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.
•
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
