(Rimuy Aki, first from left)
Rimuy Aki (Atayal Nation) is one of the few indigenous female writers in Taiwan. She works as a Atayal language teachers at elementary schools; writing, a very lonely business as she once told me, is something else for her.
I think Rimuy actually prefers telling stories to writing them. When I read her novels, I always feel she is just right there on every page reading every line to my ear. That is how 'smooth' her story line goes; I can easily finish seventy or a hundred pages in some hours.
Unlike Syaman Rapongan who writes about Tao men and their sea with a hard soul, Rimuy's tone is soft, very feminine, and sometimes excessively romantic for a reader being trained as a historian like me, even when she deals with Atayal hunters struggling with wild boars in deep mountains. Nevertheless, she soothes the soul.
The other day at the release conference of her second novel, Missing Home, I heard people calling her 'A writer that heals the soul'. Despite the fact how I do complain she simplifies life and colonial reality in her novels, I couldn't agree more with the comment. That is one of the values of her writing.
Home of Taiwan Cherries（山櫻花的故鄉） was published in 2010. It is based on the life story of an Atayal elder, yutas Payan (Grandpa Payan), and his family, who Rimuy met through friends and became dear friends with.
This novel tells how Bawnay Lesa (probably modeled on yutas Payan), driven by his desire for a better life, moves his entire family from their home in Wufeng County in Hsinchu to Namasia District in Kaohsiung.
Life was very hard for them in the beginning, especially since what was promised (a piece of land given to Bawnay and his family) was never realized. But Bawnay and his family were hardworking, honest, kind and generous - the core values of a real Atayal -, they made it through all kinds of difficulties. After some years, they earned their own land and storehouses filled with harvest, although in the end, the family also decided to return to their hometown in Wufeng as nostalgia bade.
I traveled in Wufeng and Namasia for field work a few months ago, so some scenes are familiar. I especially find the language Bawnay and his family used in Namasia quite interesting, as it sort of corresponds to the phenomenon of loanwords I experienced in my fieldwork.
Because several different indigenous peoples lived in Namasia, Rimuy describes, they commonly used Japanese to converse with each other; besides, since Bunun was (and still is) the largest group there, other minor groups, including Tsou people that had lived there even prior to Bunun, also learned to use Bunun. In other words, Japanese and Bunun were both the lingua franca in that region. Though I did not find much Japanese in 2014, still many Kanakanavu people (the Tsou that live in Namasia) can speak and are speaking Bunun.
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Published in 2014, Rimuy's second novel, Missing Home（懷鄉）, is specifically about an Atayal girl, Huai Xiang (this xiang is a pun with the xiang home in the title). She tells how Huai Xiang grew from a girl to her womanhood, survived two failed marriages, and finally found redeemed love in faith.
Unlike Bawnay and his family that moved southward, Huai Xiang headed northward and moved between places like Wulai in Taipei, Jianshih in Hsinchu and the harbor Keelung, in a constant pursuit of a settled family, the home that she has always been missing.
Again, the end that grants Huai Xiang a 'home' in the church draws criticism against her simple romanticism. I am not the only one who thinks such arrangement too ready and probably just an excuse for Rimuy's wish to stop writing. Nevertheless, that's also perhaps what 'healing' means: there is always a cure to any thing and anyone, now matter how broken they are.
Faith still in the beauty of life right in the middle of its foulness demands a lot of mental strength. That is also the beauty of Missing Home: because it's 'No Good', it is beautiful.
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