Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

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.”

I remember it was the evening of the fifteenth day after the rain stopped. Ina woke up in the middle of the night and went outside. I felt her get up, so I woke up too. I could vaguely hear her talking to someone, but who would there be to talk to so late at night in a place like this? I got up the courage to crawl over to a corner where the flap was raised enough for me to peek out. I saw someone standing in front of Ina. It was a man. That man was big and tall, and though I couldn’t see him clearly I felt he must be a young man, but he also seemed kind of middle-aged and youthful at the same time. He was just like a shadow, one moment big, the next moment small. I heard them, and they seemed to be talking about something. For a moment his eyes met mine, and those eyes were … how shall I put it? Ah, it’s hard to say. It was like a tiger, a butterfly, a tree and a cloud looking at you all at once. Aiya , I know it sounds crazy.

I immediately rolled back to my spot and pretended to be asleep, but that man’s eyes filled my head. Ina came back in, crying for the first time in weeks. I sat up and asked her what was the matter. She said, “ Kawas has spoken. Come with me.” Kawas in the Pangcah language means ancestral spirit. Ina said, “I know where he is.”

Ina held my hand as we waded into the creek up to our waists and then leaped up onto a big rock, and from that rock onto another. The moon wasn’t too bright that night, but it was bright enough to see the rocks. If someone had seen us we would have looked like a pair of ghosts. Ina was sure-footed in the dark, and it was as if she had a flying squirrel’s eyes, no deliberation, no hesitation.