Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

Given the warm climate in eastern Taiwan, there was no reason to keep the famous fireplaces in the original Asplund design. Thom found the fake fireplaces in many B&Bs in Taiwan silly and pretentious. But under Alice’s guidance he became quite enamored with Taiwan’s once ubiquitous rural “hearth culture,” and added a traditional stove room to the modern kitchen.

“We’ll really be able to use it. Only a house in which you can make authentic local cuisine is a true home.”

Thom spent another full year on the electrical system. He compared many different brands of solar panel. He adjusted the angles and covered the tops of the sloping eaves with panels, creating a solar awning for each of the three porches, under which a person could cool off, meditate or take a nap. He also went online, ordered a small desalination machine from a German firm and designed a salt-and-fresh dual-plumbing system. He planted salt-tolerant local plants like the pongam oil tree and the white-bloom mangrove, spacing them out outside the line of sight of the windows. He even calculated the growth rates so the shade of the mature trees would not fall on the solar panels fifty years hence.

A year and a half later, Thom had finished the graphic design, the 3D mock-up, and the blueprints for the electrical and plumbing systems. Alice had been watching and listening to him put the little house together, her heart faintly trembling the whole time. She had a sense of reckless bliss, a bit like turning on the tap and watching water come pouring out.

Before construction began, Alice pledged all her assets to secure a big loan from the bank. Building the house allowed her to extricate herself from her stuffy, unimaginative academic life and let her orient herself toward a specific goal. Then the day they started digging the foundation, Alice went to the hospital because she felt nauseous. The doctor recommended that she take a pregnancy test.

Alice would later say that Toto and the Sea House were the same age, which was basically true. Thom’s attitude toward Toto’s impending arrival was about the same as any father’s. He was thrilled. He added a place for Toto in both the left-hand and right-hand cabins, so both mum and dad would have time alone with him.

Toto was conceived before building began, and born before construction was complete. He was three months old when Alice finished planting the garden. She put Toto under the eaves and started planting herbs around the house for butterflies to eat. She had an acquaintance named Ming, a colleague at the university, who had written some literary essays about butterflies. Alice asked him to list species that would be appropriate for a coastal property and teach her how to plant them.

Thom loosened up the dirt road that had been packed hard by the bulldozer, and planted a windbreak on both sides to create a tree-lined path down to the shore.

But there was a series of strong typhoons the year the house was finished, and the foundation of the coastal highway, which had already been rebuilt ten meters inland from the old road, started to scour. Not long thereafter a whole stretch of road collapsed unexpectedly, and the Bureau of Public Works had no choice but to retreat another thirty meters and build a new “coastal” highway at a slightly higher elevation, drilling through a few mountainsides to do it. In the aftermath of the Great Flood that struck Taiwan on 8 August 2009, whether or how much of the island would be underwater ten years hence became a hot-button issue. But to many folks, this was still “outside the realm of possibility.” Alice thought that the lives the flood had taken would only give the survivors a fool’s confidence that there was no disaster people could not handle. Some folks shrugged it off by anthropomorphizing the disaster and running off at the mouth about the “cruelty” and “inhumanity” of nature.

After hearing Alice’s thoughts on the matter, Thom would occasionally promote his own Danish viewpoint, that, “Actually, nature isn’t cruel at all. At least, it isn’t especially cruel to human beings. Nature doesn’t fight back, either, because nothing without conscious intent can ‘fight back.’ Nature is just doing what it should, that’s all. If the sea will rise then let it rise. When the time comes we’ll move house and all will be well. If we don’t move in time the worst that’ll happen is that the sea will serve for our watery tomb, and we will become fish food. Not so bad if you think of it that way, is it?”

“Not so bad?”

At first Alice found it hard to understand what exactly Thom was saying. After all, she had invested everything she had in this property, and she had even gone into debt. But gradually she seemed to understand. In the end she just had to get on with her life, fleeing when it was time to flee, fighting when it was time to fight, and dying like a meadowlark when it was her time.

For the past year the sea had been like a random memory. In no time it had arrived on her doorstep, and since Christmas last year, she’d been forced to give up on getting in through the front door at high tide. Twice a day, Alice was put under temporary house arrest before being released a couple of hours later. At high tide, the sea would skirt the drainage ditch, encircling the house. When it receded it would leave various things behind at the back door: dead porcupine fish, driftwood in fantastic shapes, part of the hull of a ship, whalebones, ripped clothing, et cetera. The next day at low tide Alice would open the door and have to step over various dead things before she could get out of the house.

The local government had informed Alice that she was living in a dangerous building and should vacate and move somewhere else. But Alice was adamant that, “If the house collapses due to flooding I’ll take responsibility. Please don’t encroach upon my freedom: I’ve got a legal right to live here.” A tabloid magazine even published a story about a lady professor living a cloistered life in a solar house on the beach. The only thing that story had going for it was that it included some of Thom’s architectural ingenuity, including those swiveling solar panels that followed the sun across the sky.

Dahu, Thom and Alice’s Bunun friend, who was originally from Tai-tung in southern Taiwan, and Hafay, the Pangcah owner of a local bar, tried several times to get Alice to consider moving, but eventually they gave up.

“Your head really is as hard as a boar tooth,” Dahu said.

“You said it. That’s the way I am.” Alice sat in her house and looked out at the misty sea, as if she was sitting inside the body of some living organism. This little house was so nice. In all her life, she had never had such a wonderful time as in the past few years. It had been so wonderful that it seemed like a perfectly smooth glass globe, or like a holly plant without a single brown leaf. It was all a bit too perfect, a little too good to be true.

In the end she never wrote at the Sea Window. She would just sit there quietly. The sea had no memory, but you could still say that it remembered things: the waves and the stones all bore the traces of time. Sometimes she despised it for all the memories and the pain it brought her. Sometimes, out of futility, she believed in it and depended on it, like a fish facing a baitless hook, knowing full well it’s going to hurt but going after it anyway.

Alice lay there quietly, sensing the moonlight on her eyelids and the tide rolling in on her eardrums, like glass shattering somewhere far away. Outside the raindrops were falling big as stars, cloaking the earth in a humid, restless and surging air.

Even though the weather bureau had predicted the possibility of a big quake within the year, many people had a sense of despair, a feeling that “it’s finally here,” when an earthquake struck this evening. During the quake every inch of the house was moaning and groaning, but Alice was ready to let it bury everything and have done. She had no urge to flee at first. Only later when the quake intensified did she feel an instinctive desire to find shelter. Remembering her suicide plan, she couldn’t help a grim smile. The house Thom had designed and built was stronger than she had imagined: aside from a slight skew in the beams, it was fine, just refusing to collapse. At high tide the next morning, the water had not only surrounded the house but also reached almost all the way up to the highway. Looking down from the road, the house appeared to be floating on the sea.