WILD CHINESE OLIVE TREES

It must have been precisely when the scorching heat of summer was diminishing, but before it had dissipated entirely, that a faint, undying light was lit between my consciousness and perceptions. An endless season smoldered, an oppressive season, with heat rising from the mountains, from the streams, the paddy fields awaiting harvest, the beach where the nets were drying, slowly dispersing in every corner, both near and far, lifted, swaying upon the breeze, as if forced up, suddenly brought into the emptiness between heaven and earth, as if preparing to vanish by seeping away into the clouds. But it couldn’t just disappear into the formless like that; instead it solidified, turned back, and struck my body.

Sitting, I changed my position, leaning my back against an olive tree, my spine pressed right against a knob in the bark of the trunk, and the numbing sensation it produced made me feel drowsy. My eyes were barely open; beads of perspiration dripped from the ends of my hair, at first hanging on my brows, while some finally fell, rolling around my eyebrows and onto my eyelids, blurring my sight. The southern edge of the playing field rose at a fifteen-degree slope, with the green grass up to my ankles. The top of the slope leveled off where three olive trees grew randomly, and at the farthest corner stood a lone pine. I’m afraid that due to the typhoons over the years, all of the trees were old with a few short, thick, disorderly limbs on their trunks, giving the impression of extreme panic. The olive trees were all bent and deformed, but the pine, seen from afar, looked limp and lifeless. I sat on the grass, leaning against the easternmost olive tree, squinting as I counted the leaves on its four thick limbs, one, two, three, four, a breeze stirred, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, only forty-three leaves. Suddenly the breeze quickened, and two leaves the size of my palm detached from the tree and silently floated down to the slope. Forty-three minus two meant that only forty-one leaves remained.

How was it possible that there was such a tree? How could it be so old that I, a twelve-year-old boy, could lean back against it, numbing my back by rubbing against it, and still have only forty-one leaves? I imagined that every time a typhoon struck, this tree was the first to bear the brunt, the first tree to be fiercely struck, violently shaken, and knocked down, while the people, animals, and trees of other places were breathing in the first inklings of, and preparing for, the coming typhoon. Typhoons came from the sea and made land at Hualien. My Chinese olive tree stood beside the playing field on the slope, just fifty meters from the coast. Fate had determined that it would meet the first blast of mad, warm wind and the downpour of cold rain. I imagine that one or two of its few limbs would be snapped off and nearly stripped of leaves; and after the wind and rain had passed, it would try to right itself, trembling, its solitary form leaning even more to the northwest, and what few leaves remained would shine strangely in the light of day. Thus it managed to breathe in the warm, ever humid air; the strong sunlight from the sky and the sea’s surface shone together on it. Life leaped inside it, its sap circulating quickly; new shoots burgeoned from the sundered limbs, and new leaves sprouted from the branches. In a matter of days, the new branches had grown to the thickness of a young person’s arm and the leaves had grown larger than the palm of a hand. Although it slanted to the northwest, solitary and despondent, its renewed branches and leaves were abundant and elegant, beautiful and flourishing. The tree proudly stood on a high position with the vast and boundless sea before it and the precipitous peaks behind, until the arrival of the next typhoon.

I leaned against the tree, facing south. Not far away, the land fell away precipitously, where only the surging sea was seen, a rich blue with a steady stream of rolling swells. I could hear the surf, but couldn’t see the striking waves because fifty meters away the land ended at a steep cliff. The deep water filled a small inlet, striking and falling, perpetually crashing and striking. Sitting at the top of the slope, all I could hear was its echo. An unbroken stretch of potato leaves covered the cliff and on a not too distant rise stood a blockhouse, a fortification recently occupied by the coastal defense forces. Roundly did the immense sea move, rocking and swaying gently in the dazzling sunlight. I wiped the sweat from my eyelashes and, looking as far as I could see, with adoration and all of my will, I gazed at a mountain rising from boundless mist-covered waves far to the south. The mountain sat gracefully beneath the clear sky and white clouds, as if expecting me, looking at me affectionately with heart and will. The mountain was the starting point of a long chain.

I consciously grasped love and beauty and roughly sensed the mysterious symbols, the expression in the eyes of heaven and earth, everything approaching the idea of poetry. At the time, I thought I already had a firm grasp of the idea, consequently giving full rein to my naïveté, submerging myself in a bottomless, black world, probing myself and suffering. I frequently crossed the wide and long grassy area, climbing the high slope alone to sit, leaning against the slanted tree, looking for a long time at the starting point of the coastal mountain chain. Amid the sound of waves, I seemed to have known that mountain, bemusing as an ancient dream, for ages, secretly agreed upon in a past life, a thousand years ago, possessed of a tragic sense. However, it came first, sitting in a distant corner of the earth for so many ages or kalpas, bitterly waiting for me, sadly but firmly. Then it spent even more ages waiting for me, certain that one day I would arrive. As the wind blew and the clouds parted and the tide roared, I finally was on the point of arriving. It waited again for ages and I finally arrived, a twelve-year-old boy, one who thought he was able to grasp love and beauty, mysterious symbols, the expression in the eyes of heaven and earth, close to poetry but lukewarm, a boy who was quiet and odd. I saw the mountain rise from the ocean, appearing bluish gray in the distance, blending green and many other colors I was unable to name. It sat firmly, shoulders hanging down, as if one hand sought support on the ground and the other was placed on its bent back ankle. The sea breeze blew softly over the water; the waves swayed, stirring the sea’s voluminous robes. I could almost make out the mountain’s face amid the brightness and beauty, an awkward, flirtatious expression. Occasionally a thin cloud would drift over, concealing it behind nothingness.

There were no large ships on the open sea, vast and forgotten.

Where the bay formed at the foot of the mountains, the color of the water changed with that of the sky, and once in a while a fishing boat would row across. Previously I had sat on the beach trying to imagine an earthquake and a tsunami, bewildered and surprised, the water rising and falling till I could no longer see the edge of the sea, a fishing boat, or that beautiful crouching posture of the whole mountain. Now from my high vantage point, I could see the fishing boats plying back and forth. Hualien stood at a triangular depression on the east side of the bay. I could take in the entire area at a glance, the gentle rising and falling, and how the houses and the trees were woven together to form the fabric of a peaceful human community. Occasionally there was a hole marking the location of someone’s especially large garden, or a playing field, or an afternoon market in front of a temple. Here and there one could also see upright structures, a chimney, a radio antenna, a transmission tower, the observation tower of the weather station, or a Buddhist stupa.

The movement of water to my left was immense, extending far into the distance, over which hung the clouds, like flowers on a meadow. There was a long breakwater extending from north to south, cutting the sea in two—outside, the water was rough and choppy, inside, nearly smooth and placid. At the end of the breakwater was a white lighthouse, not far from which another breakwater jutted out from the land from west to east, ending about four hundred meters to the west of the lighthouse, calming the water from the other direction. The hundred-meter opening between the two breakwaters was the gateway to Hualien Harbor, and the lighthouse marked the defensive stronghold on the right-hand side, towering and graceful, revealing an ancient nautical grace and martial bearing, combining all the love and hate shared by both sexes, and all the longing and waiting, joining together that eternal romance.

The harbor was man-made, and the locals referred to it as the “constructed harbor.” It was a huge engineering project dating from the time when the Japanese ruled Taiwan. When the rulers first decided to build the harbor on the alluvial deposit of the river, perhaps they saw it had a limitless prospect facing the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean. They chose this terrain and first had to construct two large breakwaters of huge quantities of earth and stone along the coast, one from north to south, at the end of which they also built a lighthouse. And the other advancing from west to east, tightly close to the lighthouse, until they met and no opening was left. Once it was completed, they had to begin dredging the earth below, expending a great deal of time to excavate a deep, rectangular pit, separated from the sea by the two arms of the dike. The other two sides followed the topography of the land inland, ending as the land rose in a hill. When all of this was complete, they chose an auspicious day, much like a religious procession in gratitude to the gods, and they mobilized all the men and women, young and old, of Hualien to observe the ritual by the coast. On that day, amid the sound of drums and gongs, firecrackers, people, dogs, and the roar of the surf, with heavy equipment, they opened the spot where the two breakwaters had been joined, allowing the sea to surge like a thunderous torrent into the deep pit. The water surged in at great speed, raising a heavy white foam, boiling up from the bottom of the pit and striking the four thick walls of black earth, producing a fishy smell. Amid the loud torrent, fish, big and small, could be seen being swept up in the whirling water, dizzily passing by, floating white bellies up and sinking, in a flash pushed in another corner. The seawater surged in with a deafening roar, leaving the people of Hualien, who every year experienced several typhoons, stunned. It was noisier than a mountain torrent and swifter that the surf on Nanbin Beach. Suddenly, to everyone’s dismay, the noise and the speed diminished, and the water in the pit rose to a point on the breakwaters equal to the level of the sea. On the other side, the water pressed the hilly coast, gradually calming, murmuring as it snuggled close gently as a cat, swaying, splashing up and down, like all surf, going on with its perpetual rise and fall, leisurely swelling, rising, whooshing, pleasantly and gently sliding across the new ground, leaving a trace of moisture as it retreated, then coming again in the same leisurely fashion.

The two sides became the breakwaters of the man-made harbor, one on the east and one on the south, and after the hole through which the sea-water poured had been shored up it became the harbor entrance, with the white lighthouse standing at the end of the eastern breakwater.

The first time I entered the “constructed harbor” was probably when I was twelve years old. By then water had been in the pit for some time, so when I arrived at the west-east breakwater, the coast looked pretty old, and it was impossible to imagine the place of rising and falling surf had been an inland meadow a few years before. The waves came and went continuously, and the sand on the beach was fine and the shells exquisite, while slightly higher up was beach grass and reeds. The breakwater was stronger and wider than I’d imagined. When I stood on the breakwater, whenever the ocean spray would fly, my clothes were sure to be soaked. I could walk directly out toward the sea with waves rolling on both sides, giving me the illusion of being on a rocking boat. When I reached the end, the exit of the constructed harbor, which wasn’t very wide, separated me from the towering white lighthouse, which looked more impressive and vivid than from a distance. That was the first time I had ever been close to Hualien Harbor, and standing there in the middle of the water, I looked back at the green mountain slopes and the neat-looking tile roof of my new school behind the trees.

The year after the great earthquake, I entered middle school. Thinking about it now, it was a time that was moving from disturbance to calm—well, perhaps not calm, but an age that was a mixture of anger and fear, and severity and sternness, which, to a certain degree, changed into a fairly hollow age of silence. It wasn’t appropriate to express the anger and fear, and I was conscious that most people had little faith, if any at all, in the new order. It was odd, but not really. In the year or two preceding the earthquake, a number of locally famous individuals became entangled in politics. We heard about many cases of people being shot or disappeared, and the number of people jailed was unusual—this was the difference between the old system and the new. Some hid out in the banana groves, aboriginal villages, and mountainous ravines, and their relatives paid bribes to have them declared dead. When they reappeared, they were silent, empty, and depressed, but frequently they were doctors, teachers, musical conductors, and the intelligentsia of the small community. Depressed, they continued seeing patients, lecturing in class, and leading the choirs in singing the praise of God. As I recall, all the adults were unhappy, always on their guard, unwilling to get involved in even the most mundane matters, for fear of being interrogated. Although this was the case, still people would be startled awake in the middle of the night by the neighborhood committee, accompanied by the military and police, to check a household register. In the dull, yellowish lamplight, they looked disgraceful and disgusting in their uniforms. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep, listening to the confusion of footsteps, the harsh voices breaking the quiet of the night in which the insects chirruped. At once, the light of a flashlight would slice through the mosquito net, shining right on my face. My eyelids twitched, but I continued to pretend to be asleep. I think I was less afraid of them than I was of showing my disdain for them.

It was also an age of written and shouted slogans. Any empty wall, inside Hualien or outside, regardless of how large, was always covered with slogans. Whenever you walked down an old street overarched by broad-leaved tropical trees in the summer heat of August with the deafening noise of the cicadas, you’d suddenly see amid the beautiful flickering tree shadows characters the size of tires telling you to obey, support, and implement, reminding you of hunger and killing and other abstractions, and even false concepts—a few disgraceful lies. In some cases the painted slogans were continued onto the walls of residences, blotting out the wisteria blossoms that had been blooming under the windows. Other times, they painted the slogans on chimneys, in a long vertical string of characters, amid which there were a couple of commas, and at the bottom of which was a tilted, absurd exclamation point. That string of characters in the slogan soon peeled off, perhaps because the chimney was too hot. The churches were especially on their guard at this time, for each church had at least one long wall, so they preemptively wrote in red characters things such as “God loves man,” and “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.… Whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” went on the next wall, allowing the cockscombs and canna lilies to grow up and cover the remaining words. For many years I passed the church on my bicycle and would dwell on the words, “that whosoever believeth in me,” wondering what they meant. I would linger over those words the entire way. Only later did I learn that those who “believeth” have “everlasting life.”

Every day after the flag-raising ceremony, we had to shout slogans. A man in a military uniform led us in shouting “Obey … Practice” and even “Rescue” and “Complete,” a slogan consisting of six words. He raised his right fist, looking extremely determined. When he didn’t show up, a teacher came to lead us, but because of the difference in sound and form, it was comical. One time, for some reason, a rather shy and refined chemistry teacher had to take the stand and lead us. He raised his hand and shouted “Obey” and “Practice,” but he totally forgot what came next. He stood there nervously, his face flushed. The school principal walked over and stood below the platform and reminded him of each word, and only after the “Long Lives” did he step down. Such a funny and embarrassing ceremony made me feel strange and wonder about its popularity during my youth and why no one put a stop to it, and eventually, like a plague, it penetrated to the remotest areas. Slogans even floated down out of the sky. It was around the time of national day when some office got the bright idea to print up thousands of fliers and put them on a propeller-driven aircraft, which circled Hualien, dropping them inside and outside the city. The fliers floated down out of the heavens like flocks of white pigeons, fluttering and shining for miles in the clear sky, making you think it was an absurd dream. Falling, falling, they fell over the roofs of houses, small yards, courtyards, temple squares, riverbanks, bamboo groves, cowsheds, markets, and railroad tracks. Ridiculous with a vulgar beauty, like countless unrecognizable spirits floating down from the clouds, they landed in the ditches, garbage dumps, and the manure pits in the open country. But the news was the same—those same stiff, horizontal or vertical slogans you saw scrawled over the walls or shouted until hoarse, the same six-word slogan: “Obey,” “Practice,” and “Long Lives,” with their tilted exclamation points.

Someone said the noisy prop plane was a Japanese trainer from the war stationed up at Beipu Airport. It carried the number twelve, and after the war it had been abandoned by the Japanese along with another one numbered eleven. The Chinese Air Force, the recipient of the plane, had repaired Number Twelve and decided that it could be flown for distributing fliers. The rising sun had been rubbed out and the white sun on a blue sky had been painted in its place. But no matter what they did, they couldn’t get Number Eleven working and just let it rust in a corner of the airport. Every year on national day, we would see noisy Number Twelve circling in the sky, distributing large quantities of fliers, like white pigeons swaying in the air. The airplane’s wings would tip exaggeratedly from right to left quite joyfully. Sometimes I feared that it might fall out of the sky.

In that strange age, I grew up faulty with dread, with abounding perplexity, and an inexplicably scornful frame of mind. That’s how I grew into a middle-school student.

I was even more withdrawn than before, seeking every chance to be alone; even at that childish age, such opportunities were not difficult to find. Two years before I finished primary school, our class was broken up: one third failed to pass, and the other two thirds were distributed among the other six classes. In a matter of one night, I was hurled into a world in which I was nearly a total stranger; only one other of my classmates was assigned to the same class. It was very lonely. I thought that the way they interacted was different, the language they used was different, even the way they dressed was different. To me the teacher was a heartless woman, her face always powdered a vapid white, and she probably never sweated. She never looked at me directly, but strangely she was kind and genial to the students originally in her class, and always smiling. She conversed with them using their pet names and sometimes went further, addressing them using their Japanese names and even calling each one of them by their first name only, no surname when taking roll, creating an atmosphere of closeness. But at roll call, she always frostily called my name and surname. I think she must have been the first person in my life to dishearten me, a most intolerable woman. But I never felt afraid of her in the least, just felt loathing for her. Her not too long hair was a smoky black color, with no radiance; her features were like those of the denizens of hell in a temple painting; even when she smiled at someone else, behind the sweetness was a sense of derision and ridicule. Her white blouse and long navy blue skirt was an image for which I had a tender regard in my childhood; that yearning was suddenly shattered, and that old feeling, tinged with sadness, turned to flight and disillusionment. She was from Hualien.

Entering middle school at least allowed me to escape from under that shadow and should have been cause for rejoicing. But the feeling of solitude to which I had become accustomed wasn’t to be shaken off. With complicated feelings, I gazed about my new surroundings and felt happy for the most part, despite feelings of loss and gain. Directly in front of the school and to the right were two large walls, but quite beautiful for not having been defaced with slogans. Behind the school were trees, flowers, and a wooden fence that faced the Pacific Ocean. To the left, across that surprisingly large playing field, was that slope at a fifteen-degree gradient that suddenly dropped precipitously at its highest point. Eight meters from the ground, a coarse wall constructed of round stone and cement stood steadfastly and proudly, looking out upon the distant streets of Hualien, and even farther were layer upon layer of vague, precipitous mountains. It was here that first year that I discovered that mysterious world, where a lone pine stood and three Chinese olive trees grew randomly. I sat leaning against the one nearest the sea, the one that had just forty-one leaves, with the sweat of late summer running down my face, gazing at a green mountain rising to the south.