Father asked me, "When did you fall in love with our sea?" I thought about it for a time, and realized I couldn't answer. Father was silent. He looked like he wanted to say something, but wasn't sure how. Then he said, "Since I first held you in my hands the moment you were born, I have followed our ancestors' customs, saying, 'Let my eldest son be as resolute as the sea; let people take joy in him as they do a calm sea.' It is our ancestors' custom that Tao men must love the sea, and must befriend it...."-Syaman Rapongan.
Tao names are unusual in that the Tao name themselves after their children and grandchildren. The syaman in Tao author Syaman Rapongan's name, for example, means literally "father," and indicates that he is "father of Rapongan," his eldest son. His wife, meanwhile, is Sinan Rapongan, "mother of Rapongan." Both terms designate social roles the Tao greatly respect. As Syaman Rapongan says, "People speak to you differently when you are a parent."
Similarly, for the Tao the loss of this role is a source of great grief. Tao parents must change their name if their eldest child dies, replacing the name of their eldest child with that of their second. If Tao parents lose an only child, they must change their names back to what they were before they became parents. "For us, this is a horrible tragedy," says Syaman Rapongan. For this reason, to call parents by the name they carried before having children is to severely curse them.
Children of the sea
In the sweltering heat of late June, Syaman Rapongan and his wife flew from Orchid Island to Taipei to help their three children move house.
Their teenagers-a boy of 18 and girls of 16 and 14-are all currently pursuing their educations in Taipei, and recently moved from Hsintien to a new place in Chingmei.
The burly, dark Syaman Rapongan looks out of place in the cramped urban apartment. He belongs instead among the greens and blues of Orchid Island and the sea.
When the subject of the island comes up, he waxes enthusiastic about the plank canoe he has just finished. On the island, canoes are essential to survival, much as a plow is to a farmer. But to Syaman Rapongan, who last year lost both his parents, his canoe also represents his yearning for his father.
Syaman Rapongan is still awed when he recalls his father's physical stamina-he was still gathering crabs on the coastal cliffs at the age of 75 or 76, and at 77 could still net flying fish until dawn.
"My father," says Syaman Rapongan, "spent five or six months out of every year on the sea. He was at one with nature."
He explains that his father expressed love and respect for his environment through his actions, by, for example, singing song after song to commemorate the completion of a new home or canoe. Syaman Rapongan still fondly recalls the utterly natural spontaneity of his father's disposition.
Syaman Rapongan has an impressive list of accomplishments to his name. He was the first Orchid Islander to test into a Taiwanese university without a special recommendation. He is a noted author whose works include Black Wings and Recollections of the Waves. And last year he became the only person on Orchid Island with an advanced degree when he completed his graduate studies in anthropology at National Tsing Hua University. But he is quick to point out that his fellow islanders couldn't care less about the books he has published or the degrees he's completed. Instead, they judge men by their skill at spearing fisha, building canoes and diving.
Having grown up in the bosom of Tao culture, Syaman Rapongan has never been much interested in making money or establishing a "career." "I can't just toil away in one little space," he says.
He prefers instead the traditional village lifestyle, rising at dawn and working till sunset, wresting his living from the mountains and the sea. But he still occasionally puts pen to paper. "I write real words drawn from real life," he says.
Yet he is also the father of three children, and his wife sometimes complains that he is "shirking his duty as a father." "How can you raise children with no income?" Sinan Rapongan blurts out somewhat bitterly.
Stuck in the middle
Caught between the past and the present, the present generation of Tao fathers clearly faces a dilemma.
Syaman Rapongan says that the previous generation of parents didn't worry too much about their kids. They assumed that their children had their own approach to life and their own fate. As long as their kids didn't turn bad, they figured that they had been successful as parents. "My father wasn't the kind of man who would work himself to death for a buck," he says.
He notes that a cash economy has only taken root on Orchid Island in the last dozen or so years. Since then, his generation of Tao fathers has begun to find their inability to make money a problem. This is also something that bothers him about himself.
Caught between new and old, a pen in one hand and a paddle in the other, Syaman Rapongan knows he is creating an intangible asset by writing about the Tao. Yet, in the pragmatic terms of day-to-day life, his inability to support his family by playing the role of the wage-earner has left him feeling both powerless and very much alone.
In July, his son, an 11th-grader at National Keelung Maritime Vocational High School, was very excited about a pending voyage to Japan. But to Syaman Rapongan, neither his son's ship nor his son's ocean resemble his own.
What are his expectations of his son? Does he hope he'll return to Orchid Island? "Of course," responds the man who so frequently says that Tao manhood is defined by the ability to net fish and make canoes.
"Return and do what?" his wife immediately interjects. "Have no future like you?" Rapongan's father responds only with a forlorn and somewhat lonely smile.
