December 16-18, 1996
by Tom Cooney
Decidedly Amateur Anthropologist
No orchids here. Not that I saw anyway. Nor did I see the nuclear waste hidden in the hills. I saw only a muscular mass of volcanic island rock rising out of the Pacific about a half-hour flying time from the city of Taidong in southeast Taiwan.
Lanyu seems well suited to its role as a haven for about 2000 members of a dwindling tribe of aborigines, one of nine aborigine tribes that preceded the 15th-century arrival of the Chinese on the Taiwan islands. Referred to as the Yami by the Taiwan Chinese, their own word for their tribe simply means "people". They live in six separate villages with catchy names like Bright Island Village and Wild Silver Village. All of the villages are spaced around the island with seemingly well marked out lands for agriculture, such boundaries no doubt a result of the occasional battles fought between the villages before the missionaries came. Nowadays, the men more or less peacefully go about their business wearing nothing but traditional loincloths and a ready smile for visitors. The bent women trudge along the paths with their bundles or lean to the earth in the fields.
The "people" live primarily on sweet potato, taro root, pigs, and goat products (I’ve never seen so many goats in my life!). For a snack, they like to chew beetlenut, which has the comical, chemical effect of turning the entire mouth bright red after years of chewing. Both men and women look as if they have just sucked down a big pitcher of Cherry Kool-Aid. I felt that I had fallen in among the Redmouthed Clan, and I chuckled when I saw the Chinese characters for the village I would be staying in – Hong Tou Cun, or Red Head Village.
After I checked in at the tidier of the island’s two simple inns – scoring a dormer with eight hardwood torture-beds all too myself in the tourist low season -- I rented a motorcycle to tool around the island. The ride was a thrill, the day was clear and sunny, and the whole island awaited. In Bright Island Village I was doing a Santa routine and distributing small Christmas candy canes like, well, candy….and soon I met an aborigine in his early 30s who chatted with me for an hour or so. His Chinese was excellent, and he even spoke a bit of self-taught English, which was no doubt why he was selected as one of the islanders to attend an internaional anti-nuclear power convention in Los Angeles last year. I kept trying to imagine this young Lanyu gentleman sailing the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at Disneyland. My imagination failed.
The travel books carry on about how the traditional homes of the Yami are sunken into deep pits in the ground to avoid the worst effects of frequent typhoons. Only their sloped roofs peek out aboveground to give away their presence. Several Taiwanese I met in Taidong back on the main island nearly threw up their hands when describing the Taiwan government’s good-willed efforts to build new aboveground homes for the Yami. Many islanders, particularly the older generation, have rejected the new houses and still prefer to live in their sheltered homes.
Wang, wife, and three children live in one of the newer houses, but he took me on a tour of his father’s traditional home. Scrubbed clean but very dark, I felt like I was crouching in a cross between a cave and a hut. It was one level, but there were two compartments in the interior. The forward one was for sitting, eating and general use, while the far one was for cooking and sleeping. Several bunks were built into the walls in a cramped, space-saving fashion that make lofts in college dorm rooms look like luxury suites at the Peninsula Hotel. Wang said his father often used to tell stories of the people from his bed as the children gathered round on the floor.
The fireplace was on one side wall, but for some reason I could not understand, the ventilation window was on the opposite wall. Wang wasn’t sure why, but he knew that custom dictated that there be only one window. Each house also has a special drainage system for when the heavy rains come.
Wang showed me the flimsy battle vests, knives and spears historically used in village warfare. They were hung in a deep dark corner above the beds. They did not seem to me to be waiting to be used again. Rather, that old house impressed me as some sort of reproduction of a "tribal hut" that you see in a musuem somewhere. Even so, it was still very much in use and would serve as the family’s primary shelter when the next typhoon hit.
So where did "the people" come from? Taiwan? The volcanic rock below? Nope. It appears they came from the Philippines perhaps 1000 years ago, according to my friend Wang. He smiled and said that some of the prouder islanders insist that the Philippine offshoot actually originated on Lanyu, not the other way around. Wang pointed out that everyone has a different version of history. I guess some truisms of life always hold regardless of geography.
Each village has both a Presbyterian and a Catholic Church. Recently, Wang participated in a church-organized relief expedition to their even-poorer cousins in the Philippines. They brought food and supplies, taught them how to build stronger houses, and urged a bit of the faith on them. The latter surprised me. The Catholic Church owns the Philippines! How could they have missed this desperate, little tribe on one of the northern islands? The Vatican must be slipping.
According to Wang, the islanders are almost fully self-sufficient. They are poor, "but they don’t fear poverty." The land has always supplied their basic needs. Everywhere I looked I saw people bent over scraping the land and pulling from it what they needed to live. Their lives cannot be distinguished from those of the land and ocean. What is fertile soil, they sow. What is hard rock, they set their goats upon. What is ocean, they ply with small canoes and fishing boats. What is air, they breathe. What is money? They have little idea.
The Christian missionaries exercise more than a fair bit of influence on the island. A Taiwan Chinese storekeeper named Shu said they were instrumental in putting an end to village warfare many years ago. I spoke with Shu in his shop for about an hour one day as I waited for a heavy rain to blow over. He shared a simple soup of rice and spinach leaves with me, and he shared with me what he knew about native customs as he flipped through postcards of natives performing various rituals. The most interesting one to me was the "Hair Dance", which celebrates the building of a new canoe. Like the Amish in the northeastern U.S. (no, I did not attempt to introduce the Amish people to my friend Shu), building canoes and houses is a communal activity with the work shared by your relatives and neighbors. When completed, the women line up in colorful ceremonial dress and wildly toss their long black hair back and forth in sync. The postcard caught them in mid-toss, and if you blurred your eyes, you could imagine them as several dark-haired headbangers in the front row of a Guns ‘N Roses concert.
Sidenote: I helped Shu read a bit of English, but he had the most inappropriate textbook I’ve ever seen for someone whose English was virtually nonexistent. It was a recent copy of "Architectural Digest". Besides the pretty pictures of lavish houses and gardens, it was so full of technical terminology that I couldn’t have explained some of them in English. When I suggested that he start with something a bit simpler – "See Dick Run" perhaps – Shu earnestly explained that he had studied interior design in college and had worked in the field for several years already. I tried to imagine the horrid, evil, medieval interior design plan he must have completed a few years to have earned instant banishment to Lanyu Island. I shook my head and continued to explain my understanding of what "interior flow" is.
I also met a Swiss priest at the Lanyu airfield who had been in Taiwan for 35 years. He had learned to speak Mandarin, Taiwanese (a completely separate dialect), and a fair bit of the Yami language. Suitably impressed, I quietly concluded that he must have made a pact with the devil; Mandarin is giving me enough fits as it is, and I’ve been considering a limited arrangement with Lucifer myself. The good father told me his parish is in Taidong and that he spends one week per month on the island administering his flock. He visits each village, says Mass, hears confession, and pitches in to help his people wherever he can.
That help includes joining with the islanders to oppose the Taiwan Power electric utility’s shipments of nuclear waste to the island. When the shipments first started years ago, TaiPower and the government lied to the people and told them that the waste was normal, harmless "factory" waste to be shipped into the nearly unreachable mountainous interior of Lanyu. When the islanders discovered the true radioactive nature of the waste, they reacted angrily and opposed the ships at the docks of the two small island piers. Small buildings all over the island are covered with anti-nuclear waste graffiti. Officially, the shipments have stopped – there is 92,000 tons of it already on Lanyu -- but Wang alleges that they continue at night when the villagers are asleep. The villagers still have not gotten a satisfying answer to their question "If it’s really so safe, why don’t you store it in Taipei?" Wang further says that several people have already died of cancer.
To compensate, TaiPower and the government have poured money into the island for new schools, an activity center, new housing, and other infrastructure. Indeed, evidence of the investment is everywhere. Shu estimates that about 15% of the island population are Taiwan Chinese, mainly workers such as teachers and tourism industry types. They too seem to oppose the nuclear waste shipments, although not as vociferously. They are transient workers. Others will take their place in a few years. Although content on Lanyu and not acting like an exile, Shu himself hopes to return to interior design work in his hometown of Panchiao near Taipei next year. The staff at the Lanyu Inn spends most of the long "low season" playing Chinese checkers in the rec room and waiting for the 7:00 pm news broadcast with the pretty Taiwanese announcers.
By and large, native teenagers and college-age young people were not to be seen on the island. Most go to Taiwan for high school and then look for work. Passing college entrance exams in Taiwan is extremely stressful and difficult for even the brightest Taiwan Chinese, so it is extremely rare for aborigines to make it to college. Due to lack of education and lingering racial discrimination, most are limited to taking low-paying, menial jobs on Taiwan. Even so, they still save some money to send back to their families on Lanyu to help them survive. Intermarriage of aboriginal girls with Chinese men is more acceptable now to both races. I must add that the mixed offspring of such couples are often very beautiful. As few of the young people return to the island, Lanyu’s population continues to erode.
I am beginning to realize that I am most attracted to the humble peoples of the world, and they are not in short supply. The "people" of the island reminded me of the Tarahumara of northern Mexico in their isolation and self-sufficiency. Lanyu also had a bit of the frontier flavor of Chiloe Island in southern Chile. I suppose it resembles any place in the world with a small, besieged tribe clinging to tradition and life in the face of society-altering development pressures from the outside as well as land-withering weather patterns. I don’t have a strong opinion as to whether the slow death of such peoples is a cultural tragedy or a boon to their succeeding generations, who will hopefully benefit from better education and assimilation into the dominant society around them. I do not believe the Chinese are villains here – with the exception of the inexcusable deception over the nuclear waste.
No sociologist me, I venture that a distinct tribe’s disappearance is part of a natural, well-established progression of societal development (and decay) that has been re-enacted throughout history. It should be remembered that Nature itself has eliminated thousands of species of plant and animal over the millenia. More and more, I believe the bottom line of a society’s worth is the level of happiness it provides its members, and by that score, the "people" of Lanyu seem about as happy with their triumphs and as distressed by their troubles as most peoples anywhere.
"And that’s all I have to say about that." – F. Gump