Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

“I can’t save anyone,” replies the man, impassive, unwavering, unhesitating. “Not to mention that there’s nobody up there to save.”

“Nonsense! My son is up there! I don’t care who you are, but please, please , I’m begging you, you’ve got to do something!” The man doesn’t know where he found the strength to shout.

“You know very well …” the man says, his innumerable ommatidia flickering, his compound eyes like an undertow that would suck you in, drag you down and drown you, “… there’s nobody up there, at all . Nobody at all .”

A dinner with too much millet wine had put them all in a mood of disoriented rapture. So when Umav suggested they go spend the night in the Forest Church, everyone agreed it was a great idea, including Detlef and Sara, who hadn’t understood a word.

Standing in front of Heaven’s Gate, a name Anu had given to the two massive weeping fig trees at the entrance to the Forest Church, everyone was shining his or her flashlight up and down the trees from various angles and listening to an intricate symphony, of the breeze blowing through the grove, owls hooting in the trees, muntjacs calling from mountains over yonder, insects chirping nigh, and Stone and Moon barking from time to time. Detlef and Sara still didn’t know what was going on. Having no idea of the Forest Church, they’d assumed this would be a light evening stroll, not a hike through a primeval forest.

Then Anu, who’d looked drunk to begin with, walked to the front of the group, faced the “House of the Ancestors” to the one side of Heaven’s Gate and began performing a libation. People who don’t understand Bununese would on first hearing think it sounds like pieces of wood knocking together. It is a solid, seemingly rooted, arboreal language. His prayer complete, Anu took out the wine flask and shot glass he carried at the hip, poured the wine into the glass and sprinkled it on the ground. Then he poured another glass and passed it around so each could say a prayer in his or her own language and take a tiny sip of the wine. Dahu held Umav’s hand and they recited a Bunun prayer. Hafay prayed in Pangcah, Detlef in German, and Sara in Norwegian.

“No problem, the forest can understand what everyone’s saying,” Anu said, immediately returning to his usual jocular self and lightening the somewhat solemn atmosphere a bit.

“There might be big brothers and sisters here, so you need to poke the grass with a stick as you go along,” said Anu, his voice softening. “A big brother or sister is a poisonous snake. We mustn’t just say ‘snake.’ That would be disrespectful.” Then he turned his voice back up to its original volume and said, “Everyone follow me. Don’t shine your flashlight in people’s eyes, and listen to the footsteps of the person ahead.” Dahu translated Anu’s words into English for Detlef and Sara.

Anu took everyone down his favorite hunting path. Over ten years before a developer had wanted to buy the land and build a columbarium on it. To protect a forest in which the Bunun had always hunted, Anu tried getting a bank loan to buy the land. He got more than he bargained for. He had no head for money management and was soon drowning in debt. There were a few times when he was ready to give up and sell, but fortunately later on he got support from some aboriginal villagers and Han Chinese friends and was able to make ends meet. The past few years the forest had become a place for tourists to experience Bunun culture. Several years before, Anu’s youngest son Lian had gone into the forest to check the village water supply, and maybe because he forgot to pray to the ancestral spirits or because his prayers were not pious enough, a fig branch that had cracked in a typhoon came crashing down just as poor Lian was passing by. Lian was no longer breathing by the time he was discovered that evening. Long estranged from his wife, raising his sons alone, Anu would go into the forest every day to seek solace. Anu did not blame the forest. It was only doing its duty, by growing, shedding leaves, dying, or by fatally crushing a Bunun youth who just happened to be walking underneath.

So Anu had a peculiar feeling whenever he regarded this particular stand of fig, phoebe and autumn maple trees. It was not something he could tell the people around him about. He always imagined that one of the aerial roots hanging down from one of the weeping figs was his son’s avatar, a notion that fortified his resolution to guard the forest. When he took visitors on eco-cultural tours here, he would ask them to experience the forest one sense at a time. They would close their eyes and touch a tree root, lean on the tree and smell a wild mushroom, taste prickly ash leaves, and listen to a certain birdcall to judge how far away it was. It was as if by getting these people to do these things, at least a few of them would be able to smell, touch, hear or sense his son’s spirit. To him, in some form or other, Lian was still alive.

He led the group before a giant boulder in the crushing embrace of a gnarled old tree that had perched on top of it, wrapping its twisted roots around it. Underneath the rock was a small cave where Bunun hunters waited out the rain. Dahu was himself a guide, and Hafay and Umav had been there many times. Anu said, “The cave knows everyone here but our guests.” He wanted Detlef and Sara to go in and let the cave “get to know them.”

There was space for two grown-ups in the cave, though for westerners of Detlef and Sara’s height it was quite a squeeze. Dahu retold his joke about how being over 170 cm tall was a disability among the Bunun, adding that Detlef, who was close to 190 cm, must be severely height challenged. A man of this height would tend to get tripped or tied up by the vines and creepers as he runs through the forest, seriously limiting his pace.

“Actually, there’s caves like this everywhere in the forest, some in rocks, some formed by rainstorms and rockslides. But don’t ever take shelter in caves in trees and rocks above a certain altitude. Those caves tend to be bear dens. If the bear happens to come back and finds an uninvited guest, it’ll catch you,” Anu said, “and take you to the police station.”

After this burst of banter, Anu let them rest there for the time it takes to have half a cigarette, then guided them to another place where he had tied a rope up a huge fig tree to a height of about two and a half stories. The forest floor was slippery from all the recent rain, and Anu kept reminding everyone to be a bit more careful.

Anu quite liked these two unassuming foreigners. Detlef had an academic background, but he didn’t act like a big professor who would throw his weight around. He was like a worldly wise elder, while Sara was a person with the courage to try new things. Anu knew he’d have no trouble getting along with Sara from the moment she downed the first glass of millet wine he poured for her.

“Anyone who drinks his wine in one gulp, no matter how it tastes, is probably a friend,” Anu’s father had told him once when he was young.

There were no lights on anywhere nearby. Now Anu wanted the two of them to experience what it was like to travel the forest by night, so he advised everyone to turn off his flashlight and follow the person in front by holding hands or listening for the sound of breathing.

Which was why no one noticed when Hafay, who was last in line, stayed behind and ducked into the cave under the rock.

Hafay’s heart was pounding the first time Umav brought her to the Forest Church. She felt she’d finally found a vessel that could contain her, a shell in which she could hide like a hermit crab. From then on, when no one was watching, Hafay would go into the forest by herself and crawl into the cave and rest like a bear in hibernation, thinking of nothing at all.