My father and mother are both gone. I don’t want to talk about how they passed away, and I don’t want to talk about my brother, either. That’d only upset me. You know what I mean by “gone”? What do the Wayo Wayoans say when somebody dies? Dead, departed, passed away, gone to a better place? What? Iwa kugi?
(I start blowing up Toto’s inflatable globe. This thing is ingenious. You just need to force enough air into it and it turns into a sphere. It’s nearly to scale, and the words and colors on it glow in the dark. I blow and blow into the withered world until it’s firm as a drum).
You see this ball? It’s the Earth, the planet we live on. No, no, it’s not just mine, it’s yours and mine. Look, the place we live is like a star in the sky, it’s just that we call the star we live on Earth. This ball is a scale model of the Earth. I bought it for my son. It even glows in the dark! That’s because it has a special night-shine coating. Some things in this world glow, some don’t. Some are like the moon, others like the sun. What do you say for the moon? Nalusa? And the sun? The other one, the one that appears during the day? Yigasa?
The place we’re living on is actually just a small island. I sometimes feel that in a way the size of the island is not for us to decide. When my ancestors arrived on the island two hundred years ago, walking from here to here (I traced a line through the Central Mountain Range to the east coast with my finger) took months, and they risked their lives to make the trip. Maybe to some extent just like you were risking your life when you floated your way here. In fact, a lot of people came here in boats. I often think that if you stroll from town to town, from village to village, the island would get really big. When we were still dating I told Thom, “Maybe the island got the way it is today because the people living here wanted to be able to get anywhere on the island as quickly as possible.”
The day you drifted here there was an earthquake and an extraordinary wave. Are there earthquakes on your island? When the earth shakes? There should be. There must be. Earthquakes are really common here. We have typhoons, too, and I’m worried that come typhoon season the Trash Vortex that brought you here might end up surrounding the entire island.
I would guess you’re a teenager, fourteen or fifteen at the most? I had a child, too, and if he were still with us he’d be ten. I didn’t want a child at first, because I didn’t know what kind of future he would have to face. I didn’t want him to have to inherit an island we’ve gone and messed up. But Thom and I still ended up having a child.
It’s been raining a lot the past few years. Some places will get several hundred millimeters of precipitation in a single day when there’s no typhoon. Summer’s gotten extremely hot and long, and there’s a shower almost every day. My friend Ming told me that some of his bird-watching friends have discovered that certain migratory birds can’t even recognize the coastline anymore, because it’s changing too fast. They hesitate before they land. It’s in a sorry state, but this is our island home.
I also brought this to show you. Here. It’s a digital photo frame. The things it displays are called photographs, and the photographs inside it are images of the past. Interesting, don’t you think? These are my folks. And this is the place where they finally settled down in Taipei. It was called the Chung Hwa Market. We were really poor when I was little. My parents worked as hard as they could to send my brother and me through school. They thought that we’d do well in life if we got an education. My dad apprenticed in an electrical supply store. While he was out with the boss repairing air conditioners, my mother sold little egg-shaped sponge cakes in the market. My dad’s boss let us a room on the third floor, probably about the size of this hut. My mother had us stay home and study instead of minding the cake stand, except on holidays. Both my brother and I really liked baking those cakes. You bake the one side, turn it over, then you bake the other. They smelled so good! I’ll buy you some next time I go into town.
Look, this was my home in the Chung Hwa Market. We only had one bed. Mum, Dad, my brother and I all slept on the same bed. When I was a girl I often dreamed of leaving that home.
This is Thom, my husband, and this is our son, Toto. He was still an infant at the time.
Are there mountains on your island? The thing we’re on right now is called a mountain, and that tall pointy place in the photo is a mountain.
This is a “true touch” topographical map. Try touching it. Doesn’t it feel upraised, furry, wet? Some places feel hard. In the past you could just draw something pointy on a map and that was a mountain, but feel it now: that’s what a mountain is supposed to feel like. Taiwan is a small island, but the mountains here are just incredible. My husband and son really loved mountain climbing. One day they went climbing and never came back.
My good friend Dahu found Thom’s body a while ago, but my son has completely vanished, like a leaf blown into the forest, never to return. They only went for a visit, not expecting that the mountain would have them stay forever, I sometimes think.
Since then I’ve mostly been living alone in that house by the sea. At first we called it the Seaside House, but later the sea level rose and other people started calling it the Sea House. Now I call it Alice’s Island.
To tell you the truth, I felt so much sadder losing my son than I did when my mother passed away. Your mother must be devastated. If my son were still here, he might be as tall as you in a few years. You know, I’m a second child, just like you. If you don’t mind counting girls, that is.
Ah, not a cloud in the sky. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen such a clear sky. The Nalusa is so beautiful and bright this evening. People on Wayo Wayo see the same Nalusa. Do you realize, Atile’i, that the Nalusa you see now is the same Nalusa you saw on Gesi Gesi?
Sometimes I talk and talk and I think he can understand everything I’ve said. It’s not understanding in the linguistic sense, but in some other sense.
One morning he said, “Ohiyo, good morning.” (I taught him how to say this). And I replied, “i-Wagudoma-siliyamala” (It’s very fair at sea today). We’ve gotten used to using each other’s language or mixing the two languages together.
In talking to Atile’i I’ve noticed that he often seems to repeat greeting queries. He keeps asking me, “i-Wagudoma-silisaluga?”—a question that may mean, “Is the weather fair at sea today?” to which the other person is supposed to reply “i-Wagudoma-siliyamala.” At first I was puzzled, because we weren’t going out to sea, so what did it matter if the weather at sea was fair or not. But you’re still supposed to reply, “Very fair.” Sometimes when the weather isn’t fair at all, when it’s raining and the waves are watching the island coldly from afar, Atile’i will still smile and say, “The weather at sea today is very fair.”