This story took place in the second semester of my third year at elementary school. As for the Hsing-lung grocery store, it had been there since I was five. During the post-Second World War period, the store played an important role in taking our tribe from barter economy to money economy. This store provided for our tribespeople’s most immediate needs—daily necessities such as axes, scythes, aluminum cooking pots, etc. Yet behind the transaction of these daily consumer goods was the transformation of the people’s value system.
During the season of the flying fish when the breezy south westerly wind began to blow across the island, the frogs in the nearby taro field began to croak all night long. As the wind gained strength, their croaking intensified, and the quality of our sleep would suffer. However, this music from the croaking frogs provided a ready clue to their whereabouts as the more experienced among the young tribesmen went on their nocturnal hunting trips. On the moonless, pitch-dark nights, the gas lamps1 they carried flickered like giant fireflies floating around the taro field. They came with only one purpose: to catch frogs. The fact that the Han Chinese immigrants to the island found frogs a gastronomic delight also made us aware that our highly cherished season of the flying fish coincided with the mating, croaking, and breeding season of the frogs.
From our ancestors we have inherited a saying that whoever among us eats frogs is a “low-level human being.” My parents also told me that the frog’s ugly appearance excluded it from the category of edible food in our culture. Besides, with the rich variety of fish in the sea, eating frogs was considered a sign of “mental deficiency” among our tribesmen. Anyway, all the negative terms used in the Tau tradition in connection with frogs and the eating of frogs (such as “ugly-looking frogs” and “low-level human beings”) explain why I never eat them. Of course there are many other peoples who feel quite differently about frogs. One has to be careful with negative comments about eating frogs if one doesn’t wish to insult other inhabitants of Taiwan and make oneself unpopular. Still, a teacher of the Plains tribe labeled my tribe as a bunch of “idiots” just because we refused to eat what he considered nutritious “food.” Obviously, different tribes have different ideas about what is “ugly” or what constitutes “nutritional value.” Simply put, the greater the exposure to civilization, the greater importance a race or an individual will attach to the nutritional value of food. On the other hand, those that are not “civilized,” such as my tribe, are more concerned about the aesthetic as well as the cultural value of the food. For example, while sailfish and swordfish are the choicest sashimi material in Japanese restaurants, and sea slug and halibut are most favored by the French and the Japanese, my tribe finds them too ugly to be used as foods. Another example is Tilapia. Raised in a fish pond rather than caught in the sea, it is regarded as “garbage fish,” and hence inedible. So the story goes.
The frogs were croaking throughout the night, keeping awake a couple of my classmates who didn’t bother to do their homework. That night, my father was out catching flying fish, and I was on the roofed platform, working on my math problems by the light of the kerosene lamp. The south-southwest wind brought air saturated with saltiness and the heavy smell of flying fish. The wind also carried snatches of the men’s excited conversation about the celebration of a bumper catch. The clear moonlight attracted neighborhood women to the yard of their next-door neighbors, where they animatedly exchanged ideas about paradise, their emotions following the rise and fall of the waves in anticipation of signs of their children’s fathers returning with boats full of fish.
“Hey, come down here!”
“What’s up?” I asked. The pale-yellow light of the kerosene lamp on my classmates’ faces illumined their boyish innocence and their bright eyes with a touch of excitement. In the exquisite night, dots of ships and boats bobbed up and down with the waves like a dream. Wafting toward us were songs celebrating their triumphant return with an abundant catch. Under the night sky, the singing seemed like a deeply-felt paean offered to the sea god. Yet, on that night, it didn’t lure us to the beach to welcome the fishing boats, or to weave dreams under the soft moonlight. Just then I heard a voice saying: “Hey, come down! You aren’t that bright, anyway! No need to study that hard.” It was one of my classmates, the mischievous Jijimeta.
“Right, you aren’t that bright, anyway! Come down!” Jijimeta’s “followers” joined in the banter. I was well aware that I was not the smartest kid in class. As a matter of fact, on my first day at a Han Chinese school, my “Junior Grandpa” (my grandpa’s youngest brother) had even warned me: “Don’t you learn to be smart at a Han Chinese school!”
“What’s up?” I asked the boys.
“Let’s go and steal the frogs from the Hsing-lung Grocery,” somebody said with a small but crisp voice,...
*From In-ke wen-hsueh sheng-huo-chih 《印刻文學生活誌》(INK Literary Monthly), 2:4, December, 2005, pp. 126-132.
1The gas lamps consisted of two levels, with hard gas stones in the lower level and water on the higher. Water dripping down from the higher level would liquefy the stones, and gas would spout from the tong-shaped snout and burn when lit. The Hsing-lung store earned a lot of money selling these gas lamps to Tau tribesmen.
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