Читать книгу Two Trees Make a Forest - Jessica J. Lee - Страница 18

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THE STORY OF A PLACE—LITHIC, LIVING, AND forgotten—can be found in maps and what they include or leave out. Before the sixteenth century, Taiwan was considered by the Chinese to be a wilderness well beyond the bounds of their empire. Very little was known of the island across the treacherous Black Ditch, as the Taiwan Strait was affectionately called.

It has been said that the Portuguese passed the island on a journey to Japan in 1542 and dubbed it “Ilha Formosa.” In the years that followed, efforts to chart and colonize the landscape began in earnest, and maps of the region convey the history of those turbulent years. There are sixteenth-century Spanish maps, like the one produced by Hernando de los Ríos Coronel in 1597, intended to position the island among Spain’s colonial holdings in the Philippines. Taiwan on this map is not yet given true shape: it is a crude, rectangular-shaped thing, its northern bays exaggerated to emphasize their military and commercial import to the Spanish. The Dutch maps that followed in the seventeenth century detail the coastlines of their central island port and the Pescadores (now known as the Penghu Islands) off to the west.

In a 1700 Qing map, the perspective is tilted to the horizontal, drawn from the map reader’s view—the view of migrants leaving China for Taiwan—as if seeing the island from a lookout at sea. The green foothills and eastern peaks are hazed in blue in the distance. In the 山水 shanshui-style (literally “mountain water”) maps of this period, which take their cue from traditional landscape painting, the rivers run to sea like arteries, and the mountain spine forms a horizon. The world beyond those mountains remained unmapped. An eighteenth-century French map sums up the difficulty presented by Taiwan’s landscape: the flatlands of the west—by then colonized by the Spanish, Dutch, and Chinese—could be mapped, but the mountains of the precipitous east coast remained inaccessible. “Toute cette Coste est très peu connue” (“Of this coast, very little is known”), claims Jacques-Nicolas Bellin’s 1763 map. In all the colonial renderings, there is a common feature: the backbone range of mountains marked the edge of cartographic knowledge.

Little was known—but much, and little positive, conjectured—of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, who had made their home on the island for some five thousand years until, with the arrival of foreign powers, many of them were forced into either assimilation or the difficult terrain of the high mountains. In leaving out the mountains and the eastern coast, the maps depicted both topography and a view that indigenous people remained outside civilization. Beyond these maps, such blinkered visions of the island’s past now exist mostly in the records of travelers.

I once spent a few weeks absorbed in reading about that washed-away coastline in Taiwan’s Imagined Geography, a 2004 visual-cultural history by the Taiwanese American academic Emma Jinhua Teng. Though small numbers of Han Chinese had fished or traded on the island since the early 1600s, it was only in the mid-seventeenth century that Taiwan became a frontier for the Chinese and an island in often violent contention. In 1661 and 1662, Ming loyalists forced from the mainland besieged and took the island from the Dutch East India Company, which had itself made efforts to domesticate the land and suppress the indigenous islanders. In the decades that followed, increasing numbers of Han Chinese came from the southern coast of the mainland, most settling land for agriculture. And in time, Qing troops arrived. In 1683, Taiwan was absorbed into the Chinese empire.

Perhaps it was the book’s title—its harkening of an imagined geography—that had caught my attention as I flitted through the stack of hardcovers the librarian had handed over. Taiwan and its past had inhabited my imagination for most of my life. My family had arrived there centuries after the period covered in the book, but still, ours and the island’s identity—and our relationship to China especially—was troubled. The past presented a mirror: much of Teng’s book focuses on the images and maps from when Taiwan transitioned from being cast as a miasmic wilderness beyond the seas of China to a valuable part of the empire. This shift was influenced in no small part by the wealth of natural resources on the island. It was the moment the Chinese first laid claim to Taiwan. Of course, as Teng is quick to note, the success of the current “One China” view claiming Taiwan as part of Chinese territory can be “measured by the disappearance from the Chinese collective memory of the pre-Qing conviction that Taiwan was ‘beyond the pale.’”

From Teng, I moved to the travelogues of Yu Yonghe. In 1696, the Qing imperial gunpowder stores exploded; the depleted stocks created enormous demand for the wealth of sulfur to be found in Taiwan’s volcanic north. In 裨海紀遊 Bihai Jiyou (Small Sea Travel Diaries) Yu documented his journey from Xiamen, on China’s southern shore, to what is now Tainan. From that newly claimed Chinese harbor, he traveled north in search of natural resources. Yu followed the coast, fording the wide rivers that ran down from the mountains to the strait, documenting the island’s flora and fauna, and gave troubling but detailed descriptions of Chinese colonial efforts to “subdue” the indigenous population.

Yu combined verse with prose narrative, flitting from the pearls of light and color splashed by an oar in a dark night’s sea—bioluminescent algae, I thought, reading on—to an account of how the Chinese had defeated the Dutch colonists at Tainan. The island was absorbed into the empire grudgingly—because it was needed—but remained, in every way, a remote place.

Today, maps continue to show Taiwan tangled in mystery. The nation occasionally wears a veil of gray; unrecognized by so much of the world, like many disputed places, its status is not a given. But it is as real a place as any. On survey maps—contour maps, seismic hazard maps, geological surveys, bird migrations, forest distribution, and vegetation charts—I’ve found its materiality set to paper.

In Taiwan, fault lines craze the ground. One map has a list of geohazards and a pile of statistics on Taiwan’s natural disasters; another—a seismicity map—has the appearance of a Jackson Pollock painting, only the splatters are denser, set to overwhelm. Having grown up in eastern Canada, where the greatest threat was usually a snowstorm, the turbulence of the island holds for me a certain macabre fascination. My mother’s childhood was punctuated by storms and quakes: the swell of the typhoon and an occasional rumbling beneath her feet. She has long repeated what I had believed to be hyperbole as if it were a mantra: “Every day, somewhere in Taiwan, there is an earthquake.” In fact, according to a study by the weather service, the island experiences more than fifteen thousand quakes a year, nearly a thousand of which can be felt by people. When I’m in Taiwan, I keep a tracking app on my phone, set to follow every quake above 1.0 on the magnitude scale. The dangers are many: earthquakes, landslides, coastal erosion, land subsidence, volcanic eruption. They are tensions that I cannot fathom.

When earthquakes come, or typhoons sweep across the island, landslides will often follow. Where humans have cleared the land for timber or mined the mountains for gravel, the slopes will flow freely. But in places and in time, their devastation is allayed by trees: the root structures of the forests help stitch the mountains back together. The earth and forest are concomitant things, the trees in need of the right altitude and soil, the ground holding itself together in a web of roots.

From a distance, Taiwan takes the shape of a sweet potato, growing long at its southern tip. On a standard digital map, the landscape appears innocuous: the peaks that form the island’s crown are only subtle deviations from the flatlands of the west. But adding terrain to the map, the contrast sharpens. A band of rock forms on the virtual terrain. With a map’s satellite view, the deep green body of the island’s mountains and foothills presses hard against the ligature of roads and pale farmland in the west. A small place already, so much of Taiwan is given to wilderness and altitude. Seventy-five percent of the land is on a slope, and nearly 60 percent is covered in forest.

The Tropic of Cancer cuts through the midpoint of the island. It is an unseen border, but known to the life that inhabits this place: what is damp mist in the north evaporates into the scorched light of the south. Humidity reigns over all, but the south is hotter, with parched and arid sweeps of mudstone dried into jagged teeth. On islands, as on mountains, the weather shifts on a whim.

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ON THAT FIRST VISIT AFTER MY GRANDFATHER died, my mother and I had been tracing our way through the southernmost jut of the island, winding the coral-strewn route uphill to where the tip of Taiwan could be seen touching the sea. The forest grew thickly there, a short distance inland from the salt of the shore, and the humidity hung heavy. With green-glossed leaves and aerials over everything, the region felt vastly different from the forests I knew well. The trees were heavy-slung with the lazy shapes of lianas dangling from the branches. Every so often in a clearing, we’d find a looking-glass tree, its buttress roots like pale batwings propping the base of the mangrove, its shape a bizarre reflection of its funhouse name. The tree seemed to belong to an inverted fantasy world, with roots braced perpendicular to the ground, exposed to the air and tall enough to reach a child’s height up the trunk, a visible reminder of the vast worlds contained beneath the soil, beneath all the other trees.

The thought of my grandfather hung there, between us, amid the fig trees. I knew my mother’s mind was on him whenever we went south—his ashes were not far away, in Kaohsiung—and there weren’t words that could salve his absence. She dreamed of him often, she had told me, but in her dreams he was always a ghost, hovering near the ceiling. I didn’t tell her that I dreamed of him too, but the scene was always in his darkened room, him perched at the end of the single bed, hands on his knees, silent. Instead, I clasped her hand every so often, hoping the pulse of my palm might convey our shared grief.

There is a motif in Chinese myth that transmutes and shapeshifts depending on the tale and the teller. The “sky ladder” could be a mountain, but at other times it was a rope, a rainbow, or occasionally a cobweb. In my favorite tales, the ladder is a tree, impossibly high, a bridge between the earth and the heavens. What might I see at the crown of such a tree? The tree spanned the distance between mortality and immortality, the profane and the sacred. Climbing it was a feeble grasp toward godliness. I thought of my mother’s dream and wondered what Gong had known of the sky, of height. He had been a pilot, after all. He had never had need of such a ladder.

A song cut through the woods, a sweet-toned trill that rippled on the rustle of the banyan leaves. I glanced up to see a small flock of white-masked, black-mustached birds flitting from tree to tree. Their wings glistened in the afternoon light, bellies quivering with the staccato, pitchy tune they piped without end. I settled beneath the trees and watched them, Styan’s bulbuls. Endemic to the island, while they are common in the south, they are disappearing elsewhere, edged out of their habitats by construction, cities, and encroachment by other mainland species. Already gone from the northeast, they are found only on this peninsula and the eastern coastal mountains. But here they gather in busy flocks, tittering despite the threats, with a wholehearted mirth in their music.

A short walk uphill, the scent of crushed leaf and rainfall permeated the air. The dusty peaks of limestone coral smelled of dried chalk mingled with the woody scent of the banyan aerials creeping over them. The aerials wound their way into the crevices and pools of shadow, and the trees were just as delicate, hanging precariously atop the fissured outcrops. Banyan roots secrete an acid to erode the coral, enabling their near-acrobatic perches on the rock walls. Among them hung the leathered green-gray of musk ferns and other clutching, epiphytic growths from the trees, and along the paths I saw fine fingers of maidenhair ferns. Having risen from the sea, the ground in the forest was uneven, climbing at once to precipitous cliffs here and then to sunken trenches there, with caves burrowing beneath the damp soil. Stalactites dripped in the darkness of the earth, but we could only peer down toward their caves filled from winter storms with clouded pools of rain.

We clambered up the hillside, past branches occupied and guarded by brown-fuzzed macaques, silent and watchful. The hum of insects could be picked out from the forest noise only when I focused, training both my eyes and ears to spot them amid the green. Sound preceded sight of the bumblebee—a drone from which they take their Latin name, Bombus—which emerged enormous among the delicacy of violet flowers. The electricity of cicadas faded to the background as I listened, watching the bee’s clumsy flight from blossom to blossom.

At the end of the steady uphill path, we reached the cleft in the rock known as One-Line Sky. A crack in the tableland rent open by quakes—just wide enough for a person to pass through—ambled through the coral, a single bright strip of sky visible above the trench. It seemed, on first glance, like a corridor to another world, to something elemental and eternal rather than simply the other side of the hill. Sunk down into the mortal world of stone and soil, its walls reached toward the heavens. I gazed vertically to the vast ceiling of the world, and with one hand pressed to rough-worn walls and the other clasped in my mother’s, we ventured through that narrow passage.

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WITH THE FOUNDING OF GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETIES, botanical gardens, and scientific groups in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there emerged a strong impetus for exploration concomitant with colonialism. It would take some decades for efforts to gather pace in East Asia. Exploration, in part, then became a process of exchange: China was opened to Western scientists in the last half of the nineteenth century, and so too was Japan, with travelers returning samples to the collections and botanical gardens of Europe or working with local surveyors to gain a grasp of the vast lands of the Asian continent. Within years, Chinese and Japanese branches of a range of sciences—cartography, geology, botany, zoology—began to emerge and thrive, with their scientists venturing to Kew, Berlin, Paris, and Edinburgh to survey and study lands and scientific collections distant from their own.

By the 1860s, British scientists were working the island into the Western cultural imagination by traveling to Taiwan alongside the Chinese gazetteers, who for centuries had conducted local surveys, often in traditional Chinese cartographic styles. But as the workings of government began to demand the mathematically grounded mapping style of the West, the process of scientific exchange explicitly served political and cultural aims. In cataloguing territory, mapmaking was a tool of colonial governance. The difficult terrain of Taiwan’s mountains became a vital target: first, under Qing administration in the late nineteenth century, and then, under Japanese rule.

In this same period, islands became an ideal object of biological study. They had long transfixed poets and writers and informed mythologies, but their hold on science was just as potent. Such famous isles come quick to mind: the Galápagos Islands, Darwin’s muse; Madagascar, beloved by botanists. They were and remain of curious fascination.

Islands can form in a multitude of ways: as land masses attached to continents before becoming encircled by water; at sea, risen from the depths of the ocean by forces tectonic or volcanic; or as accumulated barriers of sand, coral, or glacial remnants. We speak of islands of waste—though the trash vortex does not have the density of ground—and these unseen places enter our collective dreaming of the sea and its familiars, kelp and plastic, intermingled. Still other islands are made in our time: artificial islands, like those military installations hunkered along the coast of China, facing Taiwan, and the contested islands in the South China Sea.

What islands offer to science is as incalculable as their coastlines: species endemism—when a species is unique to a particular place, having adapted in isolation—is a common feature of islands. Many therefore make a contribution to global biodiversity that is disproportionate to their landmass. Think of the character for “island,” the single bird on the lone mountaintop: 島. It is on islands that life most strays from the continents. “Isolation,” after all, takes its root from the Latin word for island: insula.

Of more than four thousand vascular plant species on Taiwan, more than a thousand are endemic. More than 60 percent of mammals on the island occur nowhere else—the Formosan black bear, deep in the Yushan ranges, or the Formosan macaques, clumsily strutting throughout the south. Nearly half the amphibians and a fifth of birds, like Styan’s bulbuls, are unique to this place. On mountain ranges, in particular, the rate of endemism increases: though the number of different species decreases with elevation, as the air thins and grows cold, the singularity of those species increases. Life-forms arrange themselves in these ways. Swinhoe’s pheasants and shrill-voiced flamecrests flicker in the middle ranges. Long-lived Formosan cypresses steady themselves on gentle slopes, and montane angelicas frill the thin-aired plateaus.

The range can be dramatic: forest surveys are ringed and banded things that follow the growth of mountains. Oaks and laurels cling to the lower slopes, with cypresses making their languid growth in the damp middle ranges. Above the fog are hemlock and endemic fir, growing upward until snow dusts the shrubs of the highest peaks. With a changing climate and a warming world, for many species there is little place to migrate but skyward. Tree lines creep ever higher, and the realm of the cold-loving species shrinks. Bound to the summits, these species can live a lonely life. And in this way, mountains become islands of their own.

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BURIED WITHIN THE FOLDS OF THE YELLOWED envelope, my grandfather’s letter felt surprisingly thin. Unfolding it, I lifted it to the light, so that the handwriting appeared backlit in glowing rows of parallel script, a landscape on a vertical lined page. It wasn’t much, perhaps twenty pages, but it was all that remained of Gong. Unsure of touching them, thin and brittle as they were, I dusted my fingers over the words, their pen marks deep-set in the page.

There were words I recognized—大 da (“big,” a person with its arms stretched wide), 媽 ma (“mother,” given its meaning from “woman” 女 and its sound from “horse” 馬), 口 kou (“mouth”)—their ideal forms scrawled as misshapen shadows. I had to squint to read them, one at a time, stranded in a crowd I didn’t recognize. I stopped at one: 哥哥 gege (a mouth and a man) rendered with the old radical for nail (丁), stacked and repeated like an anchor. Older brother. My grandfather was an older brother, and it was to his sister that he addressed his letter.

He had never spoken to me of his family, beyond the refrain, repeated by my mom, that he’d learned to cook at his mother’s side. His love had felt total, unequivocal to me, a small child. He had pressed his whole palm to my face in affection, and had always let me help feed his pet turtle, Xiao Wugui, using a miniature spoon saved from a McDonald’s coffee. When his illness became too much to manage, he’d given me the turtle, a red-eared slider the size of a tablespoon. I kept it in my bedroom, a reminder of Gong’s love. Now, almost thirty years after Gong first brought him home, the little turtle still grows.

In that single word—gege, “older brother”—an entire life appeared, the possibility of knowing Gong as a child and as a man, more of him than I had ever known.

I had the letter translated and then read it line by line, comparing the characters he’d written to the words typed into English. A work of excavation, of unearthing meaning and context from the lines, my reading stretched out over many days. I took the pages paragraph by paragraph, as if setting the limits of a survey plot, words and names the samples of my search. My mother’s notes put pieces in context, and I turned to her marginalia to find relatives she had never met but whose names she had known and historical dates she had memorized as a schoolgirl. Others still were obscure: place names and geographies unknown to us, in a China that no longer exists, from the years when my grandfather was a child.

The letter was disjointed and repetitious: unlike the lithic record geologists find underfoot, Gong’s writing had no chronology. The past appeared out of context and out of order, paragraphs out of place. It could be made sense of only when broken into pieces, reemerging in a new linear arrangement. I read it both ways, enclosed in the brambled path of memory and chronologically, identifying the gaps that spanned months or decades. There were stories to which he returned repeatedly, in identical words, like a pilot circling for landing. I marked out the dates and places on a map: the village of his childhood now a rectilinear sprawl, the homes he adopted by necessity. I searched his words for the substrata of a changed land.