The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

  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.

  The Lavian that time was my father, as always. Before dawn, the party assembled and formed a ring in an open field and waited for my father to sprinkle wine and sing.

  “Tell me what has come before my gun?” my father sang.

  “All the deer have come before my gun,” sang the other hunters.

  “Tell me what has come before my gun?” my father sang.

  “All the boar have come before my gun,” sang the other hunters.

  Our guns overflowed with the smell of liquor. On the way to the hunting ground, I overheard my father whisper to my uncle that he’d seen a sign in a dream, but somehow he’d for
gotten it after the wine sprinkling ceremony. My uncle reassured him, saying that people forget dreams all the time. Besides, not having a dream or forgetting one is no reason to leave the hunting party.

  That time we carried out Mabusau, a hunting technique. First the Lavian judges where the boar is hiding and lets the dogs drive it out. Then the hunters fan out to surround it. At about five in the morning, when the sky had just gone light, the dogs caught a whiff of the boar and started barking like crazy. My father saw something rustling in the grass from far away and knew it was a huge boar, maybe that Hanito of a boar. He guessed which way the beast had fled and assigned pursuit routes to each of the hunters. I got the left-most route, because I was still a child of these hills with everything to learn. I ran and ran, listening to the dogs barking and the grass rustling as the scent and shade of every tree went swooshing by. Then I tripped and fell, head over heels. I picked up my gun, got up and ran, pressing down on my knife with my hand to keep it from slapping against my thigh.

  I don’t know why, but after I got up I couldn’t hear anything at all: the forest had gone completely quiet, as if the world had been silent from the very beginning. I stopped to check which way the wind was blowing, what direction the distant grass was swaying in, when suddenly a huge shadow swept past up ahead, moving fast as wind. I took a deep breath and went after it, running so swiftly I was almost holding my heart in my hands. I don’t know how long I had run when that shadow stopped dead, turned, and bellowed at me.

  I was scared stiff. It was like watching a video that appears silent until it starts playing with the volume turned up all the way. Standing before me was a man. He was staring at me, his hair flying vinelike in the wind.

  The man began to speak … if it can even be counted as speaking. His mouth didn’t move in the least, but I heard him loud and clear: “Child, you are fated never to catch a boar, never to become a good hunter.”

  “What can I do then?”

  “What can you do?” he asked me back. I discovered his eyes weren’t like human eyes. They were more like compound eyes composed of countless single eyes, the eyes of clouds, mountains, streams, meadowlarks and muntjacs, all arranged together. As I gazed, each little eye seemed to contain a different scene, and those scenes arranged to form a vast panorama the likes of which I had never seen.

  “What can you do?”

  The question echoed back on a gust of wind, and I found myself standing over a sheer cliff, just like a mountain goat. It was like I was standing on an island. The distant sky was the color of a ginger lily, with dark green trees and a creek below.

  I only found out later that the whole hunting party had been looking all over for me because something had happened to my father. My uncle’s gun misfired and shot my father in the right eye, rupturing his eyeball and ripping a hole in his head. Father did not die right away. On the third day he actually managed to take out his breathing tube and summon my brother and me to his bedside. He asked me, “Where did you go that day?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He was found by a cliff, just standing there like he was dreaming,” my elder brother explained.

  My father pointed at my brother. “You must learn to be a Bunun hunter.” Then he pointed at me and said, “You cannot be a hunter anymore, not after shooting the goat ear.”

  “What should I do then?” I asked.

  “Become a man who knows the mountains.” Father’s voice became very far away, and the blood from the wound to his right eye started seeping through the gauze again. He started losing consciousness. My elder brother pushed the button by the bed and the nurse rushed to find the doctor. My father held on in a kind of stupor for only seven more days before leaving us.

  I didn’t tell him I’d met a man with peculiar eyes. I thought there wasn’t any need. Now my father’s eyes were shut for ever.

  After that, every time I went hunting I was found standing in a daze at the edge of a cliff. People avoided taking me along. Luckily I did well at school, and ultimately I even went to a university on the west coast. By the way, have you ever seen this hat of mine? I really like it. Those are bamboo partridge feathers on top. When my father named me, he caught a bamboo partridge, fed me the meat and kept the feathers for me as a memento. This might well be my most precious possession.

  After Millet left, I started coming back to the village now and again to help Anu operate the Forest Church. Maybe I’m slowly getting to know the mountains. Now I just feel we have to make sure mountains like this don’t disappear, mountains without potholed roads or tunnels, mountains where goats and boars and deer can run wild.

  It’s been blazing hot the past few days. Yesterday, looking up at the mountain from the coastal highway, I saw many trees that seemed scorched by the fiery Foehn wind. One time my father took us swimming at the seashore. “When the sea is sick, the mountains will be sick, too,” he said, squeezing my little willy between his fingers.

  20. The Story of Hafay’s Island

  I opened the Seventh Sisid because I wanted to have a dwelling with windows on all four sides. Because I’m afraid of houses without windows.

  Dwelling places are really important to the Pangcah aborigines, because we think houses are for spirits to inhabit. Me and Ina drifted into the city, spent so long living there, but all the houses we lived in were haphazard, more like shacks. So the first thought I had when I made some money was to build a house of my very own, right by the seashore.

  I remember Alice and Thom started building the Seaside House just when I broke the soil on the Seventh Sisid, so our houses were twins. Their house was really special, like nothing I’d ever seen before: it had solar panels on it, and the shape of it was unprecedented in these parts. I didn’t have relatives or friends in the local Pangcah village, but when I was building the house everyone still came out to help. Remember? When it was finished we held a mitsumod. You were there, weren’t you? You even helped me slaughter a pig Ah Jung’s family raised. Time sure flies.

  Would you mind if I ask you about Millet? Ahem. I mention her because hearing you talk about her reminds me that I used to do the same kind of job. Maybe I understand how Millet felt, more or less. Besides, maybe at the same time as I was working she was doing the rounds in a place with little rooms somewhere else. You know? The worst part about the job is when you’re standing in the doorway, about to knock, and you don’t have any idea what kind of man is waiting for you on the other side. You can’t refuse, even if you don’t like him, even if he’s disgusting. You knock, the door opens, and you’ve got to spend an hour with a stranger.

  I had a close friend at work at that time. Her name was Nai. She told me, try pretending you’re a real masseuse, not someone doing “dirty” work. Every guy who comes here must have some aches and pains. So when you massage a customer, ask him what needs special attention, where you should press harder, and when you massage those places it’s like … it feels like there’s something alive inside. Nai said that if you give those places a serious rub, the customer might initially say it hurts but eventually he’ll relax. Some guys go to sleep, others open up and start confiding in you. If you show him some tenderness a customer usually won’t be too demanding, because lust will have been replaced with something else.

  But there are all sorts of difficult customers, and some are sick with you-know-what and they’re not too happy if you don’t want to touch them or let them touch you. Some guys really make a scene. Sometimes when you’ve done half the massage, the wife or girlfriend will call and you pretend you’re not overhearing, but it’s really awkward. Some customers who haven’t been able to come when time’s up will try to pay half price and leave. Some will toss the money on the counter downstairs and jump into a cab. And when the bookkeeper counts it there’s not enough. And other customers will even make harassing phone calls.

  When I was doing you-know-what with the guys, I would turn off the lights and the TV. The room would get real dark, and I’d imagine I was on a sm
all, deserted island somewhere.

  I often thought: If I ever make enough money I’ve got to move someplace that’s sunny and bright.

  Nai always told me, whatever you do, don’t fall for a customer. She told me for my own good, and for her own good, too. But there was one time when I almost did. I still remember the way his back looked. He had broad shoulders, with a long, tapering line from his neck to his waist, like this boy I knew in elementary school. He often came exhausted, with numerous knots or clots in his energy flow. I had to struggle to work them out. He hardly ever spoke, but you could sense his breathing was labored. Even though I almost never talked to him, I felt he wasn’t a happy guy.

  When it was time, I would turn off the light and tell him, “Mister, you can lay on your back now.” He would turn over quietly, and I would sit by the bed with my back to him, holding his thing and relieving him. Sometimes he would gently touch my back with his big hands. Maybe you don’t believe me but a woman’s body can sense the emotion in someone’s touch. Even when you just lay a hand on someone or someone lays a hand on you, you sometimes get a sense of what the other person has on his mind, though you’re not real clear what it is. It’s kind of elusive, whatever it is that’s communicated through the skin. It’s hard to describe, but you know it when you feel it. You can sometimes tell whether another person loves you or not, just by touch.

  He visited almost every other week, and he always asked for me. I came to recognize his scent and physique. He wasn’t like most guys who go to a place like that. I mean … most guys want to get their rocks off, whether they’re young soldiers or middle-aged married men. Many of them start pawing you right after you go in because they’ve paid their money. But he wasn’t like that, for some reason. He was always very gentlemanly, and regarded me as a masseuse except when I “relieved” him. Lots of times he didn’t even ejaculate. The alarm would go off and he’d wipe himself down with a hot towel, say thank you, and leave.