Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

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.