book will appeal to anyone who has ever struggled across the darkness trying to find the light.”
—YASUKO THANH, author of Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains
ALSO BY JESSICA J. LEE
Turning: A Year in the Water
This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s recollections of experiences over time.
Copyright © 2020 by Jessica J. Lee
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment for reprinting materials is made to the following:
Epigraph from “The Papaya Tree” © 2017 by Brandon Shimoda reprinted with permission of the author.
Excerpt from Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 by Emma Jinhua Teng. Copyright © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted with permission of the Harvard University Asia Center.
Excerpt from Mountains of the Mind © 2003 by Robert Macfarlane. Reproduced with permission of Granta Books.
Excerpts from Liu Ka-shiang’s “Small Is Beautiful” from The Isle Full of Noises, edited by Dominic Cheung. Copyright © 1987 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Excerpt from Liu Ka-shiang’s “Black-faced Spoonbill,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2004, vol. 11, issue 2, pp. 268–69, by permission of the Association for Literature and Environment.
ISBN: 978-1-64622-000-7
Cover illustration © Harriet Lee Merrion
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Calligraphy by Shih-Ming Chang
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954451
Printed in the United States of America
13579108642
For my family
Suddenly the tree was like the stake at the base of which the ashes of ghosts had cooled.
BRANDON SHIMODA
“The Papaya Tree”
CONTENTS
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Shui
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Lin
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
LANGUAGE BARRIERS PLAY A PROMINENT ROLE in this story. Attentive readers of Chinese will note that, while I have used traditional Chinese characters, as is common in Taiwan, I’ve used a combination of the older Wade-Giles romanization system and Hanyu Pinyin (mainland Chinese) to transliterate names, places, and other details from Mandarin.
I’ve retained both forms in this book because usage in Taiwan and among those around me fluctuates—itself a lively illustration of the complexity of language in Taiwan today. Generally speaking, if I am writing about mainland China I have used Hanyu Pinyin, while for Taiwanese place-names I have mostly used Wade-Giles or occasionally the Tongyong Pinyin transliterations commonly used by local people and on signage. Google Maps—which uses Hanyu Pinyin—renders the process of moving between digital maps and local usage somewhat complicated, so for places where Hanyu Pinyin has supplanted Wade-Giles (for example, Nenggao Mountain), I have used those names. For simplicity of reading between the two styles, I have omitted tone marks from my transliterations.
It should be noted that Wade-Giles is the preferred style of my elders; Hanyu Pinyin is what I was subsequently taught.
The gaps that bind us span more than the distances between words.
n. ISLAND
Islands emerge through movement, through collision, and through accretion.
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
