Yes, I was standing in the northern sky. When I crossed the sixty-sixth parallel, the Arctic Circle, I just had to record a video with my phone. For fifteen seconds. It was really a snowy white world, and I wanted to preserve it somehow. Looking down from the plane like a bird, I couldn’t see a single black speck. Northern and even central Greenland is inaccessible, at least to humans. Not even the Inuit can hunt there on their sleds. According to the Inuit, human beings are the prey of an ice field.
Greenland is more than a thousand times bigger than Taiwan, but with a population of less than 60,000, it is the most sparsely populated island on the planet. It is shaped like a cone: wide in the north and narrow in the south. The largest city, Nuuk, is located on the southwestern coast. Along the western shore, there are countless fjords, as they call them, which remind me of the trenches, as I call them, on my home island. Of course, the fjords of Greenland are very different from the mountain valleys of Lanyu. If you seek the source of a fjord you’ll end up at the foot of a glacier, and if you go up a trench you’ll find yourself in a tropical rainforest.
Soon my friends and I were riding on a boat up a fjord. I ignored the humpback whales that were escorting us, out of appreciation for the natural topography, which was truly a “stroke of natural genius,” the work of the gods. I kept sighing in wonder and trying greedily to inscribe the scene on my cerebral topography, so as to commit it to memory.
Blame it on the bias of my visual genes, but Eurasian and American continental landscapes do nothing for me. I’m just not interested. Maybe it’s the same for continental readers of my maritime literature. What currents? What fish that women eat and fish that men eat? They’re all just fish, aren’t they? What do you mean by flood tide? (not full yet but not hungry anymore). Or high tide? (stuffed). Or low tide? (starving). What does the tide have to do with eating? What “eyes of the sky?” Just say stars! Perhaps these are things continental peoples aren’t interested in or find hard to fathom.
We’d boarded the tour boat in Nuuk. I was all bundled up: long pants, boots, a down jacket, thick socks, a knit cap to protect my bald head, and a parka and a pair of mittens I’d borrowed from a friend who had climbed ten of the world’s tallest mountains. My outfit cost more than my living expenses at Tamkang University in 1980.
The water in the fjord was so cold that an hour of skinny-dipping, my Lanyu constitutional, would have turned me into a frozen corpse, never to decay, intact for all eternity. As the boat steered into the fjord, we couldn’t see a single towering tree, nor did I recognize any of the plants growing on the slopes. In other words, the freshness of fjord ecology gave me a visual shock, for it would be impossible to find the like on Lanyu. The guide claimed that Greenland’s fjords were not as elaborate or spectacular as Norway’s, but each fjord was guarded by an Inuit glacier god, who preserved the primal purity of the ice sheet that He (and not the Christian God) had created. This is my favorite kind of “myth,” one that has taken root in the soil of a fantastical Indigenous worldview.
The sparsity of trees in that particular fjord reminds me of a pet peeve of mine, and I just have to get something off my chest, if I may. Please forgive me in advance, Dear Reader. I don’t think much of men who grow too tall and fat, because their coffins have to be so much longer and heavier, wasting the wood of the Earth. I don’t like people with too much money, who will choose coffins made of wood from rare species of tree, to be placed in vast tombs. We all die, don’t we? It’s the same for everyone. Yet there are morticians all around the world who take advantage of polytheism and the fact that “a person only dies once.” Such morticians exploit the weakest link in human nature to rake it in. In any event, they make money off the recently deceased, who really cannot rest in peace! As for poor people, they’re given a hasty cremation. Another thing I don’t like is the idea that there is only one God in Heaven and one king of Hell, for a god like that would get lonely, and such a king bored. I believe that Heaven and Hell have as great a variety of gods and ghosts as the peoples of the Earth do, with diverse and sundry entertainments. A Greenlander told me that the local Inuit only believe in gods and ghosts who can bear the cold, but not in Heaven or Hell.
*
There was a Thai restaurant in Nuuk, an illustration of the truth that the love of food knows no borders and an interpretation of the value of tolerance, of both diversity and complexity. “How did you end up here?” I asked the Thai proprietress. Her Inuit husband’s skin was just as brown as hers, so, she explained, she didn’t face the complicated problem of racial discrimination. I replied with a smile. Another day our tour took us to a Presbyterian church, where a white pastor was rhapsodizing on the meritorious contributions of the first man to proselytize to the Inuit in Nuuk. The upshot was the same as in the story of Albert Schweitzer, who practiced medicine in darkest Africa. It was a glorification of a “white savior.” Then someone asked the pastor a question.
“How many of your parishioners are Inuit?” “None.” It was an honest answer.
*
From 2000 to 2004, I was a graduate student in anthropology at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, fifteen years after I had graduated from the Department of French at Tamkang. During my graduate studies I read The Founding of New England by James Truslow Adams (1878–1949).
Adams wrote about the Puritans who had traveled from England to America on the Mayflower in 1620 and who had been celebrating Thanksgiving ever since. The Puritans said that the Bible had saved their souls but neglected to mention that the Indians had taught them to hunt beaver, giving them a source of income through the fur trade. The Indians also taught them how to plant corn, giving them a source of starch, and a chance at survival. In return, the Puritans caused a plague among the Indians that killed many, many of the people who had saved their skins. They also plundered Indian lands. They said it was by the grace of God that they now had even more land to live on. This was one of the main ideas of Adams’s book. To any sane outsider, this Puritan claim beggars belief. A few Taiwanese friends and I would wander the quiet streets of Nuuk. Every evening, a small group of Inuit gathered to sell knickknacks in a corner of a Danish hypermart. On average they were about the same height as Tao people, about five foot four, which isn’t that tall. Their skin color was the same as mine, but they were mostly younger than me. They were bachelors who had never been to Copenhagen because they didn’t have the money for the six-hour flight. The ice sheet was their world, like the ocean for the Tao. Like my cousin, who is three years older than me, or my uncle Zomagpit, who is sixty-six, the old man of the sea, they have given up learning new things, such as using a smartphone or reading online news. They refuse to invest themselves emotionally in new environments and epistemologies. Such people regard novelty not as an essential nutrient but as a superfluity, like the ocean spray. They are detached from the future of the nation. After the legendary oral stories are forgotten, the experiential ocean philosophy discarded, and the maritime literature that was once written with the body becomes fiction, the news introduced through the Internet and the facts inscribed in multiple written languages will convolute the world.
The flight from Lanyu to Taitung takes only thirty minutes, a trip we islanders have made countless times. Flying to Greenland is another story. But how does a dream like visiting the biggest island on Earth end up coming true? My Greenland dream was only fulfilled in October 2016, over thirty-six years after I became a freshman at Tamkang. It’s hard to believe: Was it my eyes that had gone traveling?
*
In August 1994, not long after I’d returned to Lanyu to learn to dive and to take care of my parents, who adhered to the old modes of thought, and my children, who thought in Chinese, I went on a junket to faraway Hsinchiang Province with the Indigenous scholar Sun Ta-chuan, the Indigenous writer Topas Tamapima, a Manchu scholar, and a female Taiwan-born Uyghur writer. The Uyghur homeland had surfaced as a place I wanted to visit in the ocean of my mind way back when I was a prep school student on Nanyang Street. In my history textbooks, which were mandated by the Kuomintang (KMT), the savages of that land were called the Northern Ti, while in my high school imagination, China’s northwest was home to tribes of fierce and brave peoples who ran circles around the Han, who couldn’t tell which way was up. The Hsiungnu, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Jurchen were names to reckon with. These beautiful peoples were barbarians in Han historiography, just as “untamed” peoples were called primitives in the white man’s ideology, out of the same kind of unreflective arrogance. At that time, I thought that only the Han Chinese were civilized. That was what I had learned from the schoolteachers who had taught us “primitives” and “barbarians” on Lanyu from 1953 to 1970.
We took a plane from Beijing to Ürümqi, which had been called Tihua City in my geography textbooks. But when I disembarked, I saw Ürümqi, not Tihua. Ürümqi is so euphonious, what was the problem? I’d found another exam question that turned out to have more than one right answer. It reminds me of “the sun sets behind the mountain,” the idiom in Mandarin; we’d get marked wrong if we wrote “the sun sets behind the sea.” In short, the man was always right, whether he was white or Han. But were their answers right for everyone? And were their values orthodox for all? Of course not. But they were in charge, and had the power to deceive us, fooling us into thinking we were wrong.
*
“Welcome to Ürümqi!” said Ekber, our guide, a Kazakh poet, essayist, and novelist who spoke three languages in addition to Kazakh: Uyghur, Kyrgyz, and Mandarin. It was all music to my ears. It’s really happening, I thought. A few days later, we flew to the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, close to the border with Kazakhstan. That was where Ekber’s family lived, in the farthest city from the capital of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). There we met with a group of local writers of various ethnic backgrounds, including Russian, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uyghur, and Hsiungnu. We sat in the shade in a vineyard and chatted. The writers were all in their sixties or seventies, belonging to our fathers’ generation (Sun Ta-chuan, Topas Tamapima, and I were only in our thirties in those days). Most of them did not speak Putonghua—the Common Tongue, the word for Mandarin Chinese in the PRC. Lucky that Ekber was there to translate.
*
In 1970, the year I graduated from Lanyu Elementary, the township mayor, who was still a political appointee in those days, was from my village. He did not speak Chinese. The approaching graduation ceremony was like a curious new rite of passage. That’s how it seemed to schoolchildren in Indigenous villages all around Taiwan. There are some painfully funny stories that can be understood in terms of the Chinese character 馴, which means “to tame” and includes the semantic component “horse” 馬.
There is a saying in the Tao language, “Mapa ka dehdehdeh.”
It means “to act like a Han Chinese when you clearly aren’t one,” when you’re a wild horse running around in the paddock pretending to be tamed. We all had to ride the Han Chinese around on our backs in those days. Passing the test of tameness was called graduation. Failing it was called termination of studies or suspension.
The mayor spoke first, in Tao, at my graduation. “Officials from Taiwan,” he said, “you’re not good people, you have robbed us of our land. . . . Our children, you must be thrilled to leave this school. Now you must learn to dive for fish and make boats if you’re a boy, so that your elders will have fresh fish to eat, and to grow taro and sweet potato if you’re a girl, so that the man of the house can fill his belly. Only then can you be fathers and mothers yourselves.”
It was up to my cousin’s husband, a township representative, to translate the speech into Chinese. And this is what he said: “Exalted officials, you are all good men. Our children, we are very happy that you are leaving elementary school. You must now continue your studies at Lanyu Junior High. Boys, you must not marry Taiwanese girls. Girls, don’t fall for Mainlander men. For if you do, our population will get all mixed up. That’s about it.” We chuckled as we clapped because we understood both Chinese and Tao.
I laughed out loud, because the mayor had said what he really meant, while the translator had not only spouted nonsense, but also poured on the oil and vinegar, spicing it up. The translator spoke fluent Tao, the language of Lanyu, while his Mandarin was an incoherent mess.
My nephew, Tagahan, was studying at OU, short for Ocean University—I mean the actual ocean, not National Taiwan Ocean University in Keelung. He scored zero on almost all of his tests, and if he got any marks at all it was by guessing the true-false questions. So he “graduated” a year late. The first thing my brother said to me after attending his son’s “graduation” ceremony was that the mayor was speaking Mandarin now. The second thing he said was that when the principal was giving out graduation certificates, Tagahan didn’t get one. He got a termination of studies certificate.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“The child’s time at school has come to an end,” I said. “It means that a child has been trying to acquire the knowledge of the Han people but hasn’t made the grade. Let’s just say that 0 and 100 are both ‘fisheyes’ in Tagahan’s eyes.” That was my explanation.
*
So Ekber was translating for the vice chairman of the Autonomous Region, to this effect:
“Welcome, friends from Taiwan, to a prosperous place that has enriched the world since antiquity . . .”
Afterward, a Mongolian poet performed for us, including the following verse:
The steppes uphold an expanse of sky, that resonates
where warriors sing
and echoes with the noble poet’s cry.
There is no shame in belonging to a place of haughty, mighty men who wrote chapters of human history. I came to the profound understanding that many warriors and poets who had galloped across the vast and desolate steppes were valorous loners, heroic not hopeless. In the thunder of a million wild horse hooves, I thought I heard the trumpet of peace—the peace that Genghis Khan brought to Central Asia.
*
In the 1960s and 1970s, the graduation ceremonies at elementary schools in aboriginal villages in Taiwan were filled with the Montagnard-accented Mandarin that prevailed under the rule of the Kuomintang, and which soon-to-be-tame children spoke to suck up or kiss ass. The ancestral languages that they still spoke fluently at home were slowly frozen out. People didn’t want to be taken for a lower class of tribesperson for speaking the ethnic tongue in public. In other words, those were the decades when the Kuomintang “tang-ified” Taiwan society most deeply, when Mainlanders reigned supreme, and other peoples were labeled low-class and inferior. In those days, the typical graduation ceremony was like a verbal wave of de-Montagnard-ization and self-destruction in Montagnard townships, a wave which native party officials rode, as if they were symbols of the emancipation of the lowly Montagnards. You can see their fawning faces in the photos of all the provincial chairmen (dating of course to before the “freezing” of the province) on official visits to Montagnard townships. Once unrestrained, they’d been swiftly tamed and then “raced” by the KMT and later the DPP—the Democratic Progressive Party—in local and national elections. They ran in these elections, as if this were the ultimate goal of a meaningful life. Allow me to repeat myself. In 1969, when I was a fifth grader at Lanyu Elementary, a Mainlander teacher asked us, members of a tiny maritime nation, to honor the Han heroes of the Chinese nation who had defended the Chinese race against barbarians in all directions: the Man, the Jung, the Ti, and the Yi. A naïve male classmate spoke up:
“Nobody who isn’t skilled in swimming or boatbuilding is a national hero of ours.” He said it so matter-of-factly and got a whipping in return. Let’s be honest, Dear Reader, would you have had the guts to question your schoolteachers, to challenge the fallacies of Han Chinese historiography?
*
There we were in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture; aware we were visitors in a land where the Han Chinese were strangers. There were no Han temples, no Chinese-language universities. We hardly heard the language spoken in the streets. We shot the breeze with writers from different ethnic groups in Central Asia. As a country, Taiwan could have been in outer space, in their eyes. It’s the flip side of the Taiwanese ignorance of Central Asia, for Taiwan looks toward the United States. Of course, I also sensed that my interlocutors weren’t just members of different ethnicities, but also of a Central Asian nation, a fusion of many peoples, for the glories of ancient civilizations were written on their faces. The lines and wrinkles hinted at victories and defeats in centuries past, at what the Atayal poet Walis Nokan has called “the cruelty of war.” It gave them a vibe of sorrowful pride that was beyond the experience of the Taiwan nation and filled me with admiration.
My question was why I’d learned that the provincial capital was Tihua City and not Ürümqi. Han historiography, it turned out, was almost all wrong, as it only allowed that the Han might be victorious in war, and not the Turks, which speaks volumes about national differences in historical perspective.
By 2018, the native principals presiding over graduation ceremonies in Indigenous villages in Taiwan spoke fluent Chinese, not elegant Tao or any other ancestral language. Noble savage pigs were long gone, replaced by Western religious “horsebreakers,” “rocking chair priests.” You have sinned, they said, go to church and confess your sins to God, also known as Jehovah. As an “ocean writer,” I have had the chance to travel to many different islands, where I have visited many different Indigenous communities. I have witnessed faces twisted by alien creeds, and peoples dispossessed of the high Happiness Index of their original religions. No one dares resist the Western God or religious colonization; after conversion, people turn their backs on, even look down on, their formerly pluralistic beliefs. For me, animism is the source of various local knowledge and diverse worldviews, which I love.
*
Back on my ancestral island, where I lived a Tao-style “maritime” life, I was the mastermind of the antinuclear Exorcize the Anito! movement. Islanders don’t discuss the success of the movement, least of all me. I’m even less inclined to review the process. The simple fact is that nobody who tries to raise national consciousness anywhere in the world escapes vilification, accusation, or oppression by vested interests. If I had signed off on direct admission to National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) on July 28, 1976, and then returned to Lanyu to teach a few years later, I might not have had the courage to launch the movement, and perhaps my fellow islanders would have mutely accepted the waste from Taiwan’s nuclear power plants, along with the idea that it should be stored in poor, remote rural areas or “uninhabited” islands, and that storage on Lanyu was the safest decision the state had ever made and the greatest favor the government had ever done the Tao. These lies would not have been exposed, and the islanders would have acquiesced to their bad luck. But that’s not how it worked out. I launched the resistance in 1988. I relaunched it on February 20, 2012, having carried barrels of waste to the Presidential Office Building in December of the previous year. I refuse to take credit and disdain the occupation of the street for the sake of personal fame. I should add that I have not believed a word any politician has uttered since I was ten years old, from the village head to the president. When I was ten, I suspected that I would never be a good student according to the standard my teachers held me to, that I would only ever be a wild horse tethered to a fence. I was certainly not fit to be a teacher. Ultimately, I decided to go my own “sea way,” and it hasn’t been easy. When I heard of an occupation called “writer,” I knew that this was the path I should take, that a writer was what I would become. I wouldn’t be able to face our ancestors as a lying politician, and to serve the interests of a mainstream political party would be even more pathetic. It was only when I published Cold Ocean, Deep Emotion in 1997 that I realized how “continental” Chinese literature was a literature of confrontation, and of urban experience. There was a “rocking-chair” island literature, but it was like seafood restaurants without a connection to the sea. There was certainly no literature that addressed the emotions of fishes. Only then did I realize that my island literature would embrace the sea. It would be about the diving environment, about talking fish, and about canoe construction and navigation. It would be a literature of discrimination, but not a literature of colonization. It would be a translational ocean-island literature of my own creation.
*
When I returned to my ancestral island at the age of thirty-two, I realized how hard it was to catch fish with one’s bare hands. My uncle said that this was our maritime literature, our marine belief, and it was hard to fathom, even esoteric, to me. And it was even harder for me to build a “shell,” meaning a home, for my family. I learned to dive for fish, which of course was not a skill that could be taught in the Chinese school. I shoveled sand and gravel into sacks at the shore (about forty-four pounds per sack, at least three thousand sacks in total) and carried them home on my back, all by myself. After three years, I could dive for fish on my own. I could net flying fish and troll for mahi mahi from my own canoe. My three children no longer had to bathe in the open air (but they still enjoyed it, in the river). They could go to sleep on a typhoon day knowing that the house would hold up. Instead of going to NTNU, I’d interned as a mover and a construction worker, acquiring a kind of knowledge that would prove practical when I came to build a house of my very own and generating a cash flow that would pay for three years of prep school classes and entrance examinations and another three years of university. I graduated with a “life diploma,” not just a BA.
I inherited my father’s diving constitution, which he shared with his two brothers, their skill and wisdom in logging and canoe construction, and their appreciation of insular weather. In my three years of high school in Taitung, I acquired the common knowledge of geography, history, and Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People that Han Chinese students have to master to pass the Joint College Entrance Examination. Then I learned about Chinese culture as a coolie laborer in the west and a factory worker in the north. I studied French language and literature at Tamkang University. Those were sixteen of the most colorful years of my life. There were many twists and turns along the way that taught me the sorrows of being far from home. In a city without the sound of the ocean to serve as an alarm clock, in a foreign land among strangers who lacked a maritime imagination, I learned to survive. I became resilient, but also tolerant. I observed the compatibility and incompatibility of different civilizations. It certainly wasn’t easy to remain broad-minded at a time when I was so marginal, when I couldn’t put myself at the center of anything. But it was easier than when I had, at the beginning of the third grade of elementary school, in the golden years of my life, been forced to see disgusting, blown-up photos from the Nanjing Massacre in the hallway of our school on September 3, Military Day. Those blow-ups were in line with the Kuomintang government’s policy of teaching us, the children of a small ocean island nation, to emulate the Han Chinese in hating the “Commies” and the “Japs.” We were colonized by a military government, and before we had the chance to knowingly obey, we were brainwashed with the bloody history of the Chinese and the Japanese, which had nothing to do with us. They taught us to detest the Soviet Union and exhorted us to help defeat the Chinese Communist Party. This was the reason why I did not want to go to NTNU. I was averse to slaving away for the KMT, to leading the next generation of my ocean nation astray with its vision, inspired by Chinese Nationalist loathing. That history of hatred had nothing to do with our island historiography.
In recent years, many good friends, especially friends I made after the debate on Taiwanese nativist literature in 1978, have made me think twice, and against the grain. Since that debate, Taiwan’s society has become divided, between blue supporters of unification and green supporters of independence. After the direct election of the president in 1996, orange was added to blue and green, tearing Taiwan apart. These polychrome political beliefs terrify me. It seems that when the Han Chinese choose their favorite color, they are provoking confrontation, choosing anger, and cutting the container of mutual tolerance. In recent years, the February 28 Incident and the White Terror have been indispensable campaign issues in every election, with appeals for the victims and attacks on the perpetrators. Friends on both sides have told me about their tragic fates. The more I hear, the better I understand, and the further away I want to stay, because good friends on both sides have tried to teach me artificial hate. I feel so sad in the ocean of my mind, because in school from elementary to university and even after graduation, when I started my career as a maritime writer, the Han Chinese were still teaching me hate. It’s truly distressing because hate isn’t part of my ethnic history. But when I launched the movement to exorcize the nuclear anito on Lanyu, did any of my blue-green friends take any concrete action to support me, or express any concern about the situation on my little island? Except for a very few close friends (to whom I’m eternally grateful), of course not. People’s concern for minorities is sporadic. Moreover, Lanyu is not their island, and the Tao are culturally and ancestrally different from the Han. We Tao have been comprehensively discriminated against by the Han Chinese. We are also bewitched by color and internally divided. Please stop teaching us to hate. I won’t choose a color, or a side. I accept humans of all colors and have particular respect for those whose blood is mixed. I don’t belong to any literary clique, mainstream or not. I can only call myself an “ocean current.” When it comes to hate, I weep for the Han. But I must also say I am grateful that Chinese characters have given me a window on the world.
