Читать книгу Two Trees Make a Forest - Jessica J. Lee - Страница 15

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I HAVE LEARNED MANY WORDS FOR “ISLAND”: isle, atoll, eyot, skerry. They exist in archipelagos or alone, and I have always understood them by their relation to water. The English word “island,” after all, comes from the German “aue,” from the Latin “aqua,” meaning “water.” An island is a world afloat; an archipelago is a place pelagic.

The Chinese word for island knows nothing of water. For a civilization grown inland from the sea, the vastness of mountains was a better metaphor: 島 dao (“island,” pronounced “to” in Taiwanese) is built from the relationship between earth and sky. The character contains the idea that a bird 鳥 (niao) can rest on a lone mountain 山 (shan).

Taiwan is just eighty-nine miles wide, but in that distance it climbs nearly thirteen thousand feet from sea level. The jump to precipitous peaks creates a wealth of habitats, such that the island sustains a range of forests much vaster than its small footprint. The coasts are muffled with salt- and sun-soaked mangroves, and moving south, thick tropical jungle grows. The wet heat of a tropical rain forest thrums to temperate trees, and their hardwoods climb to pines. Boreal forests—with towering, size-of-a-house cathedral trees—grow up from the middle slopes of the island. Beyond the tree line, the mountains peter out to prairie, cane grasslands widening toward an alpine sky. Like topographical rings on a map, the trees array themselves by elevation.

Born into conflict at the junction of two volcanic arcs, Taiwan is an unstable landmass in perpetual confrontation. Set along the Ring of Fire—the Pacific zone plagued by quakes and eruptions—southeast of China, west of Japan, north of the Philippines, the island marks the border of two tectonic plates: this is known to geologists as a destructive plate boundary. The collision of the Eurasian and Philippine Sea plates forced the island into being some 6 to 9 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch. Such collisions are powerful, with one plate thrust beneath another, raising land from the sea and into the air. But these borders can be devastating, too.

The Central Mountain Range, running some 170 miles, four-fifths of the island’s length, and the Hsuehshan Range, arcing halfway across the island’s north, are flanked on either side by faults. The foothills and flatlands to the west wear breakage like errant stitching on a quilt, determining and dividing the landscape. To the east, the Coastal Mountain Range is pressed between fault lines and the sea.

More than two hundred of the island’s peaks are higher than three thousand meters, monuments to tectonic change set fast into schist, gneiss, marble, and slate. The mountains are among the youngest in the world, and they continue to shift as the Philippine Sea Plate moves westward at around eighty millimeters a year. Through the forces of orogeny that form great mountain chains, Taiwan’s peaks stand taller every day.

Islands transfix us, their mythologies tied as much to their isolation as to imagination. Long-sought Ithaca or the seaport in a tempest, the islands I know from stories can be both real and fanciful; material places of rock and soil, they come laden with the ideological weight of Edens and arcadias, with visions of paradise.

The Chinese coastline is littered with islands close at hand—easy to reach, knowable—but for centuries, those in the distance across the Taiwan Strait or the East China Sea remained treacherous to reach and explore. It is easy to imagine how they might have been idealized, or likewise abhorred, for their distance from Chinese civilization. In Chinese myth, Penglai—described as both a mountain and an island—was the home of the immortals, blessed with cups that never ran dry, with rice bowls that never emptied. In the third century B.C., the first emperor of a unified China sought the mythic island, sailing his ships to the east. It is said that the emperor’s emissaries found Japan instead.

But Penglai—蓬萊—is also one of the traditional names for Taiwan. It was for this wealth of natural resources that Qing explorers first ventured to the island that was renowned for its abundance. In 1697, the colonial scribe Yu Yonghe traveled in search of sulfur. In his journey along the coast, led by indigenous guides and servants, he described rice grains the size of beans and island crops providing perhaps twice the harvest of the mainland. Coconuts could be split and used as cups for wine. He wrote that Taiwan’s fruit—plentiful but mostly unfamiliar to the voyagers—would spoil on the journey back to the mainland; the island was vital and abundant but entirely unto itself. For those from the continent, these eastern archipelagos were brimming with life, mountains in a turbulent sea. But unlike the immortal islands of myth, Taiwan belonged to the material realm, a living world on a fault-ridden terrain.

This is a story of that island. And it is also a story of family.

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LANGUAGES BECOME A HOME. IN ENGLISH, I find my mind, and in German, my present life in Berlin. But my earliest words in childhood were in Mandarin, my mother’s tongue. I know them still. 狗 gou (“dog”), 老虎 laohu (“tiger”), 愛 ai (“love”), and especially:

婆

Po

Grandmother.

公

Gong

Grandfather.

Po and Gong had moved from China—from homesteads no one had left in generations—to Taiwan, where they lived for nearly four decades, unable to return to the mainland. They arrived in the years after the Second World War, along with more than 1 million other mainland Chinese when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) government fled to Taiwan at the end of the civil war.

Taiwan had changed hands repeatedly: Though its indigenous inhabitants had lived there for thousands of years, the arrival of the Spanish and the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century spurred a continuous scramble for the island. The Dutch and Spanish both set up trading posts on the western shores and were succeeded by Chinese colonists, who held the island for over two centuries. After the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan ruled the island from 1895 until 1945, when it was transferred back to China. When my grandparents arrived, the decades of cultural separation were an even greater gulf to cross.

People like my grandparents and their descendants became known in Taiwan as 外省人 waishengren (literally “people from outside the province,” meaning mainlanders), a term so imprecise that even now I wonder how to explain our origins. Our histories stretched across places imprecisely until our borders grew too hazy to define. Eventually, with my mother, my grandparents immigrated to Canada, where I was born. My grandfather, nearing his death, left Canada and returned to Taiwan. I grew older and then moved away myself—first to Britain, where my father is from, and then to Germany, where I made my life as a writer and academic. My mother, sister, and I stumbled over whether to call ourselves Chinese—we weren’t from a China that exists any longer—or Taiwanese. No single word can contain the movements that carried our story across waters, across continents.

Names are rarely uncomplicated markers. So often they are born from the snares of conquest, from the declarations and misunderstandings of those who sailed from foreign shores. From China and Japan; from Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. Ilha Formosa: Portuguese for “Beautiful Island.” Tayouan, an ethnonym taken from a local indigenous settlement. Ryukyu or Liuqiu, the island arc of Okinawa, of which Taiwan marks a geological end. Taiwan is rendered in script as 臺灣 or 台灣, tai for “platform” or “terrace,” wan for “bay.” A foothold in a churning sea.

Names here are buried and written-over things, erupting from the ground underfoot the way faults emerge from a quake. 中華民國 Zhonghua Minguo, “Republic of China” as the country has been officially known since 1945. Or that incendiary marker, “Taiwan, Province of China.”

Disruption is written in the island’s stone: forged in movement, scattered with dormant volcanic hills and slopes that rise from sea to sky so swiftly they cannot be captured in a single glance. It is a place that demands time and slow attention but can be undone in a single moment of subterranean trembling.

I was eighteen when my grandfather forgot who I was. I was napping on the sofa at my grandparents’ bungalow in Niagara Falls, waiting for my mother to drive us back home. I’d stayed in the bungalow a hundred times before: on school holidays, at weekends, and when my parents would travel for work. Its thick orange carpeting was familiar underfoot. I knew the feel of its light switches in the darkness, where the edges of the smoked-glass dining table protruded, and which of my childhood photographs belonged on which shelf. Mildewed stacks of Chinese newspapers dwelled in the corners, absorbing the polypropylene smell of the VHS tapes of Taiwanese soap operas that towered in the basement. I’d memorized the sounds and smells, the landscape scenes wrought in jade that my grandfather loved, and had helped care for the bonsai tree he kept. I slept comfortably, curled into the summer stickiness of the black leather sofa, until Gong stood at my feet, pointed at me, and spoke in the only language he had left.

那是誰?

Na shi shei?

“Who is that?”

Gong’s Alzheimer’s had made itself apparent to me, and I began to ask questions. The realization that the past was quickly dissolving gave an urgency to the task of knowing it. I had taken so much of my grandparents’ lives for granted, and language had been a barrier. I had stopped going to Saturday Chinese school when I was eight, dreading being the only half-Chinese kid in the classroom as we plowed through the three-hour span of calligraphy and folk songs, so my Mandarin dwindled and faded to its most basic. Our lives together took on a simplified form: my memories of Po and Gong are mostly of the food they cooked.

My father’s large family held a kind of gravitational pull. His parents moved from Wales to Canada when my older sister, Nika, and I were young, and with them I felt the warmth of a shared language, of cousins and distant relatives. But we didn’t have other family on my mother’s side—no aunties or great-grandmothers or cousins to call on. It had always been this way; I thought it was like that for many immigrant families, spread across the world as we were.

I knew that my grandparents had been born in China, but considered Taiwan home. I had a vague sense of why, though I’d visited the island only as an infant. I heard occasional mention of past wars and government leaders, of fighter jets and the ills of communism, but that history was not taught in Canadian schools. When people heard my family was from Taiwan, they would often reply, “Thailand? I love Thai food.” I learned to correct them, tactfully and smiling, never wanting to make my frustration known; but I realized, too, how little I knew myself.

To me, Po had simply always been my irascible, difficult grandmother. She squabbled with my mother and father and hardly talked to my grandfather, save in reproach. The energy she spent in spoiling Nika and me—buying us giant teddy bears and Toblerone and Ferrero Rocher chocolates—could shift quickly, and there were times when I kept my distance. She could wound with a word, and often would.

Gong had always been quiet, reading or caring for his plants in a solitary way during his time off from work as a janitor. When I was small, I would visit and watch him mop the floors of the Chef Boyardee canned-pasta factory. The brown-bricked building fascinated me, with its enormous steel machines and the pervasive smell of boiled starch and citrus cleaner. I would watch him clean, quiet as ever, and then beam with childish pride when he bought me a can of beef ravioli. I never questioned how his life had taken him there, long past retirement, dragging a hot mop across the floor of a Canadian factory.

I was twenty-seven when I went to Taiwan for the second time, my first visit since I was a baby. It was 2013. Gong had returned there and died a few years earlier, and my mother and I had gone to visit his remains. He had died alone, his memories wasted. It felt, to us, an irrevocable betrayal, though we’d had no say in what had happened and we couldn’t have changed it.

Decades had passed since my mother had emigrated. But the island had called my family back. My mother began to talk about returning for good when she retired. I saw the ways she had tried on a different life on a different continent, and how it bristled speaking a language she’d inherited, asking her children questions in Mandarin and receiving replies in English. We mocked her errors, as children do, and she would reply, “Well, you speak Chinese, then,” jokingly, though I sensed a loss in her tone. I saw in Taiwan something of the ways that places draw us in—and sometimes push us away again—and there grew in me an inarticulate longing.

My mother and I spent the better part of that visit wandering overgrown hills and trails outside the cities, in the hot and overgrown forests she had once known, where as a child she had roamed the green sprawl near her home, wandering wet through rice paddies on late afternoons, where she had memorized the plants that sprung vivid from every patch.

We ventured to the south, to Kenting, where she’d spent childhood holidays on the peninsula of coral. We soaked in northern rain in Yangmingshan, and delved into the mist that blanketed Taroko. Those first days in the cloud forest softened me to fog. In the mountains, I saw curtains of growth that clung to the cliffs, draping and enfolding every jagged bone of the mountainside. They petered out into clumps of withered brown stone where rock had not yet relented to root. But spiny trees grew from the holes left by erosion, and vines navigated the smoothed-down faces of the stone. The green was unceasing in its efforts.

It felt as if we were finding in the landscape an expression of this place and our lives beyond my grandfather’s death, beyond a past I did not fully understand. I developed a love for these mountains and their forests, a need to return and return again.

I lamented the years we’d stayed away. It wasn’t nostalgia—a dangerous thing, if it sees too narrowly—but still, other words could not account for it. Sehnsucht, from my adopted language, German—a yearning for another course, for things that could have been different—perhaps. Hiraeth, from Welsh—a homesickness for a past to which I could not return—came close. There is a Chinese word—鄉情 (xiangqing)—that means “longing for one’s native place.” But none of them quite fit. Unable to determine my feelings with words, I began to think, perhaps, that whatever force had stitched my grandparents and my mother to this place had caught me, with just a thread at first, and then bound me to it still stronger. My grief was displaced by deep affection. Does regret, by nature, transmute into longing?

I do not think it was a unique desire. I know others who have lost places or relatives, who have taken comfort in returning, as if exercising a muscle memory passed down through the generations. I found a constancy and a comfort in walking the island’s hills.

And where I couldn’t find words, I fell to other languages: to plants, to history, to landscape. My work as an environmental historian had taught me a great deal about temperate plants and navigating my way through a Canadian pine forest or a European heath with familiarity. In the vast and unrolling woodlands I grew up with in Canada, there is the red flame of autumn, the spare and silent retreat of winter. The pines and maples do their seasonal dance: pollen, senescence, bare branch.

But in Taiwan I found myself botanically adrift, as unsure of the trees as I was of the ferns that sprouted from windowsills. Taiwan’s plants are too many to name.

A green washes itself over Taiwan’s hillsides, a mottled, deep hue that reminds me more of lake than of land, of darkened waterweed more than tree. The green rolls out on the horizon, glinting with occasional light, but more often steaming with the low-hanging clouds that cling to the border between hillside and sky. That verdant hue is unlike any other I know.

Taiwan’s hills form a natural boundary between the cities and the mountains. Camphor laurels, peeling elms, charcoal trees, banyans, and sugar palms are overrun with the unfurling of ferns beyond number, with giant taros that stand gaping under heavy rain. The parasols of the eight-fingered Diplofatsia reach their hands to the sky. Their many greens stand layered, saturated, and deepened.

The island holds both migrant and endemic species. There are plants that came from the continent, carried by birds or other animals, by air or by the land bridge that once filled the Taiwan Strait when sea levels were lower, many ages ago. Some came from the island chain to the east—Japan—while others floated atop the southern seas, sprouting on the shores. There are newer plants that arose only here, a quarter of them evolved in isolation on their island home. In Taiwan’s plants I saw both movement and change: species adapting to climate, to altitude, to soil.

I met mimosa that curled at my touch. Dendrocalamus latiflorus, Latin for “tree reed”: sweet bamboos whose tall heads swayed. In my visits, I came to know them by walking, by crouching low to the ground to catch a scent, and by training the lens of my camera on their distant reaches.

I searched books for a guide. I found in the works of nineteenth-century British geographers a strange vision of the island. Their accounts of Taiwan’s inner reaches held a trace of terror—the plants too foreign, the forests too thick. They wrote of the island as beautiful yet threatening, a wilderness overgrown; the sublimity of extremely high mountains found an analogue just as readily in darkened woods. John Thomson, a photographer and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote of softly beautiful mountain scenery cut through with gigantic forests, where “climbing parasitic plants passing from tree to tree formed a chaos like the confusion of ropes on a Chinese junk.” These portrayals mingled beauty with fear, with curiosity and exoticism, occasionally with disgust. Though written in English, I struggled to find in them a language I could share.

But this was the green my mother grew up with. She told me the Mandarin names of plants I had no reference for, passed on from my grandfather to her: 鳳凰木 fenghuang mu (phoenix or flame trees) and 芭蕉 bajiao, a fibrous, inedible species of banana; her childhood through the names of trees. I turned their names over in my mouth, stretching their shapes into my mind, and found in them a longing to remember the things I had not known.