In the second essay of a series considering ecological literature and writings on animal life, as collected in our Spring 2023 special feature, Charlie Ng examines the pressing issue of species extinction through Wu Ming-yi’s poignant story of grief and resurrection, “Cloudland”. By connecting an intimate loss to the broader losses caused by the Anthropocene, Wu equalises human relationships with the less visible connections between individuals and their landscape, illustrating vividly the consequences of absence to consider how storytelling and an return to indigenous knowledge can activate empathy and our impetus to preserve.
Earth is no stranger to mass extinction; the most recent, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, was caused by a major asteroid collision, wiping out seventy-six percent of living species. In consideration of these great cycles of birth and death, it seems that lifeforms are destined to come and go—so why should we care about extinction?
Perhaps because we’re causing it. Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History has drawn public attention to the fact that the titular extinction we are currently experiencing is, unlike the previous five, attributable to human activities. As such, the sixth mass extinction has come to be referred to as the Anthropocene extinction, the consequences of which have been well-documented across the globe. One such case is Taiwan, which, despite being just roughly the size of twice that of Hawaii, has a remarkably diverse range of flora and fauna due to its forested mountains and oceanic surrounding. However, many of its native animal species have become endangered or extinct due to adverse impacts of human development such as deforestation, pollution, habitat loss, and overhunting.
“Cloudland,” Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s short story in the animal-themed feature of our Spring 2023 issue, has an extinct animal at its center: the clouded leopard. Despite occasional reported sightings of the animal, experts generally believe that the leopards have been gone for decades—and such is the case in “Cloudland”, where the animal is only present through its absence. The nonexistent leopard is simultaneously a denotation of the extinction’s sad reality and a literary symbol, acting as a mythical figure and a stand-in for the protagonist’s deceased wife. In tackling grief and loss, Wu tells the story of a man named Shutter as he searches for the already gone, trying to heal by reconnecting to nature and the indigenous wisdom of intimacy between people and their environment.
Originally collected in Wu Ming-yi’s Where Rain Falls Amiss, “Cloudland”—like the other five stories accompanying it—explores the relationship between humans and nature through characters who come to have extraordinary experiences with animals. All the narratives are connected through a “Rift in the Cloud”, a digital virus that hacks into the cloud server and sends the “Access Key” of each person’s account to someone related to them—with which they can then access the data of the account owner. To situate human beings within the juxtaposed networks of social relations, technology, and ecology is a hallmark of Where Rain Falls Amiss; Wu’s characters often suffer from solitude or alienation in one way or another, yet manage to find consolation and meaning through a rediscovery of relational existence. As encapsulated by Catherine Yu’s translation for the protagonist’s name, Shutter, he leads a lonesome existence, shutting himself from the world after the death of his wife. Eventually, however, he comes to see life through a new lens as he navigates through the temporal-spatial networks of his psychological trauma, his wife’s unfinished story, and a spiritual search for the legendary clouded leopard. The death of Shutter’s wife and the extinction of clouded leopards are set as counterpoints, as both are caused by human action; Shutter’s wife was a victim of a bomb attack, and the clouded leopard went extinct due to hunting and the habitat loss caused by land development. These elements are braided together by the overarching theme of the exploitation of technology as symptomatic of an anthropocentric modernity—one that places excessive emphasis on atomistic individualism and instrumental reason, marginalising interconnectedness and empathy.
As a former lawyer, Shutter is representative of a rational, modern man—almost the opposite of what his wife embodies. She was of indigenous origin, loved being close to nature, and was a fiction writer; yet, Shutter was blind to these qualities, as they had been veiled by romantic attraction before his wife’s tragic death. He was physically close to his wife, but he had never taken part in the aspects of her life that did not interest him. Her passing, then, turns Shutter into a searcher and a storyteller, fuelled by the scientific spirit of finding the unknown.
Inspired by his wife’s unfinished story of Pawz, a young Rukai man who incidentally becomes interested in the clouded leopard after he discovers the connection of the animal to his own ancestral culture, Shutter takes to the mountain in the hopes of finding the animal, following the steps of Pawz, though rationally knowing it to be a “futile pursuit”. As the story unfolds, he journeys into territories unfamiliar to him—not only the wild landscape in which he sets up night-vision cameras and hair trappings for tracing any evidence of the clouded leopard, but also his own mindscape of memory: the sides of his wife that he failed to understand in the past, and his former life that surges forward in fragments and dreams. The images of the wild animals captured by cameras remind Shutter of his wife: “He used to find her awake in the small hours, sitting at her desk. She would turn around to look at him the moment she heard a stir in the bed. Her eyes were sometimes full of sorrow, or anger, or desperation. Now he finally understands: it was because her emotions were synced to those of her characters.” As a writer, Shutter’s wife had an acute sensibility for emotions. Writing about the lives of other people also enriched her own—which she had once described as “dreary”. Storytelling, as exemplified by this practice, is a way of creating and living in a world of others; it refines the imagination and empathy by allowing people to immerse themselves in different realities, narrating events and conceiving experiences that are beyond the scope of one lifetime.
Storytelling is integral to the indigenous culture of the Rukai people, and being half Rukai, Shutter’s wife inherited this philosophy, a wisdom that only enlightens Shutter when he encounters Fer, a young Rukai man, who tells him the significance of storytelling as taught to him by his father: “Ama said that you tell stories for your own sake, not for others, because when you tell a story, you have to imagine yourself as another person, a tree, a boar. In doing so, you become a true person.” Storytelling’s ontological significance underlies the ancestral myth of the Rukai, who believe that they are descendants of a girl with a skin disease and a handsome clouded leopard who healed her by licking her skin—thus turning the animal into a subject of reverence for the tribe. Beyond the story’s symbolic significance, the Rukai’s creation myth also reflects their worldview of the intimacy between humans and animals, that they live in a symbiotic relationship of mutual love and coexistence, not of conquering and domination.
In contrast to the deep time that Earth measures itself by, the lives of human beings and animals are conditioned by limits. By emphasising the vulnerable body of grief, Wu’s story urges us to compare extinction with the death of a loved one—an experience that floods the mind with regrets for what could have been, that enforces the painful certainty of a world lost forever, and that imagines all the unique contributions their continual existence could have made to the tapestry of life. As illustrated in “Cloudland”, storytelling does not attempt to recover what has been lost, but creates another world that dreams of conservation, as reflected by how Shutter finishes his wife’s story of Pawz:
In the world inhabited by words, Pawz finally discovers a gigantic Chamaecyparis formosensis above the sea of clouds on Mount Beidawu, where no human being has ever set foot. The Formosan cypress is tall and strong on the outside, but hollow inside. Forty metres above the ground, the trunk splits open and a deep rift emerges. Since no one has ever climbed the tree and stepped inside, the immense world beyond the rift remains unbeknownst to humankind. It is the heart of the heart, an entire forest inside a sacred tree. Rain pours in from the rift and forms a cascade. Inside, Pawz and the last clouded leopard beget children and posterity. Their tribe will only appear before fools, whereas all other ordinary mortals are shunned.
The “Rift in the Cloud,” where messages and virtual keepsakes fall through the cracks, echoes here with the rift that leads to a vast, unknown world. Mirroring the Rukai’s creation myth and Shutter’s own dream of consummation with a female clouded leopard, Shutter’s way of finishing his wife’s story is an effort of healing through imaginary resurrection, which not only commemorates the unique, intimate bond they once shared, but also helps him to overcome his trauma, regaining the power to face life again. In reading Wu’s story of circling back to move on, we can understand the human impetus to tell narratives of animal disappearance as a way of processing our own traumatic experiences of ecological events—to document this loss and incite action through empathy. Through navigating the pain of a more sparsely populated Earth, we use such stories to understand our place—whether as the instigators of extinction, or as agents of preservation. This is how stories of death, of extinction can be continually told: not only to mourn and to grieve, but to heal the past, and to consider the future.
Charlie Ng is currently an assistant professor at the School of Arts and Social Sciences of Hong Kong Metropolitan University. She obtained her BA in English and MPhil in English (Literary Studies) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and graduated with a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. This article is part of her research project, supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project Reference Number: UGC/FDS16/H18/22).
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