The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

  Some environmental protection organizations believed that the use of the harpoon was even crueler than modern weapons as it would cause the whale greater pain. Amundsen found this impossible to accept. “All life must feel pain in the face of death. To live without pain is to live without dignity. We venerate the whales and don’t intend to kill them off, and I don’t make them suffer on purpose. We put our lives on the line, in exchange for theirs. When I hunt a whale, it’s either him or me. I don’t condone the commercial hunt, any more than you. It’s the commercial hunters who are driving the whales to extinction. You should be going after them, not us. Get it?”

  Amundsen was a one-man army, with a truculent manner to match. Modern boats were so much faster than traditional ones, but Amundsen made a point of following the old ways. “At least, the whales that die by my hand die with dignity. They have a fighting chance, the chance to take my life.” Sometimes, before Little Sara was old enough to understand, he would explain, “People are a link in the food chain, and hunting in moderation won’t cause any species to disappear. Hunting whales made the old Scandinavian fishermen strong. This you must understand, my little Sara.”

  To his friends, Amundsen was a typical Norwegian, tough and cold. Only Little Sara saw the weakness in him. He would often sit up at night in the cabin of his boat and pierce and yank at his skin with a fishhook. This process left twisting scars, which soon snaked all over his arms. People were always shocked by the sight when he rolled up his sleeves and set to work out at sea. One morning while they were eating breakfast, Little Sara surprised him by asking why he poked himself like that. He fell silent a minute, then replied, “To feel what the fish feel, my Little Sara.”

  Many years later, Amundsen would say that his whaling career ended the year he turned fifty. That year he and his friends were chasing a pair of fin whales. They fought them all the way across the north Atlantic until they ended up killing the eighteen-meter-long bull and releasing the even more massive cow, because they had agreed never to kill females. But when the cow was leaving it took a swipe at the boat with her tail, not only ripping a hole in the hull but also destroying the propulsion system. Regretfully, they had to leave the male, letting its colossal body sink into the sea. Adrift, Amundsen and his friends sent out distress signals as they tried to fix the leak. They had even jumped into the whaleboat, ready to abandon ship, when a Canadian fishing vessel rescued them, lowering a transport net and hauling them off to Newfoundland.

  It was already late autumn. Amundsen decided to winter in Canada, taking some time out for a trip down the Mississippi. Renting a boat and navigating this river had been a boyhood dream of his, ever since he had seen a cartoon called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom and Huck, Tom and Huck, Amundsen sang as he steered the boat, feeling himself fortunate to enjoy this kind of nostalgic interlude.

  Amundsen returned to Newfoundland in early spring and met up with his whaling buddies to reclaim the repaired boat. A Canadian seaman named Kent invited him to hunt seals in Labrador, his homeland and a major breeding ground for harp seals. Amundsen had hunted seals in Europe, and it was actually not that hard. As an adventure lover, Amundsen was lukewarm about the idea, but could not really refuse Kent’s avid hospitality.

  This was the season when pregnant seals congregated on the beach to give birth and nurse their pups. Amundsen and Kent and other hunters moored their boats along a floe and entered “the ice zone” on foot. The floe was dull and gray, making a fellow like Amundsen, who came from a land of ice and snow, feel right at home. The pod of seals was like a class of carefree kids on a field trip, looking around, enjoying the scenery.

  On the way to the ice, Kent had filled Amundsen in on some basic seal lore. “Baby seals are called ‘whitecoats’ because they are covered in snow-white fur. Two weeks later when they start developing silver fur they’re ‘ragged-jackets.’ Another nineteen or so days after that, when they’ve entirely molted, they turn into silver-gray ‘beaters.’ Actually, when seal fur was fashionable in Europe, ‘whitecoat’ fur was the kind favored by the rich ladies, but now it’s against the law to hunt whitecoats. The government says we can only hunt the beaters. I just don’t get it! What difference does it make? Either way, it’s still killing a seal!”

  “But I don’t have a hunting gun. You’d have to help me borrow one.”

  “No problem.”

  The weapon Kent handed him the next day wasn’t a gun. It was a special kind of club called a hakapik, about the length of a baseball bat but with a metal hammerhead and hook attachment on the one end.

  “How do you use it?” Amundsen asked, doubtfully.

  “You bludgeon the seal’s head with it. Bang, it’s dead. A good hunter can kill a seal with a single blow, then skin it,” Kent said. “Let the games begin.”

  When the hunting party got close to the ice floe, the alert seals started to bark like crazy and flee en masse into the water. They could not move very fast on the ice, but once they made it into the water they were out of reach, out of range. But the seal pups ran very slowly, and some couldn’t swim too well, either. Some, too scared even to dive in, were soon caught by the hunters. Watching from off to one side, Amundsen discovered that killing a seal with one blow wasn’t easy, even for a big guy like him, mainly because the ice floe was swaying slightly and the seals would try to dodge. Most seals took quite a few hits, screaming and cowering, their heads all bloody, before they stopped resisting, by which time they were either badly injured or out cold. When a seal submitted, the hunter would turn the club the other way around, hook the animal’s neck and drag it over to the boat. The blood would drip down from the end of the club, as if the club itself had suffered a mortal wound.

  As the seals could not attack, Amundsen could not bring himself to strike. To him, whaling in the olden days meant risking a life for a life. At least that’s how he and his old-school comrades still hunted whales, out of a conviction that whaling was an important part of Scandinavian culture. This was different: the seals were weak and vulnerable creatures with big eyes and pathetic cries. Amundsen just did not know how to do this. It would be okay if I used a gun, he thought. For the first time in his life Amundsen felt that for the killer to use a different tool changed the meaning of the act.

  The seals were skinned right at the boat. One hunter used a razor to slice the skin, starting from the gash on the seal’s head, while another helped him slowly peel off the animal’s skin, just like removing a pair of too-tight jeans. Seal blood kept welling up, flowing onto the ice. Without eyelids, the seals that hadn’t made it off the ice all seemed to be staring at him, glassy-eyed. Amundsen was a man long accustomed to slaughter, but this sight chilled him.

  “Why not wait until they’re dead before skinning them?”

  “It’s quicker to peel the skin off when they’re alive,” said Kent, sensing the doubt in Amundsen’s tone. “It’s true many hunters don’t check whether the seal’s skull has been shattered. I always make sure the seal is dead, but I don’t blame those who don’t. Too slow, no dough, right?”

  Then a seasoned hunter called Alfie caught two male seals, cut off their penises with a knife, but did not skin them.

  Amundsen asked, “Who’s buying seal penises?”

  “An adult’s fur isn’t worth anything, but its dick is. Asians eat it. They think it’s like Viagra, that if they eat it they’ll have the sex drive of a seal. If seals want someone to blame they should blame those fools who eat seal dicks. Actually, seals don’t have a very good sex drive, at least not compared with me,” Kent quipped.

  Amundsen said nothing on the way back. He did not blame Kent or the other hunters or himself. He did not think his faith in whaling was misplaced. He simply sensed he’d gone hollow somewhere inside. Kent saw the qualms, the hurt and the questioning look in Amundsen’s eyes, and the self-reproach he too had once felt returned. He avoided his friend’s eyes and patted him on the shoulder, saying, “Life’s not easy for these hunters. They just s
crape by. It’s the middlemen who make all the money. Sealing is the only thing some of these guys can do. It’s all they have. If you don’t let them seal, they’ll starve.”

  Something wavered somewhere deep in Amundsen’s heart.

  Amundsen went back to Norway several months later. He ate the pickled fish Sara prepared for him. The fish eyes had been gutted, and when Amundsen stared at the eye sockets, the swiveling eyes of those seals, so juvenile, like the eyes of schoolchildren, inadvertently returned. It wasn’t “killing” the seals that had struck him, but the “way” the seals were killed. People had to kill to make a living. Like it or not, that could not change, just like it wasn’t right or wrong for the Inuit people to kill seals for survival. But people weren’t just killing seals for survival anymore, and, more importantly, the hunters clearly had the energy and the ability to check whether the seals were still suffering, but their hearts remained unmoved. It must have taken them long years of training to turn their hearts to stone. Men who had to hunt for food did not have hearts of stone. They were full of gratitude toward the hunted animal, just as the eyes of their womenfolk and children waiting eagerly at home were full of anticipation. But the sealing he had witnessed in Labrador was nothing like that. Everything had changed.

  At the dinner table, knife and fork untouched, he related his sealing experience to Sara.

  “You don’t think it’s right? Daddy?”

  “I don’t know. There are still lots of seals. But there used to be lots of whales, too, and people had no sympathy for them. They saw whales as disposable. Sometimes they killed massive numbers of whales, taking only the thickest strips of blubber and not bothering with the rest. Then there came a day when there were not many whales left in the sea. Lately I’ve started to feel that even if people could never kill the last whale or seal, even if there were always another, we should only take what we need to live and no more.”

  “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.

  25. The Mountain Path

  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.

  Alice saw that the sea was two thirds of the way up the second floor when she swam near the Sea House. All the windows were broken, and a huge chunk of one wall had collapsed, along with most of the main wing. She could now see the situation inside the house from underwater. She “dove” in through an opening, found her room by memory and opened the door. It was a bit heavy due to the water pressure, but fortunately there was a hole at the base and she could still push it open. She swam down the hallway, finding Toto’s door ajar. His room was full of trash swept in by the tide, and his things had been washed out into the hallway or were hidden among the debris. She looked up and there it was, the mountain map Toto and Thom had drawn on the ceiling, same as always. But now Alice saw another route she hadn’t known about until now.