Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

“So you think …”

“Recently, I keep thinking that this isn’t about the survival of a species. It’s about why we’re never satisfied with what we need, why we always take a bit more.”

“What about the penises? Where do they sell them?” Sara was intently remembering the penises she’d seen before, two of them belonging to classmates, one to a friend she’d met working part time. She had held their penises. They were warm to the touch, and gave her the sense that there was some living thing within.

“China, Hong Kong or Taiwan, I guess,” Amundsen said, stirring the soft-cooked egg on his plate. “Sara, most of my fishing buddies have not completely turned their hearts to stone. Many have no other choice. But behind them are the corporate bosses. Counting their cash in comfy chairs in nice heated rooms, they never appear on the boat or on the ice, and their hearts never bleed.”

Sara would always remember the look of sadness that appeared in her father’s eyes. They were brimming with pathos, an expression she had never seen before on any other animal. Amundsen’s eyes were flashing, like he had an insect’s compound eyes. “Sara, I renounce my identity as a seafaring hunter. The time has come. I really feel I must relinquish my former identity. I have to try to make a change, or I will feel that I have lived my life in vain.”

Amundsen kept his vow. That year he sold his boat and joined an international organization opposed to the slaughter of seals. He went back to Canada and threw himself into the antisealing movement. He also took part in commercial whaling protests in Norway. From then on, Amundsen gave people a big headache on both sides of the Atlantic.

When Sara saw the sea her father had always called “our Pacific,” a thousand feelings thronged her heart.

Although the beach had been given a “temporary” cleanup, some of the trash from the vortex would wash onto the shore every day with the tide, as if the trash island out there wanted to unite with the island on which she was standing.

Because he had a prior arrangement, Jung-hsiang was going to have an old classmate who was now teaching at the U of D host Sara and Detlef. But then he decided another friend he’d met mountain climbing might be more suitable. “His name is Dahu and he’s aboriginal. When you visit Taiwan, especially the east coast, the aboriginal people make the best guides.”

Immediately after crossing the bridge over the last river before Haven, they saw a dark-skinned man with a red bandana waving at them. Sara had a profoundly good feeling about this stocky fellow with a mournful expression. There was an unaffected quality in his every movement.

“Sara, Detlef, so nice to meet you! I am Dahu.”

Dahu got in the driver’s seat. About half an hour later they were heading down the coast by the Sea House.

The sea they saw from there was in a different state, because as far as the eye could see across the gently curving bay they could barely make out the edge of the Trash Vortex.

“How are you handling it now?”

“Well, we start by sorting the trash on the beach. Five decomposition vats have been set up in the nearby wastepaper plant. Anything that will decompose is sent there for priority processing. The valuable trash is sent elsewhere for further sorting and recycling. Any live animals we find are sent to the local university for experts to study. You’ll see we’ve got nine work stations, but to tell you the truth we don’t have enough people to man them.”

“What about the local townspeople and villagers?”

“Many of them are Pangcah. The word means ‘people,’ and it’s what the Amis aboriginal people around here prefer to call themselves. Most of the Pangcah in Haven are involved in the recovery work. I’m afraid that this is it for this stretch of coast and for the fishing ground too. Part of the sea culture of the Pangcah people has been ruined. To Han Chinese people, all the pollution means is that there’s no more money to make from the sea, but for the Pangcah it’s different: the sea is their ancestor, and so many of their traditional stories are about the sea. Without ancestors, what’s the point of being ‘Pangcah’?”

“Are you Pangcah yourself?”

“No, I’m Bunun,” Dahu said. “The word bunun means that we are the true ‘people.’ ”

Sara completely understood. Every people in the world, in the beginning, felt that they were the only “true people.”

For dinner they went to Dahu’s house. There they met a girl and a woman. The girl, Umav — what a charming name! — was Dahu’s daughter. But he only introduced the woman by name without indicating whether she was his wife. Sara felt that she seemed not to be. The relationship between Hafay and Dahu seemed like what was between her and Detlef, just not exactly. It was like an article without an explicit thesis. She was told that the dinner was made mainly with the wild vegetables that the Pangcah people often ate. But there wasn’t any seafood. Umav and Hafay could not speak English, so Dahu did most of the talking.

“There’s seafood in almost everything we eat, but there isn’t any seafood for now. You know how it is.”

“No worries. It’s a wonderful, lavish feast! And when you think about it, who knows if there’ll ever be seafood again? Maybe now’s the time to go veg,” Detlef said, laughing, and the others groaned and laughed along with him.

This island has already started to redeem itself, Sara thought.

Alice woke up in the night and hiked down the mountain with her flashlight. It was still drizzling. This was the eighteenth straight day of rain on the east coast. Apparently, some sections of road and railway in Tai-tung had been swamped by the sea, and some coastal villages in Ping-tung, the ones that suffered the most subsidence, had been evacuated.

The path wasn’t that easy to make out, but Alice was moving right along. She was growing less afraid of the mountain as she became more familiar with every little path she could take to get down, and with the rate of growth of every plant, every clump of grass along the way. So this was what a mountain was like, the same as a person: the more you know, the less you fear. But even so, you still never know what it’s thinking. And just like you never know what a person is going to do next, you never know what a mountain is going to do next, Alice thought.

Alice had mixed feelings when she reached the coast and stood at the shore, once so familiar but now so strange. Since this stretch of coastline was relatively populous, the preliminary cleanup had been finished, finally. But seawater does not stay in one place; the trash island was spread out over an expanse of sea larger than Taiwan itself, so that when the second wave washed in it crammed trash into every discernible gap. The Sea House was now about fifty meters from the high water line, when the water reached all the way up to the edge of the road and surrounded the house with debris. Now the tide would begin to ebb. Alice took off her T-shirt and put it in a waterproof bag, then put on her swimsuit and waded down the slope of the road, which hadn’t subsided, at least not yet.

At first, the water only reached her calves, but soon it was too deep to stand and she stepped into nothing. Her body tensed up for a moment in the frigid water, then relaxed.

In the darkness the seawater was inky black. She’d never seen it this way before. The lights from the streetlamps danced on the waves like flashing threads weaving themselves into something people did not yet understand. Alice put on a diving mask, strapped on a mini Aqua-Lung and plunged. In the glare of her headlamp she saw myriad plastic objects floating in various poses, like the unknown organisms of an alien world.