“You see, the little girl dancing there is my brother’s daughter. She’s gone and so is her father,” a teary-eyed 71-year-old Mao Yu-chu (毛玉珠) told the Taipei Times as she watched the film. “Now that’s my sister dancing. She didn’t make it out either.”
When Siaolin was buried by massive landslide on Aug. 9, Mao lost her sister, her brother, her brother’s family, her daughter and her son-in-law Liu Jen-ho (劉仁和), who was the village chief.
“I was ill at the time and was in hospital in Kaohsiung City,” she said. “I went into the hospital on Wednesday, and was supposed to come back on Sunday, but the village was gone on Sunday morning.”
The ancestral spirits seem sadden by the tragedy as well.
After two shamans whom the villagers believe to have been possessed by ancestral spirits talked in the Siraya language for a while, they both started to cry.
Several nearby villagers began to cry as well.
However, the sorrowful atmosphere was lifted at the end, when the shamans declared that the Arit were pleased by the feast and wanted everybody to dance and sing a traditional tune.
The villagers were reserved at first, but after a while, more people joined. They danced around a pole in the kuva that represents the Arit’s army, sang and drank the rice wine that was passed to them.
“This is how we Aborigines are — we can easily heal ourselves and look forward,” said Tsai Sung-yu (蔡松諭), chairman of the Siaolin Self-Help Association.
“Every crisis presents an opportunity,” Tsai said. “If it wasn’t because of the tragedy, so many of the young men from Siaolin would not have gathered here again to talk about how to reconstruct our own community and how we want it to be in the future.”
Like many of the younger generation in Siaolin, Tsai, in his 30s, has been living and working in Taipei. He said, however, that he was considering moving back.
In the past, everything was taken care of by the village elders, but now the young people must live on their own, he said.
“Of course I’m in deep grief — I’ve lost my parents, and all my childhood memories are buried deep underneath,” Tsai said. “But this is exactly why we, the younger generation of Siaolin villagers, must shoulder the responsibility to rebuild our homes and pass on our traditions.”
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