Sauljaljui Pinevar (Paiwan)

Sauljaljui Pinevar, otherwise known in Chinese as Chou Shu-chin（周淑琴）, was my classmate at Shimen Elementary School. She was the leader of the class; the captain of our school handball team; and a constant winner in exams or competitions of sorts.

Now, she works as a teacher at a primary school near our hometown, a mother of three children, and a writer whose writing is motivated by none other than a desire to pass down the knowledge about the past to younger generations and in one word, Love.

Watch her interview: Motivated by Love.

"The Story about the World Under the Water" (Taipei: TIPI, 2013)《水世界下的故事》and "cunuq's Summer" (Taipei: TIPI, 2014)《佐諾的夏天》are the results of her love-driven hard-work.

An year ago in 2012, sauljaljui got her MA degree from National Taitung University with the thesis, "A View on the Changes of Paiwan's Mudan Communities through Masupadai" 〈從稻米祭看排灣族埔丹群社部落的變遷〉.

In this thesis, she examined how rice plantations changed local Paiwan villages; one of the changes from masalut (Millet Rite) to masupadai (Rice Rite) in 1950s to masalut (harvest in general) in 2011 was introduced to her illustration book, "The Story about the World Under the Water".

The story "Under the Water" began with three kids swimming in the water dam that was built near their home; (factually, in 1986, the project to build Mudan Dam  kicked off over the collected farmlands of Mudan communities). These kids dived to the depth of the dam and seemingly saw another village lying down there. Amazed and wondering, they went home to ask Vuvu (grandmother) about what they saw, and heard a sad story of change imposed upon their village as the government forcefully levied their farmlands to construct a dam for the peninsula of Hengchun.

Losing their farms to the dam, the Mudan people could no longer till like before; rituals or ceremonies like masupadai (Rice Rite) that used to mark the turning point of the year, a time indicator, also disappeared from their life. Like Vuvu, people nowadays could only miss that past and move on with a heavy heart.

cunuq (meaning 'mountain falls and earth splits') is a another character sauljaljui invented to recount the past of Mudan communities.

He was a boy from around the time of the Second World War (1940s~1960s). In this novella, he and his family living in Mudan went through the horror from flying bombers,  the curious exchange with American soldiers that performed drills in their forests, the annual devastating visit of typhoons and the waning of whaling industry in neighboring non-indigenous townships like Hengchun and Checheng.

Besides, following the naughty games of cunuq and his cousins / brothers, readers were also brought to the pasture, river, wilderness, or basically the Mudan before the construction of dam and the agricultural lifestyle of local people.

In other words, cunuq was from the world lying under the water of Mudan Dam, the scene that originally brought the three kids in "Under the Water" to their vuvu. There is the connection between these two books.

As consistent with her motivation for writing, sauljaljui always uses her pen and creativity to bring people back to the old Mudan. As she said herself, she wants these communities to be remembered, how they survived by farming and how that life was taken from them and put under the water eventually. Her stories are the stories from within. I like her spirit and diligence.

There is just one difference between us. That is, although my village, Damei or Sepungudan, belongs to the cohort of Mudan communities, we the Sepungudan people actually have quite different stories to tell.

Neither does sauljaljui's thesis, "Under the Water" or "cunuq's Summer"  goes as far as to the brink of my village. It lies at the door to the Mudan communities, sandwiched by the non-indigenous communities to the west and Paiwan villages to the east. Besides, while sauljaljui's family, the pinevar, were actually those who learned rice planting from the Japanese and the Han Chinese (a contested identity) in the beginning and initiated the changes in Mudan communities, my family were poor immigrants from elsewhere trying to survive on on the margin of Mudan. Thus, our stories about the past of Mudan naturally diverge.

Of course, I am not asking my dear school friend to write my village's story for me; that will be too low for a historian to be. Her works actually serve as the best resources for me to reconstruct Mudan, Hengchun peninsula and the entire Longkijou in the twentieth century. Since I am working on the seventeenth century and Professor Chou Wan-yao is a very fine historian of the eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century Taiwan- I truly admire her works!-, there paves a way to the complete picture of the southern tip of Taiwan throughout the centuries.

And I promise I shall soon pick up my painting brush.