The Man with the Compound Eyes (12 page)

I sometimes think I’ve come full circle and ended up back at the shore.

When I was all of eleven months old, Ina (which means mother in Pangcah) brought me along when she left the village and went into town to find work. Ina’s man abandoned her and nobody knew where he went. But there wasn’t much work in town, so soon Ina took me to Taipei. At first she had a part-time job as a babysitter. Later she did a bit of everything, from nursing drooling old folks in the hospital to waving signboard ads for presale apartments. But don’t underestimate how much it costs to care for even a little kid. It’s really a lot of money. In the end Ina had no choice but to find work in a karaoke hostess bar. The customers were all old geezers, and she didn’t do much with them besides eating peanuts, drinking beer and chatting. Some fellows would touch her hands, tits and ass on the sly, but that’s about it. Later Ina started living with this guy called Old Liao. Old Liao was always getting drunk and using her as a punching bag. By that time I’d already started elementary and I remember more of what happened. We were living by a creek. There wasn’t too much water in the creek. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Yup, at that time we were living by a creek without much water in it.

I’d left my home village when I was less than a year old, so I had no
idea what village life was like. Every time Ina mentioned something about the village I drew a total blank. I don’t know why, but Ina never had any plans to take me back to the village at that time. Sometimes I’d hear her talk about a creek by the village, and that because the water in that creek was muddy they called it Makota’ay. Pale silverflowers bloomed all along the creek we lived by in Taipei. Ina said that if you ignored the buildings in the distance it looked just like home. So I would often squint and try to see the view of the silverflowers without the buildings behind, thinking to myself maybe this was what home looked like.

One time, Ina had an idea to pick silvergrass hearts and cook up some broth for me to drink. She said she’d done the same thing right after I was born when she wasn’t producing enough milk. She picked silvergrass hearts growing near Makota’ay to make me soup as a substitute. At the time I was still so small and hadn’t grown a memory yet. But somehow the moment I drank the broth Ina made with silvergrass by the creek in Taipei it tasted different, not like home. You won’t believe that I would remember the taste of soup I drank when I was a year old. But I did remember, I really did.

Old Liao made the house we lived in at that time out of scrap formwork. Old Liao was a truck driver and did heavy labor. When he wasn’t working he’d go wait under the bridge and see if anyone was hiring. He was the sort of guy who would work if there was work to do, but of course most days there wasn’t. Ina said that she met him working at the hostess bar. In my impression, Old Liao was fairly polite when he wasn’t drinking. He was skinny and small, not the heavy labor type. But after he hit the booze he would get out of hand and hit Ina over every little thing.

At the time I could not understand why Ina would never fight back. She could’ve taken him on: we Pangcah women are pretty tough, you know. Why’d she let him hit her like that? And what was even more of a mystery was why she would get up before dawn the next morning and cook up a meal for him like nothing had happened. It wasn’t like Ina couldn’t support me on her own. Why did she have to shack up with a guy like that?

In those days if there was something I didn’t understand I’d run off and sit on this big rock near the mouth of that creek, the place where it flows into the river, and sing. I’d sing songs Ina taught me, songs I heard
on TV, songs from CDs classmates lent me, songs from the karaoke. I’m real good at remembering the words, even words I don’t understand. I’m not trying to brag or anything, but everyone said I sang real nice, so nice that my voice would make the millet sprout. But the folks living in the temporary tribal village in Taipei didn’t plant millet. The only thing growing on the creek bed was silvergrass, and you didn’t have to tend silvergrass. It grew rampant, and you could never cut it all down.

In elementary I used to get up real early, because I liked to take the long way to school. I guess I left the house at around five in the morning. I didn’t have a watch, so I didn’t know exactly what time it was. I would draw a watch on my wrist with a pen, setting the time to 6:10. I thought I had a kind of magic power: when my classmates asked me what time it was I was always amazingly accurate. I was incredible, I’m telling you. Time seemed to live somewhere inside me, walking around, back and forth, back and forth inside my body.

I used to like watching this tall dark boy from the class next to mine play basketball. His name was Spider. He had really long arms and legs, and his movements were kind of comical. But on the court he was so into it, so svelte. To this day I find men with that kind of intent expression irresistible. Doesn’t matter if a guy is fat or thin, tall or short, rich or poor, just as long as he knits his brows when he can’t figure things out and stays focused on what he’s doing: that’s my kind of guy. I often watched Spider until about 6:10 in the evening, because 6:30 was the latest his dad would let him come home.

When I felt it was almost 6:10, I’d pretend to look at my watch, and Spider would leave the court, sloppily wiping away the sweat with his shirt. We took the same route part of the way home. Spider would push his bike a ways behind me, never beside me. I would stop at the fork in the road, and Spider would push his bike past, smile awkwardly at me, say see you tomorrow and go home. I’d have been waiting all day long to spend this time with him, waiting for this moment when he would smile and say see you tomorrow.

Ina always worked until five in the morning, came home and made breakfast for me before going to sleep. She liked to ask me what time I’d
gotten home the previous evening and I’d always say 6:10. Sometimes I’d save the money Ina had left me for dinner and spend it on whitening creams, because I thought my skin was too dark. I would eat dinner at one of the neighbors’ instead. Our neighbors were real nice to me. They’d come and invite me over to eat. That’s what it was like. The kids in the neighborhood would run around eating at different houses. I remember that year a rumor went round that they were paving a riverside bike path or something and that the village might be torn down. Quite a number of outsiders came to our village, saying they wanted to help us fight the government.

There was one villager called Dafeng who was really active in the village. He was the “city chief” we elected. I remember one time he got up on the stage and held the microphone and proclaimed, “Urban renewal is all about renewing us out of house and home, isn’t that right?” Everyone standing in front of the stage said, “Right!” Then he said, “But we’re not really afraid of any bulldozer. It’s the man behind the wheel that makes it run, right?”

“Right!”

“So it’s the man that scares us, no matter whether he says he’s here to protect us or to tear our houses down. Because he never tells you why, because his Han Chinese why doesn’t mean the same thing as our aboriginal why, right?”

Everyone below shouted, “Right!” I still remember his words. Sometimes protesters would come and hold vigils and tell me to go up onstage and sing. When I sang the songs Ina’d taught me, everyone would start crying, young and old, their tears dripping down like rain.

Several times the government really did cut the water and power and tear down houses in the village. Eventually some folks moved into the “projects” the government built. It seemed to me that all those protests never did a bit of good. The government was so big, and we were so small. But sometimes they couldn’t do anything about us. We’d wait until the bulldozers and backhoes had left and go back and rebuild using waste formwork, election posters, corrugated fiberboard, iron sheets and driftwood. Those houses weren’t much to look at, but you could live in them
just the same. The folks who lived in them came from many different tribal villages, not all of them Pangcah. Ina said there were many people like her, who’d run off not really knowing where they were going and stumbled into Taipei without enough money to buy a bus ticket home. Ina said, “Those guys want us to move somewhere else, but where are we supposed to move? We couldn’t get used to living in those suffocating apartments in the projects, and some of those Han Chinese landlords would call us ‘savages’ and look down on us.” Old Liao helped Ina rebuild the house in no time flat. That’s the only reason I can think of why Ina couldn’t bear to leave him.

One time not long after everyone’d moved back to the village by the creek to rebuild, Old Liao came home drunk and started smacking Ina around. He picked up the
Sea of Words
dictionary I’d left on the table and started hitting Ina with it on the head and shoulders. Maybe because Ina scraped against something on the wall and started bleeding, her hair was all stuck together and crimson. I was so mad I started kicking Old Liao. The
Sea of Words
was a gift from a teacher after I’d done well on a test. My teacher had said to the class, “When Wu Chun-hua grows up maybe she can be a teacher.” Well, Old Liao went and smacked me on the face with that dictionary. He was so nasty, you know? My head really hurt. It even left a scar. See? It’s faint but you can still see it. At the time, I thought the reason why it hurt so much was because Chinese characters were so hard to understand. And now when I sing, I still can’t hear my voice on my right side too good. That night was the first time I’d ever heard Ina cry. The sound of her weeping merged with the sound of the creek outside, like two rivers surging around in my heart.

Ina often told me, “Sometimes I wish I could pretend that the creek we’re living by is Makota’ay, but it isn’t really, only seems like it.” I thought a creek wasn’t a good place to live by, because if you couldn’t sleep at night you’d hear the trees and rocks cry. The wind echoed the sound back and forth across the creek, as if it meant to make people’s hearts ache.

That night I kept tossing and turning, couldn’t get to sleep. The next morning I got up real early, before it was light out, and sat on my rock and started singing. I’d probably sang three songs before the sun made its way
up. All of a sudden there was a swarm of golden dragonflies over the creek. It was a kind of dragonfly as looks like a butterfly. Usually you only see them alone or in pairs, if you see them at all, but that morning there was a whole swarm of them, like they were going to school or a meeting or something. If I close my eyes I can still see every eye in the swarm. Dragon-flies have green eyes, and I sometimes wonder whether the world looks green through dragonfly eyes.

I’ll never forget what happened when I was walking to school that morning. Spider swooped in out of nowhere and said, “Hi, it’s almost time for class.” Then he slowed down and walked his bike behind me, talking with me as we went. When we were almost at the gate, he pulled even with me and then half-rode, half-ran past me, saying, “You sang real nice just now.” Then he vanished into the bike lot behind the school in a cloud of dust. He pedaled standing up, his shoulders swinging to and fro like he was about to take off. It was the first time he’d ever said, “You sing real nice.” I felt like a bird about to fly away.

That afternoon it started raining, a huge downpour, like someone was hurtling stones down at the iron roofs of our shacks. Ina opened the window and looked out, and the sky was darker than night. At around three in the morning, Old Liao made a trip back to see us. Looking gloomy, he told Ina: “Take Hafay to an inn. Ride the scooter. Here’s five hundred bucks. Get your things ready. When you find a place to stay call me and I’ll be right over.”

“What’s wrong?” Ina asked him.

“I don’t know yet. The rain’s been torrential. I’m scared there’s gonna be a flood. I just heard them saying on the radio that it won’t let up, so I came back right away. I think you’d better go stay somewhere else for now,” said Old Liao.

“We’ll wait for you and go together,” Ina said.

“No, my buddy Moe will give me a ride on his motorcycle. You go first.”

By the time the rain was falling the hardest Ina and I were already safe in an inn downtown. That inn still used thermoses from fifty years ago! Still in soaking-wet clothes, we turned on the TV news. The news kept jumping around. We saw our village and a flood coming. Our village was jumping on the screen.

It was still raining the next day. Ina took me back to the village on Old Liao’s scooter. No, I shouldn’t say back to the village, because the village was gone. It’d turned into a huge mud puddle. The rain had even broken through the embankment to the right, flooding the basements of all the new high-rises in the area. The water still hadn’t receded. Water doesn’t care if you’re aboriginal or Han. The police had cordoned off the area, not allowing anyone in. It poured and poured. It was so heavy that the search and rescue team could only get into the full swing on the third day of the storm. They were pulling corpse after corpse out of the sand and mud and from between the rocks, body after body, battered and wrecked; many had broken bones, and some were twisted beyond recognition—you couldn’t even tell that was a person. I walked along with Ina. She covered my eyes with her hand, but I kept my eyes open and through the spaces in her fingers I saw a body all swollen up and wearing Spider’s clothing. A section of that body’s legs had snapped; it had gotten real short. But the shoulders were still intact, and though I’d never leaned my head on those shoulders I knew them so well. It was like my blood had turned to ice, like vermin were eating my heart from the inside. I cried and cried, without making any sound.

The rain didn’t let up. Villagers remember it rained for all of ten days. And in all that time Ina did not cry a single tear. She kept walking along the creek, telling me: “Hafay, Hafay, we’re going downstream.”

She was stubborn as a wild boar, checking more carefully than the search and rescue team in the cracks in the rocks of the creek and in the flat places. She helped the team find three bodies, but all corpses, no survivors. It seemed like everyone who’d stayed in the village that day became a corpse, but Old Liao was nowhere to be found. Ina said maybe he’d drifted somewhere else because he wasn’t from the village. She kept walking and walking, and I followed her until I was nearly out of breath. I told her, “I don’t want to walk no more, I don’t want to walk no more,” so Ina borrowed a tent from the search and rescue team and let me sleep inside. She went out again and kept walking, and it was real late before she came back to sleep. Early the next morning she got up and told me again, “Hafay, Hafay, we’re going downstream.”