The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi

Author:Wu Ming-Yi [Ming-Yi, Wu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-90797-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

16. Hafay

“Once upon a time, there was a girl who always took her basket along when she went to work in the fields, but very mysteriously would never allow anyone to peek inside. But a nosy neighbor wondered why there was always a handsome young man helping the girl plow and plant when she was working. So the neighbor went behind the girl’s back and told her Ina.”

“What was the girl planting?”

“Millet, I guess.”

“My dad says that you don’t really have to plant millet; we can just scatter the seeds around.”

“Probably where the girl was living they had to pick up stones and turn the soil and plant the seeds.”

“I guess she would never admit that there was someone helping her.”

“Good guess. You’re so smart, Umav. The girl just denied everything. Her Ina had a funny feeling about her daughter’s basket, and suspected it might have something to do with the handsome young man the nosy neighbor had told her about. One day the girl got sick. She tossed the basket by her pillow and lay in bed. Her curious Ina waited until she was fast asleep, then took off the cover and looked inside. She could hardly believe her eyes: inside the basket was a fish, two feet long and seven inches wide.”

“How big is that?”

“This big.” Hafay showed Umav with her hands, and Umav was obviously satisfied. “My dad has caught way bigger.”

“The mother cooked and ate the fish, and then put the bones back in the basket. When the daughter woke up and discovered the fish was gone she went and asked her mother, ‘Where’s my fish, Ina?’ Her Ina told her off, yelling, ‘What an ungrateful daughter you are! The other day when we pounded mochi sticky rice there wasn’t anything to go with it, and there you were hiding a great big fish from me. How dare you!’ ”

“The daughter must have been angry because her mother got her all wrong.”

“Maybe she got angry at her Ina, or maybe there was some other reason, but in any event, the daughter was so sad when she heard what her Ina had done that she swallowed the bones in the basket and died. Turns out that handsome man was a fish in human form.”

“Why not a handsome man in fish form?” Umav asked.

“That makes sense, too. My Ina told me the story, but I forgot to ask her why it wasn’t the other way around. Umav, you’re so bright.”

Dahu couldn’t stop chuckling. Pangcah and Bunun people are both fond of making up stories. When he was a kid Dahu asked his father: “Who did you hear the story from?”

“From the elders.”

“Who did the elders hear the story from?”

“From even older elders.”

“But the even older elders were children once, too, weren’t they?”

“Yes, they were, Dahu.”

“So they heard the story, too.”

Dahu’s father thought it over and said, “Dahu’s right, even the oldest elders were children once. A story can take children places they’ve never been before and tell them about things that happened to folks even older than their elders.

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