Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

Sara was now feeling the roots of the tree with her other hand, wondering whether her widely traveled father had ever seen a tropical forest like this. On that trip he’d taken to the Mississippi, had he gone downstream into the warm South and encountered trees there like the one she was now seeing?

Actually, Sara never even got the chance to see her father’s body. His friends had already cremated “their Amundsen” by the time she was informed of his death. He had died in his favorite place — on the ice — but in Canada not in Norway.

Sara could not say she had not begrudged Amundsen his absences. At least when she was an adolescent, she thought for the longest time that he loved the sea, the fish, the whales and, later on, even the seals more than he loved her. Her mother’s departure had thrown Sara into a man’s world, a world of gory slaughter and relentless pursuit that she always regarded with disgust. And when she found it hard getting accustomed to life at sea he never gave her a word of comfort, just let the sea torment her. The sea had separated her from her mother, and even if Sara had wanted to go looking for her, there was no easy way for her to get back to land. The only way she could punish her father was by looking away whenever he spoke to her, looking toward the sea instead.

Her father finally permitted her to start a life on land when she was fifteen, and from then on they lived separate lives, one at sea and the other on shore. He was always away, while she worked nonstop in her seaside lab learning science and getting to know a freedom she’d never enjoyed out on the open ocean. When she went into oceanography, she realized she understood the sea way better than her classmates. What the professors taught in class was just a way of talking about what she had lived through, and a way for her to revisit a girlhood spent at sea. Sometimes, pondering some issue in marine ecology, Sara could almost hear her father haranguing her from the ship’s railing.

He would wire money into her account regularly, but hardly ever sent even a simple postcard. Soon after Sara obtained her Ph.D. she got a reputation for being fierce. When most professors were cozying up to the government, she was the “spear of knowledge” for protest organizations. She was always able to pierce the criminal subterfuges of state agencies or capitalists hiding behind the letter of environmental protection regulations or pseudoknowledge, no matter what the issue: the exploitation of polar oil or methane ice or excessive whaling in the name of research. The literature reviews she did were so thorough that the scientists defending the capitalists always got beaten back, unable to hold their own against her. While most people described Sara as “fierce,” only she knew about the emotional knots a traumatic childhood had tied in her soul.

When Sara’s father was found, the hunters initially mistook him for a flayed beater. Obviously, he had been battered to death with a hakapik. His head had sustained multiple blows, leaving his face almost unrecognizable. All his teeth had been knocked out. As he was not found until several days after the fact, his arms and abdomen had been eaten away. Maybe the seals had come on shore and divvied him up. They didn’t even leave his reproductive organs.

Amundsen himself was known for his fierceness in the environmental protection movement in his later years. He once blocked a Japanese whaling boat disguised as a scientific research vessel in the Antarctic for seven days, until his own craft got rammed so badly it lost propulsion. He had, quite illegally, pointed a gun at a group of sealers until they retreated. He spent the entire winter on the ice guarding the seals, until he was arrested and charged with criminal intimidation. His hair went completely white; his face, scoured by ice and snow, was covered in scars, while his beard, covered in salt crystals, was hard as baleen. Heart disease often made him wince, and people who saw him knit his brows thought he was unhappy. Only Amundsen knew that he had never felt more contented in his entire life than he did now.

His friends made a special point of presenting funeral invitations to minke whales, fin whales, sei whales, codfish and harp seals. None of them could come, of course, but his daughter Sara did attend the memorial service. A fellow she called Uncle Hank, an old friend of her father’s, brought Sara his personal effects: a hunting gun, a harpoon, a pair of binoculars and the birthday presents he never remembered to send in time. His presents were all the same: a tiny, inch-long boat carved out of styrofoam floating in a deep blue sea inside a crystal box. There was a girl in the boat, with “Sara” written on her cute little dress. On the base of each box Amundsen wrote, in that distinctive flowing script of his that slanted like an ocean wave, “ our Pacific ,” “ our Indian Ocean ,” “ our Arctic Ocean ,” “ our Norskehavet ,” with the word “our” in bold and the date at the end.

“That’s our village down there.” Anu led everyone through another wood until they reached the edge and a wide-open vista appeared. Some lights were still twinkling in the village below, and in the distance the Laku Laku River was shimmering. “That’s our village, and the mountain is our holy land, as well as our refrigerator.”

By now Umav too had discovered that Hafay wasn’t there. She kept looking back into the darkness to check whether Hafay had caught up. She pulled at Dahu’s hand and said she wanted to go back. Dahu looked at his daughter in the darkness and found that at some point her expression had changed without him noticing, that she no longer had the eyes of a wounded bird.

“Let’s not bother Auntie Hafay for now. She’ll come out when she’s ready,” he said, bending down to whisper to his daughter.

“We’ll sleep in traditional Bunun houses this evening, if you don’t mind. See the two buildings made of bamboo and stone over there? They might not be that comfortable to you, but for the mountains this is a five-star hotel. Inside, you’ll hear the sounds the mountain makes at night.” After hearing Dahu’s translation, Detlef and Sara said they liked the idea. Having lived on an oceangoing fishing boat, Sara didn’t believe that there was any place in the world she couldn’t take.

In a mellow mood from the wine, Anu pointed at the village and continued his explanation, saying, “We call it Sazasa , meaning a place where sugarcane grows tall and animals leap, a place where folks can thrive.” Anu gestured toward a mountain on the other side of the Laku Laku River, then looked round and motioned toward another mountain on their side of the river and said, “My father said the Japanese forced us to leave our original village on that mountain over there and come live here by the river on the slope of this mountain. But it’s all worked out for the best, because now we’re closer to the sea. My dad used to take me hunting when I was little. We would follow the trail up that mountain all the way up to the summit and then go down to the sea on the other side. My dad told me, sea and mountain aren’t the same. The sea washes everything clean. It even washes us clean, inside and out.

“It’s just that the sea isn’t the same as it used to be,” Anu said.

Exhausted from the past few days of hiking, Alice finally came down with a cold. She was trembling all over. The medicine in the first-aid kit had no effect, and soon she had sunk into a feverish state with hot flashes and cold shivers and times when she was half-comatose. Atile’i picked several kinds of herbal medicine with the knowledge he had gleaned from the field guides and cooked up a pot of medicinal broth. He collected dry sticks for a fire in order to save propane. Alice drank the broth and her vitality was actually somewhat restored.