The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi Page B

guide him toward the sea. Then he tore off his clothes and jumped in naked. It was like he had been separated from a lover for too long and needed to give her a big hug and some sweet loving to celebrate the reunion. Standing mutely in the middle of the lot, Alice watched his curly sandy locks bob up and down in the water, like a keepsake she might lose at any time. He came back up on shore, gave her a big kiss, and said: “Let’s build a house like the Summer House.”
    Thom borrowed a stack of architecture books from the library and started doing research. He almost never went climbing. Alice had total faith in him. Though he was no genius he had drive, and could finish anything he started if he was willing to put his heart into it. But could she really keep a man like this?
    Thom said, “The exterior can be like the Summer House, but the whole concept has to be different. I want to build a house that suits these surroundings.” He rotated the house slightly. The side of Asplund’s Summer House that had faced a Scandinavian fjord now faced the Pacific Ocean, but at a thirty-degree angle in order to deflect the stiff ocean breeze. Also, sunlight reflecting directly off the water might bother people instead of creating the kind of comfortable atmosphere that would make them want to take their time getting out of bed in the morning, and a thirty-degree turn would illuminate every corner of the house, affording ample but not glaring light. Thom raised the ceiling in the attic of the right-hand cabin by a meter so that the window would have a full view of the Pacific.
    Listening to Thom’s explanation, Alice started imagining herself writing at the window. She said she wanted to call it the Sea Window. Thom also explained the rationale for keeping the little cross passages between the cabins in Asplund’s original design: each would be granted a certain semidetached independence while maintaining a friendly rapport. “You’ll live in the right-hand cabin. The one on the left will be mine. I’ve moved it back slightly so I’ll have a view of the sea, too.” That sense of distance appealed to her.
    For the main cabin, Thom put various plants inside and out, so when you looked in from the outside you’d see a charming tropical living room. Rather sneakily, Thom went and stayed in all the B&Bs up and down the coast. With total self-confidence, he reported back to Alice, “I think many people who build houses don’t understand that people ‘live’ in their houses. Particularly in Taiwan, where you have people building places just to serve as B&Bs, because most guests will only ‘stay for a night.’ A house you really live in for ten or twenty years is different. I want to build a home we can live in for a long, long time.” This last declaration made Alice fall madly in love with him all over again.
    Given the warm climate in eastern Taiwan, there was no reason to keep the famous fireplaces in the original Asplund design. Thom found the fake fireplaces in many B&Bs in Taiwan silly and pretentious. But under Alice’s guidance he became quite enamored with Taiwan’s once ubiquitous rural “hearth culture,” and added a traditional stove room to the modern kitchen.
    “We’ll really be able to use it. Only a house in which you can make authentic local cuisine is a true home.”
    Thom spent another full year on the electrical system. He compared many different brands of solar panel. He adjusted the angles and covered the tops of the sloping eaves with panels, creating a solar awning for each of the three porches, under which a person could cool off, meditate or take a nap. He also went online, ordered a small desalination machine from a German firm and designed a salt-and-fresh dual-plumbing system. He planted salt-tolerant local plants like the pongam oil tree and the white-bloom mangrove, spacing them out outside the line of sight of the windows.He even calculated the growth rates so the shade of the mature