I sat down on the cold stone steps overlooking a muddy field in order to decompress from the afternoon’s buzz of activities and brisk introductions with community members.
However, my plan to unwind while watching the ritualistic dance was quickly thwarted as I was soon joined by thousands of excited out-of-town onlookers. Some were dressed in red Saisiyat (賽夏族) vests with dangling bells, which you could purchase from a makeshift roadside shop for a whopping NT$4,000, along with matching headbands that cost up to NT$800.
The ritual had finally started, at 6pm sharp, and would go on until 6am — in other words, from sundown to sunrise — although “outsiders” were only allowed to partake in the dance and stand inside the circle from midnight onwards. My initial thoughts were: Why had we driven for hours from Taipei to Wufeng (五峰) and then waited for an even longer time in the mud and rain to watch people in the field hold hands and bob around, thrusting their hips in a gyrating fashion?
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
The dancers were separated into two groups — the singers who swayed back and forth chanting the same verses over and over, and the beat-makers who caused considerable stir among the audience with their gyrating movements. Around me, little kids were imitating the beat-makers’ suggestive dance while their parents attempted, without avail, to make them stop.
The atmosphere was far from the tranquil mountain vibe I had imagined. Instead, it was a blend between a gawking tourist spectacle and an all-night rave fueled by Hsinchu County’s famous sweet rice wine and Taiwan Beer.
LEGEND OF THE SHORT BLACK PEOPLE
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
I had to constantly remind myself that this was not a party. Saisiyat community members made that clear with the brochures (all in Chinese) they handed to us and instructed us to read, as they tied grass around our arms and DSLR cameras in order to ward off evil spirits before letting us non-Saisiyat wander into the field.
Legend has it that thousands of years ago, there existed a mythical pygmy race known as the short black people who lived in the adjacent mountains. There was a shortage of women in their community, and they sexually harassed some Saisiyat women. Infuriated, the Saisiyat exacted revenge by chopping off the bridge from which the short black people were using to cross over. Without access to crops, the short black people died out, but not before putting a curse on the Saisiyat. The terms of the curse were simple: If the Saisiyat did not remember them, then they too would face extinction.
As such, the Saisiyat have been carrying out the Ritual of the Short Black People (矮靈祭), or Pasta’ay, once every two years for the last century or so.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
The event to appease the spirits of the short black people is a long, drawn-out one. Sometimes it lasts for 10 days and sometimes for 30. This is because the Saisiyat must ensure that the spirits of the short black people are ready to cross over into this world. Not to mention that it takes time for them to eat, mingle and be merry with the spirits before commencing the actual ritual. Lastly, non-Saisiyat are only allowed to join on the last two days.
Visitors certainly took advantage of these last two days. I was finding it hard to set my scientific beliefs aside to believe that there were spirits present — especially in an environment in which the number of city slickers in the audience easily outnumbered the number of Saisiyat Aborigines.
Sensing my frustration, my friend Sean Kaiteri — a New Zealand native who had attended Pasta’ay seven times before and was married to a Saisiyat woman — said to me, “You don’t have to believe that there are spirits. You just have to come here with the right attitude to try to understand why the ritual is so important for the Saisiyat.”
Kaiteri’s wife’s family — the Jhu (朱) clan — owns the Da’ai Festival Ground (大隘矮靈祭場), where the ritual took place. Kaiteri refers to the Saisiyat as his “family” and Taiwan as his “homeland,” but he says that he too, still struggles with understanding Pasta’ay in its entirety.
“I feel like I know this much,” Kaiteri said, making a small gap in the air with his hands.
“And there’s still this much more to learn,” he added, this time stretching his hands far apart to indicate a much larger gap.
Kaiteri’s belief that “there is more in heaven and earth than in your philosophy” aptly sums up the feeling that an “outsider” experiences throughout the entire ritual.
WELCOMING ‘OUR HAN CHINESE FRIENDS’
Somewhere in between drinking rice wine and giving up any farfetched notion of having a relaxing mountain retreat, I eventually made peace with the fact that as a non-Saisiyat and a non-Taiwanese, all I could do was sit back and appreciate why such celebrations were important to the people doing it.
What I had trouble grappling with however, was the level of complacency that the Saisiyat had towards the swelling number of “outsiders” — Taiwanese and foreign — coming to observe. The crew I rolled in with for instance, consisted of expat artists and filmmakers from the US, South Africa, France, Belgium, the UK, Australia and Vietnam, although we were an anomaly since most of the other “outsiders” were Taiwanese.
Earlier that day, I was introduced to a member of the Jhu clan who gave me his Chinese name, Jhu Yi-de (朱義德).
In addition to being a principal at an elementary school, Jhu was one of the main planners of Pasta’ay and he took breaks from our conversation every few minutes to repeat the same announcement into a loudspeaker, shouting that the dance was starting at 6pm and thanking “our Han Chinese friends” for attending.
Jhu stressed that the way in which Pasta’ay is carried out hasn’t changed much since its inception a hundred years ago — in other words, the chanting, swaying and gyrating have all stayed the same and it’s only the audience that has changed.
Jhu, who looked slightly older than middle-aged said that it was in the early 1970s that Taiwanese people started to attend Pasta’ay after having watched it on television. Since then, there has been an increased number of inter-marriages between Saisiyat and Taiwanese people but as Jhu says, “we have never regarded non-Saisiyat as outsiders.”
When asked about his attitudes towards “outsiders” who came to Pasta’ay today, he shrugged and simply said, “They get drunk because we give them alcohol — as you already know, our rice wine is delicious. If they are too drunk, it just means they have a low alcohol tolerance. As long as they don’t disrupt the ritual, we are fine with letting them do their own thing.”
A CURSE AND A BLESSING
Jhu was certainly right about the rice wine — it was the rare type of alcohol that actually tasted good and not the type that you just drank for the sake of getting drunk. He was also right about Saisiyat customs remaining relatively unchanged for centuries.
Daveh Ivan provided some insight as to why this was the case. He says that I must first understand that the Saisiyat are not like other Aboriginal communities in Taiwan. It’s because of the curse that the Saisiyat have to survive and pass their traditions down to younger generations — it’s not a matter of choice; they have to do it or else they will face extinction.
“Our young people will always return home no matter how far they travel or how long they are away, which may not be the case for other Aboriginal communities,” Ivan added.
One matter which he is concerned about however, is not being able to pass down the Saisiyat language one day. Saisiyat children attend school with Taiwanese children where they speak Mandarin and it is only at home that they speak their language.
“Our father may know 120 words, we’ll know 80 words and our sons will only know 40 words,” he said.
But Ivan seemed to be doing a good job with his 13-year-old son Ivan Hayawan. Standing next to his father, Hayawan said, “My father made sure to educate me in our Saisiyat customs by making me attend singing and dance lessons so I can perform in the ritual one day.”
The bubbly teenager added that he thinks he is “pretty darn good” at singing and dancing.
Hayawan spoke with a genuine passion that contrasted deeply with the immense feeling of dread that many teenagers may have experienced (or at least I had experienced) when being forced to trek all day to suburbs or rural areas to hang out (i.e. play video games while the grown-ups chatted) with distant relatives I didn’t know existed for Chinese New Year, for instance.
This is not the case for the Saisiyat at all. The atmosphere, although loud and jarring even to my New York ears, was one of joviality for the Saisiyat. Everyone knew each other somehow and young and old alike chatted, mingled and took selfies. The tradition of Pasta’ay was well alive, albeit with modern technology like cameras and camcorders to capture such lively moments.
As had Kaiteri said earlier, “It’s because of the curse that the Saisiyat have to struggle to survive, but in a way, it’s also a blessing.”
NATIONAL FESTIVAL
Around 9pm I was whisked away by O,bay, a member of the Saisiyat who was also councilor to the Hsinchu County Commissioner Chiu Ching-chun (邱鏡淳). O,bay, who was a friend of Kaiteri’s, insisted I meet the commissioner, who had “worked very hard in promoting Pasta’ay as a national festival.”
It was not until I was brought to a crowded outdoor dining hall where the commissioner was finishing dinner with his Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) campaigners that I was reminded that the municipal elections were being held at the end of this month.
After chowing down on rice, chicken and various other delicacies, Chiu said to me that “it would be good to promote Pasta’ay not only as a major national festival, but also as an international one.”
Referring to the increasing numbers of non-Saisiyat at Pasta’ay, Chiu said, “We want people coming from the cities to feel that they can blend in.”
Finally, he added that he wished that people from all over Taiwan and the world would be able to appreciate Saisiyat customs for what it is and that Pasta’ay “provides a rare opportunity for inter-cultural interaction.”
The commissioner’s words rang true as the night was indeed a melting pot of cultural exchange as much as it was a sacred ritual unique to one particular community. My mistake was assuming all along that the two had to be mutually exclusive. Although Pasta’ay had become a tourist attraction of sorts, the Saisiyat themselves do not seem to mind — as long as “outsiders” abide to certain rules and try to understand Saisiyat customs.
Ultimately, as with many things in life, it is up to the individual to choose what he or she wants to believe in. While the spirits may remain a mystery to some of us, what is known is that the Saisiyat were proud of their customs and happy that other people were making an effort to learn more about Pasta’ay. Despite the apparent chaos that weekend, it was as simple as that.
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