Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

“Mountains?” he asked, pointing in the distance.

“Yes.”

“So many?”

“Yes.”

“God is there?”

“What?”

“God is there?”

Is God there? Some Taiwan aboriginal myths involving mountains came to Alice’s mind. The first Atayal ancestor was supposedly born on Mount Dabajian. The Tsou had fled to Jade Mountain after the Deluge. And the Bunun, too, had their own Holy Mountain. Almost all the tribes did. But was a holy mountain a god? Alice would rather describe it as a source of sustenance and as a refuge. The mountains had no particular place in the folk religion of her ancestors, the Han people of Taiwan, but belief in the communal Earth God was ubiquitous. So in a certain sense, at a certain point of time, the mountains had, loosely speaking, been “gods.” Alice was reminded of slogans people had made up in response to the rash of landslides that had been striking whenever a typhoon hit, sometimes burying whole aboriginal villages, sometimes swallowing vehicles, sometimes merely knocking roads out and leaving entire villages isolated. There’d been calls for a return to nature and a renewed respect for nature and even an appeal to “worship the mountain god again.” But maybe it was already too late. Even if once the mountains had been divine, all the gods would have departed by now, Alice thought.

“God was there, but not anymore.”

“God is there, in Wayo Wayo’s sea. The mountain is small, but God is also there,” Atile’i solemnly declared.

Unlike Kabang, Yayaku, the Wayo Wayoan mountain god, was a chastised deity. Wayo Wayoans believed that there were many other gods who were not quite as mighty as Kabang but who were in charge of fate and destiny, each in His own domain. The reason Yayaku had been punished was that one day when Kabang resolved to wipe out a certain kind of whale that had given offense, Yayaku astonishingly extended the hand of mercy. He created a kind of kelp that grew as high as a mountain, let those peerless whales hide inside, and exhorted them not to come out until after Kabang had calmed down. But Kabang finally found them when a playful whale calf snuck out of the seaweed grove. Kabang quaked with anger and unleashed His vengeance upon Yayaku. Yet at the same time, Kabang had realized it would be rash and improper to exterminate a kind of living creature, and thereupon He rescinded His fatal decree.

But Kabang was still contemplating how He should punish Yayaku, at once to put the minor god in his place and boost His own prestige. Kabang had given Wayo Wayo to the people, but over time the rocks on the island would become sand, and the sand would be blown away by the wind and carried away by the sea and the island would get smaller and smaller. Thus, Kabang resolved to oblige Yayaku to take on the form of a little bird and the quotidian task of collecting the grains of sand that blew away in the wind or floated away in the sea and replenishing the island with them. Because the waves never rested and the wind never tired, Yayaku never enjoyed a moment of respite. But Yayaku was industrious and managed, when the gods of sea and wind were not exerting themselves quite so much, to pile up a mountain. In possession of this mountain, the islanders could cut down a certain number of trees without fearing that Wayo Wayo might someday disappear. This was why the islanders worshiped Yayaku as the Mountain God.

“So your mountain god is a bird?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it just be too cute to have a little bird as the mountain god,” Alice thought aloud, gazing at the youth standing before her. She couldn’t fully understand him, but there was more to what he was saying than just the words. His expressions, gestures, tones and dynamics made him a natural storyteller. His body had been milled, polished, scarfed and forged, as if by magic, a magic that would make people believe that any story he might tell, no matter how absurd, bizarre and unbelievable it might seem, must have actually happened in real life.

“Adorable? No, Yayaku has no feeling. He is cold.”

They kept finding their way, and at dawn on the fourth day, they could see some peaks in the distance that Alice recognized from the map. She knew they were approaching the “forest” on the map. But by this time Alice was starting to show fatigue, so they took even more frequent breaks. Alice taught Atile’i how to read a map while they were resting. The key concept, which Atile’i soon grasped, was the use of a sign to stand for some natural feature. The next step was determining orientation, allowing the mind to match the observed landscape and its corresponding representation on the map. Atile’i’s ability in this respect greatly exceeded Alice’s. The only thing he could not get was proportion. The ocean was clearly vast. How could such a small image serve as a surrogate?

They made a fire to cook a meal. Alice had brought many vacuum food packs, which you could just heat up and eat. This evening they had spaghetti with pesto sauce and hot coffee. Atile’i had gradually gotten used to the food the Taiwanese islanders ate.

“So, what did you eat most often at sea?” Alice asked.

“Fish.”

“How’d you catch them?”

“I used things on Gesi Gesi to make a spear gun, and oyster shells as hooks.”

“You ate them raw?”

“What?”

“You didn’t use fire?”

“Fire? No.”

“No fire. Oh, right, it would be too difficult to make a fire on the ocean. What about writing? Do the people of Wayo Wayo have writing?”

“Writing? Like this?”

“Yeah.”

“Writing, we have not. The Earth Sage says, speech is everything.”

“Too bad you don’t have writing. There are many things that can only be expressed using the written word.”

“No need. Wayo Wayo has no writing, but we can express things all the same.”

“But how can you compose poems without writing?” Atile’i didn’t answer, having failed to understand.

“What do you call the moon again?”

“Nalusa.”

“Oh, kaga mi yiwa Nalusa ,” Alice said in Wayo Wayoan.

“Tonight there is a moon,” Atile’i translated into Mandarin.

“Ah, indeed, your Mandarin is much improved, tonight there is a moon. And what’s the sun again?”

“Yigasa.”

“Yigasa,” Alice repeated.

“ Yigasa shines with its own light, which Nalusa borrows to be bright,” said Atile’i, reciting the lyrics of a Wayo Wayoan nursery rhyme.

“ Yigasa shines with its own light, which Nalusa borrows to be bright,” Alice said. “ Aiya , that’s poetry.” But Atile’i still didn’t understand what poetry meant.

That evening, shortly after the two of them had gone to sleep, Atile’i woke up, immediately pulled Alice over, covered her mouth to signal silence, and motioned for her to leave via the rear opening. Atile’i sensed that something was out there, but Alice saw nothing except an expanse of silent gloom. Alice’s blood and heartbeat were still sluggish, and because she had not slept enough her legs were still in a dreamland. Atile’i on the other hand was preternaturally alert. He gazed intently into the darkness.

Soon, in the shadows of the trees, he made out a looming form. It seemed to hesitate but was actually resolute. When it moved close to the tent, Alice felt as if a bucket of water had been dumped on her head. Now she was completely awake.

“Bear!”

The bear looked over toward the voice. It stood up on its hind legs like a man and craned its neck to catch the scent, revealing the pattern on its chest, like a crescent moon in the vast night sky of its body. Attracted by the smells, it hesitated before roughly “opening” the tent, spilling their food out on the ground. Then it tasted every item on the menu.