by Wu Ming-Yi
The kid says he’s from an island called Wayo Wayo. I’m sure he told me why he left his island and drifted here with the Trash Vortex. He seems to think that the Trash Vortex is an island, too, and he calls it Gesi Gesi. But I don’t get his explanation of the meaning of gesi gesi in his language.
Though I concentrate when he talks, I cannot comprehend his speech, so when he tells his stories and gets to the most critical moments, I have to keep leaping great ravines in order to keep up with him.
But when he said, “My name is Atile’i,” I understood him right away.
There was nobody there when I returned to where I’d asked Atile’i to wait for me that day. Just as I was about to give up looking, he suddenly walked out from behind a tree. It was as if he was part of the trunk. That gave me quite a fright! Apparently he was making sure I meant him no harm and that I’d not brought anyone else with me. I almost forgot that he was seriously wounded; even with an injured leg he seemed to have the ability to blend into the wilderness.
He also had an incredible tolerance for pain. I received some nursing training when I was younger and I knew immediately that his ankle might be dislocated, maybe broken in a few places. But when I returned, the dislocated joint had been put back in place. He must have gritted his teeth and readjusted it himself. Initially I was going to give him my arm and help him along all the way to Dahu’s hunting hut, but he insisted on hobbling along on his own. He was like an injured beast, wary of his surroundings. I braced his leg with a makeshift splint and gave him some vitamins to restore his strength and some antibiotics to prevent infection.
Dahu’s hut is really close to a piece of farmland Thom and I purchased. We used to go there on holidays to tend the garden and stay for dinner in the hut. After settling Atile’i in, I made another trip to the seashore to see what shape my house was in.
The sea is totally changed. From a distance it is still blue, or even multihued on account of the garbage. But having spent time with the sea on a daily basis I can feel its emotions. Now the sea seems to be made out of pain and misery.
While having a meal in town I saw that Ming had written a letter to the editor. He described this latest incident as “payback.” “In media reports on the incident,” he wrote, “the island seems to be a victim, as if the island is a person who has been wronged. There’s never any mention of the fact that actually we contributed to the formation of the Trash Vortex. Considering the size of our island we made a pretty big contribution. In the past we avoided paying the inevitable price of development, and let more impoverished regions bear the cost for us, but now it’s payback time: the sea has sent the bill for the interest.”
I went to a hypermart to buy some rations and another, camping-style tent to store in the car. Before I knew it the sky was getting dark. By the time I hurried onto the mountain path I was losing my footing every few steps even with the flashlight. Just when I was starting to panic, a shadow flashed through the trees. My heart skipped a beat, but then I saw the shadow was limping: it was Atile’i. Atile’i turned and walked ahead, never letting himself out of my sight. The kid was showing me the way.
Atile’i’s leg is gradually healing. One day when I was writing at my desk, Atile’i picked up a stone, sitting nonchalantly in the doorway. Suddenly all the muscles in his body tensed up and he hurtled the stone so hard it was like he was throwing part of his own body. He hit a green pigeon. I spent some time explaining to him that I have enough money for food and we don’t have to kill birds, but he didn’t really seem to get it. At night he’s always alert to the symphony of mountain sounds, like a beast lying in wait for prey.
Sometimes he looks off in the distance like he’s listening to the music of the spheres. Sometimes he adopts a strange pose, with his right hand palm up and his left leg slightly bent. I ask him what he’s doing but he doesn’t say a word. It’s like he’s turned himself into a tree.
Much to my amazement Atile’i can imitate the call of any bird near the hut, even ones he’s never seen before. As long as he hears a birdcall seven or eight times he can do such a convincing imitation that he fools even the birds themselves. One time when he was sitting by the path he listened to the call of a crested thrush for all of a minute and imitated it at the top of his lungs, as if he’d turned into a being with a human body and the voice of a crested thrush, a voice that made all the lady crested thrushes fly down like they’d fallen in love with him.
A language that one group of people uses to communicate thoughts and intents sounds to another group like the calls of a screech owl or a muntjac. If we really tried learning birdsong the way we learn French or Russian, taking, say, two classes a day and keeping it up, would we eventually be able to talk with the birds? The very notion makes me all the more determined to learn the language of Wayo Wayo.
But language learning is long haul. One time I asked Atile’i where Wayo Wayo was, but he did not seem to understand. He opened the fingers of one hand and added the pinkie and ring finger of the other hand, as if to indicate a certain number. I hit upon the idea of giving him pen and paper and getting him to draw Wayo Wayo. He went into his own little world. I only expected a sketch, but he really put his heart into it.
Sometimes he draws with his fingers, sometimes with his teeth, sometimes even with his tears. When he finishes a picture he asks for another piece of paper. By now I can tell that he is going to piece the pictures together into a story. The first picture is of an old man doing the jellyfish float next to a few little boats. I can’t tell what it means, but think I should go into town to buy him a sketchbook, so he doesn’t have to keep drawing on his body. And this way I’ll eventually have an illustrated anthology of the tales of Wayo Wayo.
Perhaps because I don’t think he can completely understand me, I often feel like talking to him. It’s like talking through an open window.
This is also an island, the island of Taiwan. In the olden days people called it Formosa. Look, this is an aerial view of Taiwan. You’ve probably never seen a photograph before, eh? Oh, that’s right, maybe you saw lots of photographs on Gesi Gesi, all blurry because they’d been immersed in seawater. What’s an aerial view? It’s like a bird looking down at Taiwan from above the clouds. Look, there’s ocean on this side of the island, and ocean on this side, this side and this side. It’s surrounded by ocean on all four sides, so we call it an island. So actually, no matter which way people turn on an island, they’re always facing the sea.
I don’t know too much about science, but I learned some geography in school, and according to geographers the island of Taiwan only took on its present shape two to six million years ago. Do you have any idea how many years that is? It’s a long, long time ago, yes? A long, long time ago. What’s a geographer? I don’t know if this will sound offensive, but I think a geographer is a bit like the Earth Sage on Wayo Wayo you were telling me about.
Strictly speaking, people like me are latecomers to Taiwan. We crossed the sea to get here a couple hundred years ago. A few years ago people were fond of saying that if you metaphorically compress the history of the world into a single day, humans only appear a few seconds before midnight. We now call the first people who lived on the island aborigines, and my two good friends Dahu and Hafay are both aborigines. Though they belong to different tribes, their ancestors came to the island a bit earlier than mine did.
And here’s where you came onshore.
I moved here over ten years ago to teach at the local university. It’s not that far from here. You see that house way down there? The one that has fallen over and been confiscated by the sea? My husband and son and I used to live there. As I said, I’m not from the east coast. I’m originally from a city in the north called Taipei. Before that, my mum and dad were both born on the west coast. In his youth my father went to work in a factory in Japan. His hometown is a place called Kuei-shan in the northwest, and my mum comes from Fang-yuan in central Taiwan. My mum believed in the sea goddess Matsu all her life. My father forfeit
ed his inheritance after a falling-out with his family, so he had to go to Taipei to try to make a living on his own. And when the oyster field could no longer feed my mum’s family, she had to take a part-time job in an industrial park that was kind of far from her home. She worked there for a while but then got laid off. In the end she, too, moved to Taipei. I don’t actually know how my parents met. They never told me. My mum said that when they were young they moved around from place to place, like gypsies practically. They went wherever they could make a living.
My father and mother are both gone. I don’t want to talk about how they passed away, and I don’t want to talk about my brother, either. That’d only upset me. You know what I mean by “gone”? What do the Wayo Wayoans say when somebody dies? Dead, departed, passed away, gone to a better place? What? Iwa kugi?
(I start blowing up Toto’s inflatable globe. This thing is ingenious. You just need to force enough air into it and it turns into a sphere. It’s nearly to scale, and the words and colors on it glow in the dark. I blow and blow into the withered world until it’s firm as a drum).
You see this ball? It’s the Earth, the planet we live on. No, no, it’s not just mine, it’s yours and mine. Look, the place we live is like a star in the sky, it’s just that we call the star we live on Earth. This ball is a scale model of the Earth. I bought it for my son. It even glows in the dark! That’s because it has a special night-shine coating. Some things in this world glow, some don’t. Some are like the moon, others like the sun. What do you say for the moon? Nalusa? And the sun? The other one, the one that appears during the day? Yigasa?
The place we’re living on is actually just a small island. I sometimes feel that in a way the size of the island is not for us to decide. When my ancestors arrived on the island two hundred years ago, walking from here to here (I traced a line through the Central Mountain Range to the east coast with my finger) took months, and they risked their lives to make the trip. Maybe to some extent just like you were risking your life when you floated your way here. In fact, a lot of people came here in boats. I often think that if you stroll from town to town, from village to village, the island would get really big. When we were still dating I told Thom, “Maybe the island got the way it is today because the people living here wanted to be able to get anywhere on the island as quickly as possible.”
The day you drifted here there was an earthquake and an extraordinary wave. Are there earthquakes on your island? When the earth shakes? There should be. There must be. Earthquakes are really common here. We have typhoons, too, and I’m worried that come typhoon season the Trash Vortex that brought you here might end up surrounding the entire island.
I would guess you’re a teenager, fourteen or fifteen at the most? I had a child, too, and if he were still with us he’d be ten. I didn’t want a child at first, because I didn’t know what kind of future he would have to face. I didn’t want him to have to inherit an island we’ve gone and messed up. But Thom and I still ended up having a child.
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.
19. The Story of Dahu’s Island
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.
