Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

Alice had tendered her resignation, returned her faculty ID. She could finally let out a big sigh of relief: now the torment of this life would end and she could try her luck in the next. Alice had gone to grad school to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. She had sailed into this faculty position after getting her Ph.D. With her delicate appearance and sensitive disposition she seemed in Taiwan’s conservative society typecast for the role of the writer. A lot of people envied her; after all, for a literary person, this was the smoothest road one could possibly take. Only Alice knew the truth: that becoming a good writer was no longer the issue, that she simply had no time to write. Stifled by administrative duties, she had not had a breath of fresh, literary air these past few years. Oftentimes it was already sunrise before she was ready to leave the office.

She decided to give away all the books and things in her office to her students. Trying not to get all emotional, she treated each of the students she had mentored to a meal as a way of saying goodbye. Sitting in the dreadful campus cafeteria, she observed the different expressions in their eyes.

“So young,” she thought.

These kids imagined they were on the way to some mysterious destination, but there wasn’t really anything where they were going, just an empty space like a basement, a place that was heaped with junk. She tried to keep a glimmer of sympathy in her eyes, to let her students think that she was still listening and interested in what they had to say. But Alice was just a shell through which air was blowing, all words like stones being tossed into an empty house that didn’t even have windows. The only thoughts that flickered through her mind were memories of Toto and possible ways of ending her life.

On second thought, that seemed a bit unnecessary. The sea was right on her doorstep, wasn’t it?

Alice had not bid farewell to practically any of her colleagues. She was afraid she might reveal the knots of revulsion toward the world that life had tied in her soul. Driving through town, Alice felt things looked about the same as when she first came here over ten years before, but she was struck by the sense that this was no longer the land of gorges and villages that had drawn her here. Halfway down the east coast, separated from the overdeveloped west by the Central Mountain Range, Haven had once seemed a refuge. But now the huge leaves, the clouds that would gather all of a sudden, the corrugated iron roofs, the dry creek beds she would see along the road every couple of miles, and the vulgar billboards — all the things she had at first found so endearing — were gradually withering, growing unreal, losing their hold on her. She remembered her first year in Haven: then the bush and the vegetation came quite close to the road, as if neither the terrain nor the wild animals feared the sight of man. Now the new highway had pushed nature far away.

Originally, Alice reflected, this place had belonged to the aborigines. Then it belonged to the Japanese, the Han people, and the tourists. Who did it belong to now? Maybe to those city folks who bought homesteads, elected that slimeball of a mayor, and got the new highway approved. After the highway went through, the seashore and the hills were soon covered with exotic edifices, not one of them authentic, pretty much as if a global village theme park had been built there as a joke. There were fallow fields and empty houses everywhere, and the fat cats who owned these eyesores usually only appeared on holidays. Folks in the local cultural scene liked to gush about how Haven was the true “pure land,” among other cheap clichés of native identity, while Alice often felt that except for some houses belonging to the aboriginal people or buildings from the Japanese era, now maintained as tourist attractions, the artificial environment had been intended to spite the natural landscape.

Which reminded her of this one conference coffee break when her colleague Professor Wang started spouting off about how sticky the soil in Haven was, how “stuck-on-Haven” he felt, and not for the first time. What a disingenuous comment! Alice couldn’t help telling him, right to his face, “Don’t you mean stuck-in-Haven? There’s fake farmhouses and fake B&Bs all over the place; even the trees in the yards of these places are fake. Don’t you think? These houses! Ug. What’s so great about it if all it does is cause phonies like that to stick around?”

Professor Wang was at a loss for words. For a moment he forgot to wear the mantle of the senior faculty member. With his drooping eyelids, gray hair and greasy appearance, he looked more like a businessman than like an academic. Honestly, there were times when Alice could not tell the difference. Professor Wang eventually managed, “If you say so, then what should it really be like?”

What was it really like? Alice ruminated on the drive home.

It was April. Everywhere was a sluggish, damp smell in the air, like the smell of sex. Alice was driving south. To the right was the Central Mountain Range, a national icon. Occasionally — no, more like every day — Alice recalled the way Toto had looked standing up on the car seat, gazing at the mountains with his head sticking up through the sunroof. He wore a camouflage hat, like a little soldier. Sometimes her memory would dress him in a windbreaker, sometimes not. Sometimes he would be waving, but not always. She imagined that Toto must have left the foot-sized indentation in the car seat that day. That was the last impression she had of her husband and son.

Dahu was the first person she called for help after Thom and Toto went missing. Dahu was Thom’s climbing buddy. A member of the local rescue team, he knew these hills like the back of his hand.

“It’s all Thom’s fault!” She was frantic.

“Don’t worry. If they’re up there, I’ll find them,” Dahu reassured her.

Thom Jakobsen was from Denmark, a country without any true mountains. He was a flatlander who became a climbing fanatic soon after arriving in Taiwan. After finishing all the local trails with Dahu, he went abroad to train himself in traditional alpine climbing techniques. He wanted to prepare for an ascent on a mountain of over seven thousand meters, three thousand meters higher than the highest peak in Taiwan. Taiwan became a place he only visited on occasion. Alice, feeling herself getting older day by day, was almost no longer able to handle not knowing if or when Thom would return. But even when he was by her side his expression would wander far away.

Maybe that was why lately Alice tended to think first of Toto, then of Dahu, and only then of Thom. No, she hardly ever thought of Thom. He thought he knew everything there was to know about mountains, forgetting there were none back where he was from. And how could he? How could he take their son climbing and not bring him back? What if he had gotten sick that day or forgotten to charge the battery or even slept in a bit longer? Everything would have turned out different, Alice often thought.

“Don’t worry, we’re only going insect hunting! I won’t take him anywhere dangerous. We’ll be fine. Everyone knows the route we’re going on.” Thom had tried to reassure her but she heard a hint of impatience in his voice.

Most people could not believe that at ten years old Toto was already a skilled rock climber and mountaineer who knew more about alpine forests than the average forestry graduate. Alice understood Toto belonged to the mountains and tried not to stand in his way. Maybe Dahu was right that fate is fate, and that when the time comes, fate can fly like the shaft that finds the wild boar.

Dahu was a close friend of Alice and Thom’s. He was many things: a taxi driver, a mountaineer, an amateur sculptor, a forest conservationist and a volunteer for some east-coast NGOs. He had a typically stocky Bunun build. He also had a charming gleam in his eyes; best not gaze right at him or you might think he has fallen in love with you, or that you have gone and fallen for him.