Dahu.”

  “You want to live there?”

  “Well … sort of.”

  “It’s not too comfortable.”

  “No, it’ll be fine. I’ve got a tent and a full set of climbing gear. No need to worry about me. Oh yeah, how’s Hafay?”

  “She’s fine, but the Seventh Sisid collapsed.”

  “I saw. The same thing will happen to the Sea House, I reckon.”

  “Yeah, maybe. When the time comes everything will collapse. Where are you now?”

  “Close to your hut.”

  “Can I go over and help?”

  “No, no help, I don’t need any help. Dahu, listen to me, I want to be left alone for a while. I’ll come and find you when I’m ready.”

  When Dahu got back to the village that evening, Umav told him that she’d taken Hafay to see the walking trees again in the morning. “It’s different during the day.” The walking trees was actually a stand of fig, phoebe and autumn maple trees, weeping fig trees in particular. The aerial roots of fig trees drop from the branches down to the ground and grow into prop roots. Villagers once used fig trees as border markers, only to discover that they could “up and walk.”

  “Come spring, I guarantee you’re in for a surprise.”

  “You mean in the forest, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “There’ll be butterflies,” Umav interrupted.

  “Yes, there will. In winter, some different species of crow butterflies will gather here, and for a certain time after they pupate there’ll be golden cocoons everywhere. Later they’ll emerge from their cocoons and there’ll be swarms of butterflies flying wing above wing. Ah! It’s a moving sight to see.”

  “Really! I guess I’ll come next year and see for myself.”

  “You can just settle down here. Our village could use an extra pair of hands. Lots of tourists are making the trip already. We’ve survived relying on this forest and that mountain.”

  Hafay didn’t respond. Dahu felt he’d been a bit too forward in saying what he’d said, but it was too late to unsay it now.

  Several days later, Dahu encountered Hafay as he was a
rranging things in the traditional house in front of the Forest Church. She couldn’t get to sleep. So they started chatting while tying the corn up to dry by the window. After helping with the coastal cleanup for the past week, Dahu was exhausted. Hafay seemed to sense this and said: “You’re beat, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “People give off a certain smell when they’re tired.” She laid her hands on Dahu’s shoulders and started to give him a massage.

  “Do they? I’ve never heard that before.”

  “I’m a professional, you know! I used to work as a masseuse in Haven.” The sound of the wind whistling through the Forest Church could be heard a long way off. The breeze on Dahu’s back really relaxed his muscles. “I really studied the art of massage. Ina taught me, and so did other girls in the massage place. Your sense of touch can tell you a lot. Joints and tendons can feel like they are bubbling with vital energy, like there’s some live animal running around in there. A person who’s giving a massage uses her fingers, elbows and joints to apply pressure to those places and loosen them up. I kid you not, sometimes you’ll see dark vapors escaping from a guy’s body. But if you inhale them you’ll have a terrible pallor the next day.”

  “Really? Sounds almost supernatural.”

  “It’s true. Nothing supernatural about it.”

  “What were the customers like?” Dahu knew but asked anyway.

  “All guys. They came for a hand job. The massage was just kind of on the way.”

  Dahu was surprised that Hafay would be so candid. Indeed, there were two kinds of masseuses. A few were real masseuses, but most were the other kind, and Millet was the other kind. It must be obvious to Hafay what he was thinking. Dahu blushed.

  “Aiya, it’s no big deal. It’s just making money by doing another kind of labor, that’s all.”

  “You’re right.” Dahu did not know how to respond, so he laughed and said, “Actually, I’ve been to a place like that.” As soon as he had said it he felt he had said the wrong thing.

  “You told me, that day, when we were driving. You mentioned Millet.”