New Life Started
Returning to Irapinan (Meilan now), Alianus got married and became an assistant of Catholic Father Rodrguez, helping with missionary work in those villages along the eastern coast such as Changpin, Chungan, Tomiats, Misaro, etc. because at that time the Spanish Father was not able to speak in Amis except for Japanese. He wanted someone who could handle both Amis and Japanese for elderly villagers properly. Here Alianus came in for help. Later he could not resist the temptation to work for a Japanese otter trawler under a term of two years of contract. They sailed as far as Montevideo, Uruguay. “If I worked as a crewman and sail across the Pacific Ocean,” he recalled, “I might run into the souls of my comrades who had died somewhere in battlefields. I miss them so much.”
House Builders
When Alilanus returned, he received 1.5 million dollars for his wages. With this chunk of money, he invited his wife and cousin to labor together to build a farm house on his own on top of a hill where it is now. “While constructing the bones of the roof, there was a series of earthquakes,” said his wife, Sra, recalling her house building days. “We were so scared that we did not dare to move an inch. We remained on the roof sometimes while shaking. The earthquakes occurred day and night for a month. It was very frightening.” Sra
took me out of the living room and showed what was so funny about the house of her own. “You see the five pillars in support of the veranda look slanting a little,” saying, she pointed to one of the pillars. It was true that each pillar painted in light blue was slanting inwardly. They would not add any extra support. They simply let it go. Sra looked proud of this “my home” of hand-manipulated concrete brick walls and tiled roof. Despite its awkward appearance, the house of white and light blue in lovely contrast, surrounded by hibiscus hedges, stands on top of a plateau and commands a breathtaking view from the pillared veranda.
It is a one-story house, roofed of scale-like tiles, containing the spacious living room in the middle where most of my fieldwork conversation takes place, and four bedrooms on both sides. Alianus and Sra occupy one of each adjoining room. The other two rooms accommodate approximately twelve people at their family reunion. The front veranda leads to the kitchen and dining room and beyond that is the bathroom. The house has no longer copied the structure of the Amis traditional style, which used to be of thatched roof with no windows except the main door in the middle. Since there were no walls for separation but a fire place in the inner part, no privacy was kept. The spacious space which occupies the largest area n the house usual serves as multipurpose function (Suenari 1983). The traditional styled houses are not common today.
Alianus had formed an ideal style of dwelling place in his mind. He said it is more like Taiwanese house. Sra said, “While we were building the house, looking down from the beam, I was already dreaming of enjoying TV with my family in the living room spacious enough and with plenty of light. Now I‟m glad my dream has come true.” Alianus interrupted, “When the house was
globalization in his own house to a traditional house in which he was brought up before eight years old.
A unique feature of the house is the large kitchen and dining room. The floor is beautifully paved with white tiles that make the whole place brilliant even in the daytime. “On the Chinese New Year‟s Eve, we have about thirty family members dining here,” said Sra, showing off the huge dining room, and went on. “Two of my daughters-in-law are terrific at cooking. So I have the greatest helpers at the busiest time. After dinner, the dining room turns into a bedroom for a dozen persons of three families.” One can imagine how noisy and happy when all those families squeeze in one. That is merely a temporary excitement. Alianus and Sra cannot help but feel a sense of tranquility when the children and grandchildren go back to work and leave them alone.
The elderly couple has been living in it and they are quite pleased to.
They have nine children; three of them have past away, and the rest of them are working in different cities with their own children. They were all brought up under the same roof on this piece of land. Theirs must be a considerably big family in the village. It is in this house built by this elderly couple that the happy and warm family reunion has taken place year after year for the past few decades. Alianus owns a farm and an orchard at a distance from where he lives but he is too weak to work any longer.
Surviving a Fatal Accident
One year Alianus got involved in a car accident at Turek. He was seriously injured and carried to a hospital in Taitung. Sra was not with him when the accident occurred. She was notified about his accident that Alianus was taken
to Taitung Hospital. She hurried to Taitung from Chungan, where they had been invited to one of the relatives‟ wedding banquet. It took about five long hours to get to the hospital where she thought him taken for treatment. But she was upset when she found her husband was not there. So she spent more time looking for her man, from hospital to hospital, because she had been given wrong information. Finally she found his name on the list of casualties in MacKay Hospital. He was found in the ICU.
Alianus could neither see nor speak, just lying in agony with arms and legs all bound to the iron bed. He only stretched his right hand and seemed to ask for something. Sra knew instinctively what he was demanding. She took a piece of betel nut out of her bag and squeezed it into his mouth. Alianus said, “I was dying for betel nuts but I simply couldn‟t talk then. The moment I felt a piece in my mouth, I began to chew. I instantly revived to talk. Ha, ha, ha!” Sra interrupted, “I kept it stealthily from the doctor. I didn‟t let the doctor aware of it.” Then Alianus added, “It was sort of magic cure-all. Ha, ha, ha.” Betel nut is called icep in Amis. He remarked, “I saw natives in New Guinea also in the habit of chewing it, but they simply chewed and chewed it without any seasonings as we do. Indigenous people in Taiwan seem to be enjoying betel nuts in by far more „civilized‟ way than those in New Guinea because ours are more particular about the flavor and aroma in each bite and even care about how to treat with blood-like spits into plastic bags to keep up the level of sanitation.”
Ever since he was involved in the car accident at Turek, when he lost both eye sights, he has never watched Japanese movie on DVD. But time and again, he would sing Japanese songs on Karaoke because he is still strongly
The aged couple has no willing to learn Mandarin Chinese. When their grandchildren come back for holidays, they hold responsible for teaching the mother tongue of Amis only to fail partly because they are not teachers, and partly because the grandchildren have no chance at all to use it. In their daily life Mandarin is absolutely dominant. To the kids, it seems that there is little room for Amis culture. Alianus feels frustrated in unable to hand down his own heritage. Though visually handicapped, he is talkative with much sense of humor as ever.
Solitary Life
Blind as Alianus is, he is quite accustomed to doing chores alone at home while his wife is out. For example, I dropped by without previously notifying him and happened to see Alianus taking out the clothes out of the washing machine in the rear of the house, carrying them in a plastic basket to the front yard, and drying them on the clothes line. He managed it just like an ordinary seeing man does, terribly slow in motion, though. As a man of over ninety with blindness, it is amazing that he has a clear mind and is capable of doing most of housework by himself during his wife Sra‟s absence. Blind as he is, he seems to
„see‟ the locations of all the furniture precisely just like he saw through the darkness when raiding the Australian army tent in New Guinea.
Lying on the front veranda is a wooden stool, wide enough for two persons to sit on side by side. This is where the aging couple rest in their leisure time. As usual, Alilanus was taking a rest on that stool when I greeted and offered a bag of betel nuts which he accepted with thanks. The betel nut looks green. It is wrapped up in a green leaf with a tiny bit of lime powder appearing like mashed potato. When chewed together, they make the whole mouth and
lips red with bloody juice. Precisely like a chain smoker, Alianus, holding a plastic bag close to his face, spit into it making a high pitch tone, and instantaneously let the second fresh one crammed into his mouth, so skillfully that it was extremely enjoyable to watch the “from-hand-to-mouth” feat going on.
Wedding Night
Alianus has a fine and clear memory of the past. For example, he remembers all about his wedding party. Everybody who came to join the banquet wished him happiness by cheering up with glass after glass of wine until over midnight.
It was customary with Amis tribal wedding in which all seniors and juniors were invited to join to make the atmosphere merry and animated. When the bridegroom noticed that the bride was not there, he began to look for her with his cousins. They looked every possible place but in vain. Nobody noticed her leaving the party, either. The search went on until dawn. All of them were worried about her whereabouts. Then Sra interrupted, explaining it herself, “I just escaped because I was afraid, afraid of being with a man. That‟s all.”
Alialnus added, “My wife thought that I could not catch up with her at a race
„cause she was a well-known fast runner.” How did she show up the next day?
Neither of the couple gave an answer to that question yet. It is not hard to imagine how their married life resumed. They have had, however, nine children in the long run.
In the living room there is a set of old sofa on one side, and a TV set is on the opposite side with piles of DVDs and CDs on both sides. All of these are
and listening to them at their leisure time, but since he became blind in his eye in an accident, he said, these DVDs or CDs have rarely been touched any longer.
Trouble in Inheriting Mother Tongue
Alianus finds that in the Amis language there are a lot of loaned words, dominantly from in the Japanese colonization rather than in Qin Dynasty and KMT era. Alianus like Livok of Taitung believes that the indigenous Amis can hardly exist without these loan words in their daily life.
From Alianus‟s dialogues a list of words are collected as follows:
Sinsi (teacher), kuchusinsi (principal), shokakko (elementary school) Tinsia (bicycle), tusia (automobile), tintu (battery flash)
Sufitai or safitai (soldier), tuki or puki (clock, time)
Mari (baseball), kuranto (playground), untukai (sports meeting), ichipan (first)
Hikuki (airplane), pasu (bus), turaku (truck), miuntingai(driver, with prefix mi and suffix ai added), haiya (hire)
Tamaku ( tobacco), nasu (egg-plant), tamana (cabbage).
In the pronunciation system of Amis, the sounds such as /b/, /d/, and /g/
never occur in any syllables, but they are recognized as high frequency
consonants in Japanese. So when it comes to speaking Japanese, average Amis are likely to have these voiced sounds substituted by their voiceless, unaspirated counterparts, e.g., /p/, /t/, and /k/.
For example,
Japanese go (five) is pronounced by Amis as ko;
bai (double) is pronounced by Amis as pai;
den (electricity) is pronounced by Amis as ten.
Although these phonological phenomena make great differences phonetically, they are predictable and acceptable socially. If one gets used to it, it brings no difficulty understanding what is said.
These phenomena are true of other voiced consonants. Like average Amis mates, Alianus appears to be no exception. But as far as the usage of the language is concerned, he is extremely careful to add honorific expression in the end of each sentence to sound politer more respectful, e.g., degozaimasu, desu, deska? itashimasu, etc.
One will be surprised to see that there are no such words as thank-you, sorry, good-bye and even cursing remarks in the Amis language. “What do you do then when you want to express gratitude, apology and so on?” Alianus replied, “None of these has been occurring in our life. They are something that only happens in the sophisticated occasions. If he or she has received the Japanese education, then she may respond with loaned words such as arigato gozaimasu, sumimasen desita, or sayanara, etc. in Japanese because these are a must taught in Japanese schools when social manners are infused to children.”
and grandchildren generation are more like a kite flying in the sky with a string broken from the child‟s hand. This means: the grandparents do not know Mandarin Chinese which is grandchildren‟s main language of daily life; and grandchildren speak neither Amis nor Japanese which are grandparents‟ mother tongue. In other words, there is no common language to combine the both generations together with.
Sra says that she has great trouble communicating with her grandchildren in schooling age. She always makes a serious effort to have the kids pick up maranam-marahok-marafe (to have breakfast, lunch, dinner) type of action words, and nanom-futing-itini-itira (water, fish, here, there) kind of content-word vocabulary, while they are home for vacation. The kids also make enormous efforts learning them. “But,” Sra says with regret, “it‟s very frustrating to see them come home again forgetting all they learned in the previous vacation.
A little episode Alianus told me is worth mentioning here. While in New Guinea, every time his troop came to pass a native village, it was his job to communicate with the chief. With his darker skin, native-like outlook, and Amis language, Alianus found it quite easy to make friends with the chiefs and their people and get support such as providing some food, or knowledge of geography. He succeeded several times in inducing them to be engaged in espionage on the Japanese side because he could speak Amis, a kind of Austronesian language somewhat similar to the native languages in New Guinea.