Tamsui Oddities: A Turtle on the Rooftop That Loved to Jump

Upstairs in the apartment building of my old home in Tamsui lived a family of small-time gangsters (swamp eels). When I was little, their old man would often get drunk and run out into the street to go on a rampage, occasionally setting scooters on fire or smashing windows with red bricks. Aside from him, the rest of their family and ours got along peacefully enough (as long as the old man stayed sober, everything was fine).

Because they lived on the top floor, they seemed to naturally take over the roof as well, and kept all sorts of plants and animals up there. Ever since I can remember, those animals caused no small amount of mischief. The protagonist of the story I want to tell you today is a “soft-shelled turtle.”

I have no idea whether this turtle had some kind of delusion, but it spent all day thinking it was a little bird.

Because today was already the third time in its life that it had jumped off the building.

It would be one thing if the turtle just wanted to jump off by itself, but every single time it landed on our awning. When the metal sheet got struck by the turtle’s shell like that, it sounded exactly like an enormous drumbeat. If this had been on an ancient Chinese battlefield, both armies might have started slaughtering each other the moment they heard it.

And with each jump the turtle made, the impact sound grew louder and louder, because every time you saw this turtle, you could tell it had grown a little bigger.

In a few more years, this turtle would probably end up in their family’s stomach (oops).

Speaking of jumping off buildings, many years ago, on the eve of a Christmas, a turkey also jumped down from the roof. At the time, an obnoxious nouveau riche neighbor next door was putting up an illegal addition to their new house (that is, building half of it first, passing inspection, then building the other half). After the turkey jumped down, it ran into the basement of that obnoxious family’s construction site, and the family on the fourth floor all came out with flashlights searching everywhere. Looking back now that I’m grown up, it was actually quite amusing.

Written on 2001.06.27 13:58

The Sequel to That Turtle

Now, when I caught that building-jumping turtle to return it to the neighbor who kept a bunch of animals, I put it in one of those semicircular stainless steel pans used for baking cakes and pastries. But because I had to leave for a while, when I came back, I found that the turtle had mysteriously vanished.

The bottom of those cake-and-pastry steel pans is flat, with curved sides. Climbing up would have required ninja-level rock-climbing skills. All I can say is that turtle had an incredibly strong will to escape—to this day I still have no idea how it got out.

At the time I had deliberately placed it on a fairly high table, but a turtle capable of jumping from the fourth or fifth floor would hardly regard a mere height of less than 1.5 meters as anything. So it jumped off again. Jumping off would have been one thing, but it actually went and hid, playing hide-and-seek, making me search for ages before I finally found it under a cabinet.

Seeing this turtle reminded me of an even earlier time, when relatives from Daxi brought us a very large turtle, about 20 centimeters in diameter, and it was a female. The only reason I, with zero biological identification skills, knew it was female was because it laid a whole pile of unfertilized eggs all over the concrete floor of our backyard.

We originally wanted to release it in the mountains, but at the time there was no internet, I was young, and I had no idea where to look up animal information. Before I could even figure out whether it was a sea turtle or a land turtle, it accidentally died while we were keeping it (facepalm).

Written on 2001.06.29 23:37