We brought him out to the courtyard and sat him in a chair. Li brought in his grandson. He was a small boy, but seemed very bright. He was scared and tried to run to his grandfather. Li pulled him back, stood him against the wall, and pointed a pistol at him.
"We are not going to kill you,” I said. “But if you won't confess, we will execute your grandson as an accomplice."
"No, no,” he begged. “Please. He doesn't know anything. We don't know anything. I'm not a spy. I swear."
Li stood back and held the pistol with both hands.
"You are making me do this,” I said. “You have given me no choice. I don't want to kill your grandson, but you are going to make him die."
"I came here on a boat with four others,” he said. He kept his eyes on the boy, and I could see that I was finally getting to him. “They are all good people. None of us are Communist spies."
"That's another lie,” I said. “Tell me who they are."
Just then the boy jumped and grabbed Li's hands, and the boy tried to bite him. “Let my grandfather go,” he yelled as he struggled with Li.
There were two gunshots, and the boy fell in a heap. Li dropped his gun and I rushed over. The boy had bitten his finger to the bone, and he was howling with pain. I picked up the gun.
I looked up and saw that the old man had fallen out of his chair. He was crawling to us, to the body of his grandson. He was crying, and I couldn't tell what language he was crying in.
Chen went to help Li while I watched the man crawl to the boy. He turned his body until he was sitting and lifted the boy's body into his lap, hugging the dead child to his chest. “Why, why?” he said to me. “He was just a boy. He didn't know anything. Kill me, please kill me."
I looked into his eyes: dark, glistening, like mirrors. In them I saw the reflections of my own face, and it was such a strange face, so full of crazed fury that I did not recognize myself.
Many things went through my head at that moment. I thought back to when I was a little boy in Maine, and the mornings when my grandfather would take me hunting. I thought about my sinology professor, and the stories he told of his boyhood in Shanghai and his Chinese friends and servants. I thought about yesterday morning, when David and I taught the class on counterintelligence to the Nationalist agents. I thought about Lilly, who is about the boy's age. What does she know about Communism and freedom? Somewhere, the world had gone horribly wrong.
"Please kill me, please kill me."
I pointed the pistol at the man and squeezed the trigger. I kept on squeezing the trigger, again and again, after the gun was empty.
"He was resisting,” Chen said, later. “Trying to escape.” It wasn't a question.
I nodded anyway.
* * * *
"You had no choice,” Mrs. Dyer said. “He forced you to do it. Freedom isn't without its price. You were trying to do the right thing."
He did not respond to this. After a while, he drained the glass again.
"You've told me how hardened these Communist agents are, and we've all heard the tales from Korea. But only now do I really understand. They must have really brainwashed him and made him without human feeling, without remorse. The blood of his grandson is on him. Just think what he could have done to Lilly."
He did not respond to this either. He looked across the table at her, and it seemed that there was a gulf between them, as wide as the Taiwan Strait.
"I don't know,” he said, finally. “I don't really know anything anymore."
* * * *
Dad walked with Lilly next to the river, their feet sinking into the soft mud. Both stopped and took off their shoes, continuing barefoot. They did not speak to each other. Ah Huang followed behind them, and every once in a while Lilly stopped to pet him on the nose as he snorted into her palm.
"Lilly,” Dad broke the silence. “Mom and I have decided to move back to Texas. I've gotten a transfer for work."
Lilly nodded without speaking. Autumn had settled over her heart. The trees along the river waved at their own reflections in the moving, rippling water, and Lilly wished she still had Mr. Kan's magic mirror.
"We have to find a new home for your water buffalo. We can't take him back to Texas."
Lilly stopped. She refused to look at him.
"It's too dry back there,” Dad tried. “He won't be happy. He won't have a river to bathe in and rice paddies to wallow in. He won't be free."
Lilly wanted to tell him that she was no longer a little girl, and he did not need to speak to her that way. But instead she just stroked Ah Huang some more.
"Sometimes, Lilly, adults have to do things that they don't want to do, because it's the right thing to do. Sometimes we do things that seem wrong, but are really right."
Lilly thought about Mr. Kan's arms, and the way he held her the first time they met. She thought about the way his voice had sounded when he scared the boys away. She thought about the way the tip of his brush moved on paper, writing the character for “beautiful.” She wished that she knew how to write his name. She wished she knew more about the magic of words and characters.
Even though it was a pleasant autumn afternoon, Lilly felt cold. She imagined the fields around her covered in white, a frost of terror that had come to freeze over the subtropical island.
The word “freeze” seemed to call for her attention. She closed her eyes and pictured the word in her head, examining it carefully the way she thought Mr. Kan would have. The letters jiggled and nudged against each other. The ‘z’ took on the shape of a kneeling, supplicating man, the ‘e’ the fetal curl of a dead child. And then the ‘z’ and ‘e’ disappeared, leaving free in its place.
It's okay, Lilly. Teddy and I are free now. Lilly tried to concentrate, to hold onto the fading smile and warm voice of Mr. Kan in her mind. You are a very smart girl. You are destined to become a literomancer too, in America.
Lilly squeezed her eyes tight so that no tears would fall out.
"Lilly, are you all right?” Dad's voice brought her back.
She nodded. She felt a little warmer.
They continued to walk, looking at the hunched-over figures of the women in the rice paddies, harvesting the heavy grain with sickles.
"It's difficult to know how the future will turn out,” Dad continued. “Things have a way of working themselves out to the surprise of everyone. Sometimes the most ugly things can turn out to be the cause for something wonderful. I know you haven't had a good time here, Lilly, and it's unfortunate. But this is a beautiful island. Formosa means ‘most beautiful’ in Latin."
Like America, Meikuo, the Beautiful Country, Lilly thought. The wildflowers will bloom again when it is spring.
In the distance, they could see the children from the village playing a game of baseball.
"Some day you'll see that our sacrifices here were worth it. This place will be free, and you'll see its beauty and remember your time here fondly. Anything is possible. Maybe one day we'll even see a boy from here playing baseball in America. Now wouldn't that be something, Lilly, a Chinese boy from Formosa playing at Yankee Stadium?"
Lilly focused on the scene in her head.
Teddy steps up to the plate in a Red Sox helmet, his calm eyes staring at the pitcher on the mound, the N crossed with a Y on the pitcher's cap. He swings at the first pitch, and there is a crisp, loud thwack. It's a hit. The ball floats high into the cold October air, into the dark sky and the bright lights, an arc that will end somewhere in the grandstands beyond right field. The crowd stands. Teddy begins to trot along the baselines, his face breaking into a wide grin, searching the crowd for Mr. Kan and Lilly. And the wild cheers shake the stadium as the pennant is clinched. The Red Sox are going to the World Series.
"I've been thinking,” Dad continued. “Maybe we should take a vacation before we go back to Clearwell. I was thinking that we can stop by New York to visit Grandma. The Yankees are playing the Reds in the World Series. I'll try to get tickets, and we can go see them and cheer
them on."
Lilly shook her head and looked up at him. “I don't like the Yankees anymore."
* * * *
Author's Notes: For a variety of reasons, this text does not use pinyin to romanize Chinese. Instead, Mandarin phrases and words are generally romanized using the Wade-Giles system, and Taiwanese Minnan (Fukienese) phrases and words are romanized using either the Pe'h-ôe-jî system or English phonetic spelling.
An introductory account of the history of joint American-ROC covert operations against the PRC during the Cold War may be found in John W. Garver's The Sino-American Alliance: Nationalist China and American Cold War Strategy in Asia.
The art of literomancy is greatly simplified in this story. In addition, the folk etymologies and decompositions used here are understood to have little relationship with academic conclusions.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: FILMS: NEITHER FISH NOR FOWL—NOR FULLY HUMAN? by Kathi Maio
In the interests of full disclosure, as well as TMI (Too Much Information, not Three Mile Island), I would like to acknowledge that my bathroom is populated by mermaids. Okay, I admit that they are not real. They are just examples of world folk art—mostly from Mexico and Latin America, but also from even more distant lands like Bali—all showing a human female face and torso attached to a fish-tailed lower body. Clearly, just the existence of the many sculptures, plaques, and tiles from around the world are proof that the mermaid is a figure of fascination for many.
She has existed in the human imagination since ancient times. In Mexico, she is called La Sirena. But whether termed Atargatis or Derceto, apsara or nereid, Undine or Mélusine, she is a powerful figure of religion and folklore. She embodies the mystery, danger, and beauty of the sea, but her personality and motivations vary greatly according to who is telling the tale, and when. She can be the cruel temptress who through physical beauty or siren song lures sailors to their death (and possible dismemberment), or she can be a figure of purity and grace who provides aid and succor to lost souls. After Christianity arrived on the scene, many mermaid stories superimposed a subtext related to a soulless female seeking spiritual redemption through marriage to a human male. But, religion or no, in many of the tales of shape-shifting seamaids, that figure remained a wild and free symbol of the feminine.
Many variants of the mermaid story have appeared on screen since the early days of the industry. In 1914, director Herbert Brenon and his aquatically gifted star, Annette Kellerman, made a daring and expensive film in Bermuda called Neptune's Daughter. Alas, except for a couple of segments held in archives, the film is considered lost. In the 1940s the film siren—exemplified by Ann Blyth in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948) and by Glynis Johns in Miranda (1948)—was sweet and saucy, disrupting and enlivening the staid existence of the middle-aged men (William Powell and Griffith Jones, respectively) who discover her. Played for comedy, it was mermaid as mid-life crisis.
In 1961, Curtis Harrington (clearly under the spell of Film Noir and Val Lewton) made a bizarre beatnik mood piece starring a very young and sweet-faced Dennis Hopper. In Night Tide, Hopper's lonely young sailor falls under the spell of a beautiful young woman who plays the mermaid at the local pier sideshow. But is she a real mermaid? And is she also a serial murderer of her lovers? Even at the end of the movie you may be a bit unclear about who did what to whom, and what that poor mixed-up mermaid was about. The climax and denouement—along with much of the rest of the movie—makes precious little sense. (Although if you listen to Harrington and Hopper chat on the commentary track of the modern DVD, at least you will learn what Harrington thought he was depicting.) In this one, mer-mania is a dissociative disorder.
Over the years movie mermaids have flapped and fluttered from rom-com beauty (Splash, 1984) to kiddie cartoon heroine (Little Mermaid, 1989; Ponyo, 2008) to tween girl BFF (Aquamarine, 2006) to blood-thirsty siren turned B-movie monster (the delightfully cheesy and seldom seen She Creature of 2001).
A personal favorite, which I reviewed in these pages more than fifteen years ago, is The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), a very atypical John Sayles film that interwove the Celtic legend of the selkie with the hardscrabble lives of post WWII fisherfolk of Ireland.
The selkie is an intriguing variation of the fish-woman mermaid, as she is a seal capable of shedding her phocidaen coat and taking human form, as she chooses. According to legend, any man who can steal the shed skin of the selkie can hold her in thralldom, forcing her to become his bride and bear his children...that is, until she finds her animal skin again; at which time she abandons hearth, home, and even children, without remorse, to return to her life of freedom in the sea.
John Sayles, a filmmaker usually associated with very American and urban and progressively political themes, knew that to tell The Secret of Roan Inish well, he would need to anchor his story in the harsh yet beautiful Irish seacoast and in the difficult lives of working-class Irish people. Irish writer and director Neil Jordan knew the same. Shooting his latest film, Ondine, was something he purposefully wanted to accomplish but a short distance from his own Irish home, in and around the fishing town of Castletownbere in County Cork.
Although some of Mr. Jordan's least (artistically) successful—but most high-profile—films have been overtly the stuff of fantasy (think Interview with the Vampire and High Spirits), some of his more interesting and obscure cinematic work (like The Miracle or his loopy but fascinating variations on the tale of Little Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves) also touch on the power of fantasy and myth.
In Ondine, the filmmaker explores how fantasy has the power to transform. Belief in magic is more important than actual fairy dust in allowing beaten-down humanity to hope for better and to heal their dispirited lives.
The film begins in the bleak waters off the Irish Coast. A fisherman named Syracuse is pulling in his trawling net, expecting it to be all but empty, as it usually is. Syracuse (Colin Farrell), a recovering alcoholic, expects little from the sea or the rest of his life. He is so well known in his community for the drunken foolishness of his youth that he is called not Syracuse, but “Circus, the Clown,” by almost everyone in the village. This even includes, at times, his bright but sickly daughter Annie (Alison Barry)—the one person he adores, and who loves him back.
But on this particular day, his net comes up with a few fish, and also with a woman. He thinks she is a corpse, but it is soon apparent that she is alive, albeit fearful of being seen, and disinclined to discuss who she is and where she came from. Still, she gratefully takes refuge in the abandoned cottage that belonged to Syracuse's late mother.
Thereafter, while young Annie is having a dialysis treatment, her “da” tries to entertain her with a vague retelling of his unusual fishing expedition, but it is Annie who supplies the mythic context for the woman's appearance. She must be a mermaid or a selkie, she decides. And the evidence begins to pile up that this might be true. First, the mysterious beauty allows Syracuse to call her Ondine (the name associated with a variety of German and French mermaid tales that have been retold through operas and ballets). Then, just like a mermaid who grants wishes, Ondine (Alicja Bachleda) starts to bring good fortune to the rather woebegone Syracuse.
But how extensive are her powers? When Ondine sings on his boat, the seaman's lobster pots and fishing nets come up brimming with a valuable catch. All well and good. But young Annie, who also wants to believe in magic, has her own wish. She hopes that the lovely woman can somehow cure her kidney disease and make her well again.
Mr. Jordan knows how to give even a fairy tale a quite realistic (intermittently even grim and depressing) foundation. But he never forgets the lyrical touches, either. And his love of his homeland and her melancholic yet resilient people is evident in every shot of this film. Eventually the filmmaker feels the need to resolve his storyline—which I will not discuss further—through episodes of melodrama and violence, before ending it on an appropriately hopeful note. However, this moody if minor fa
ble is still a pleasure to watch.
The performances are all lovely. Colin Farrell is surprisingly good as a loser who begins to believe his luck is turning. (With all the tabloid stories over the last few years, it is easy to forget how talented Mr. Farrell is.) Ms. Bachleda gives a rather opaque performance, much of the time. But as a possible changeling from the sea, her enigmatic affect is not at all inappropriate. Young Alison Barry, in her first screen role, is a natural as the brave yet vulnerable Annie. And Stephen Rea (a Neil Jordan regular) is quite delightful in a small wry performance as the village priest whose confessional must substitute for Syracuse's AA meeting.
I think that some fantasy fans will be disappointed by Ondine. I was not. For the film shows that shape-shifting is just one kind of magical metamorphosis. Another is the power of belief—in ourselves and those we love—to transform our lives.
Canadian filmmaker Vincenzo Natali (Cube) does not, I feel sure, have any interest in making a mermaid movie. (More's the pity.) But the talented director has acknowledged that “the notion of bonding with something not entirely human goes back to ancient myth. It has always existed and I was fascinated by the idea that those mythic concepts—mermaids, centaurs, chimeras, human hybrids that have tantalized people's imaginations for thousands of years—could exist in the real world through new science."
It is precisely this idea that Mr. Natali explores in his sf-horror flick, Splice. Set in the world of speculative corporate bioengineering, where geeks and suits have big dreams of magic bullet cures and golden egg profits, the story focuses on two young, hip scientists named Clive and Elsa (Bride of Frankenstein references, anyone?) played by Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley. The committed couple are equally devoted to their scientific pursuits at their Nucleic Exchange Research and Development (yep, that's NERD to you) laboratory. There, they attempt to synthesize medicinal proteins and other compounds by developing organisms jerry-rigged from DNA cocktails of primordial soup and gestated in biomechanical thermal incubators.
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