| Searching | ||
| Text and photo by Hsiao Yiu-hwa. Translated by Tang Yau-yang | ||
A woman in her seventies was looking and digging for something where her home once stood, on the shoreline in Tacloban, Leyte Province, the Philippines. Her home had stood there for more than seven decades when Typhoon Haiyan destroyed it on November 8, 2013. When the winds and the rains had died down, many of her long-time neighbors had also died, without saying goodbye. They had beaten her in leaving this turbulent world. She had always lived alone, but now she was even more solitary.
“Ma’am, go have your cuts treated,” I urged. “Oh, that’s nothing,” she said to me half absent-mindedly. Her attention was squarely on the rubble. “What are you looking for?” “Nothing. What can I expect to find?” she murmured. She was right. She was combing through piles of debris that had been soaked in sea water and exposed to the elements since Haiyan hit the area two months earlier. The chance was next to none that she would find anything valuable or useful in those piles of rubbish. “Ah, my eyeglasses!” she exclaimed. Then she cheerfully showed me the treasures that she had excavated: a pair of eyeglasses whose lenses were severely scratched and cracked but still set in their twisted frame; a rusty, stopped alarm clock; a few damp photos; a mildewed and aged notebook, its puffy pages stuck together as if glued. It suddenly dawned on me that what she had been looking for were her memories—70-some years in the making, and unlike those of anybody else in the world. Apparently, Haiyan had effortlessly destroyed her house and many of her friends, but for all its power it had been unable to take away even the slightest bit of her memories, which remained safely locked in those fading photos, in the clock which no longer told the time, in the stuck pages of the notebook, and in the pair of beat-up glasses through which she still saw her past in amazing clarity but her present only in a blur.
Tacloban, the Philippines, January 15, 2014
|
|
