Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

“I can make a bit more driving the taxi in Haven, but lately I’ve been thinking: Forget it, you know? The good thing about the village is that you’re welcome there no matter when you go back, and no matter what kind of job you do you can always scrape by. As it happens I’ve got an uncle here, Uncle Anu. He went to the city when he was young to get himself a master’s degree, just like me, and one year when he was back for a visit he heard there was this really nice piece of land that a consortium wanted to build a columbarium on. Uncle Anu managed to get a loan to buy the land. He borrowed some from friends and the rest from the bank. He does tours there at a place he calls the Forest Church. He teaches the city folk about the Bunun lifestyle, how we plant millet, how we hunt and build our houses. It’s been a while now. I’ve been coming down and helping out every chance I get. Now I’ll just move back here for good. Besides, Umav has kids to play with in the village.”

“You haven’t mentioned this to Alice, have you?”

“Not yet. This is something I just decided recently.”

Everything is just getting started, Hafay thought.

It was already evening when they got to the village. Dahu gently shook Umav awake, and friends in the village were making dinner for everyone, not just for Hafay and Dahu, but also for some tribespeople who’d just gotten back from cleaning up the beach.

Then a stocky middle-aged fellow with a childlike grin walked over and slapped Dahu on the back. Dahu introduced them: “Anu, Bunun.” Dahu pointed at Hafay and said, “Hafay, Pangcah.”

Anu was a talkative fellow. He got Hafay to listen to him when she was feeling depressed and did not want to listen to anything. He told her all about why he had founded the Forest Church, what problems he’d had, how much money he still owed, how many times the bank had tried to seize his house, and so on.

“My house almost got auctioned off quite a number of times.”

“Then why didn’t it?”

“Nobody’s interested. Who would want to buy it, in this location? Only Bunun people would be willing to live here. Ha ha! It’s rotten luck for the bank. I hear the loan officer that approved my mortgage lost his job!” he said, laughing, and Hafay could not help laughing along with him.

“There are only two kinds of people who would loan money to Anu: angels and fools,” Dahu said.

Soon Anu was lying on the floor, drunk, and wouldn’t budge. His friends and relatives all went home. Dahu took Hafay to the guest room, which had two single beds, one for Hafay and the other for Umav.

Hafay lay on the bed but just couldn’t get to sleep, not expecting that Umav would also be having a sleepless night. Umav was sitting up in bed, watching the moonlight outside.

“Auntie Hafay, want to take a walk in the Forest Church?”

“The church? Right now?”

“Yeah, now.”

“Do you have keys?”

Umav looked at Hafay, surprised. “How could there be keys to the forest?”

They walked to the end of the road, passed a mesa with a view of the river valley below, and came to stand in front of two towering trees. Umav said, “This is the gate.” Hafay realized she had gotten it all wrong: the Forest Church was a tract of woodland without even so much as a fence around it. The two of them stood there as if they had turned into a couple of animals.

“I thought it was a real church.”

“What do you mean, a real church? Are there false churches, too?”

“That’s not what I meant …” Hafay said. “What’s inside?”

“Walking trees,” said Umav.

“Once upon a time, there was a girl who always took her basket along when she went to work in the fields, but very mysteriously would never allow anyone to peek inside. But a nosy neighbor wondered why there was always a handsome young man helping the girl plow and plant when she was working. So the neighbor went behind the girl’s back and told her Ina.”

“What was the girl planting?”

“Millet, I guess.”

“My dad says that you don’t really have to plant millet; we can just scatter the seeds around.”

“Probably where the girl was living they had to pick up stones and turn the soil and plant the seeds.”

“I guess she would never admit that there was someone helping her.”

“Good guess. You’re so smart, Umav. The girl just denied everything. Her Ina had a funny feeling about her daughter’s basket, and suspected it might have something to do with the handsome young man the nosy neighbor had told her about. One day the girl got sick. She tossed the basket by her pillow and lay in bed. Her curious Ina waited until she was fast asleep, then took off the cover and looked inside. She could hardly believe her eyes: inside the basket was a fish, two feet long and seven inches wide.”

“How big is that?”

“This big.” Hafay showed Umav with her hands, and Umav was obviously satisfied. “My dad has caught way bigger.”

“The mother cooked and ate the fish, and then put the bones back in the basket. When the daughter woke up and discovered the fish was gone she went and asked her mother, ‘Where’s my fish, Ina?’ Her Ina told her off, yelling, ‘What an ungrateful daughter you are! The other day when we pounded mochi sticky rice there wasn’t anything to go with it, and there you were hiding a great big fish from me. How dare you!’ ”

“The daughter must have been angry because her mother got her all wrong.”

“Maybe she got angry at her Ina, or maybe there was some other reason, but in any event, the daughter was so sad when she heard what her Ina had done that she swallowed the bones in the basket and died. Turns out that handsome man was a fish in human form.”

“Why not a handsome man in fish form?” Umav asked.

“That makes sense, too. My Ina told me the story, but I forgot to ask her why it wasn’t the other way around. Umav, you’re so bright.”

Dahu couldn’t stop chuckling. Pangcah and Bunun people are both fond of making up stories. When he was a kid Dahu asked his father: “Who did you hear the story from?”

“From the elders.”

“Who did the elders hear the story from?”

“From even older elders.”

“But the even older elders were children once, too, weren’t they?”

“Yes, they were, Dahu.”

“So they heard the story, too.”

Dahu’s father thought it over and said, “Dahu’s right, even the oldest elders were children once. A story can take children places they’ve never been before and tell them about things that happened to folks even older than their elders.”

Dahu had noticed that Umav was really paying attention when Hafay told her the story. She wasn’t like that with other people. She really seemed to trust Hafay. The first day Hafay came to stay with them Dahu was a bit worried, but the next day when he heard Umav had taken her to the Forest Church in the middle of the night, his mind was set to rest. He knew the sacred trees there awakened fear, awe and caution, and that nobody who had seen those trees would want to end her life.

These past few days Dahu had gone back and forth between Deer County and Haven more times than he could count. The stench along the shoreline was getting worse, and it was especially stuffy there. The concrete wave-dispersal tetrapods piled along a long stretch of the east coast made the cleanup work all the more difficult. A few environmental groups with chapters operating in several local high schools and universities threw themselves into the coastal cleanup. It was heartwarming to see young people all along the way relaying the trash away, but there just weren’t enough vehicles. It wasn’t looking like the shore would return to its former self anytime soon.