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.
TAIPEI WAS A CITY THAT BELONGED TO MY childhood imagination. Built of words spoken quietly to me by my mother, its streets were paved with her longings. The air was made of memories. In this place, Taipei was a single hillside, a school at its crest and a tenement block at its base. A packed-dirt road cut a straight line between them, bustling with street-food sellers in carts that looked uncannily like the Toronto hot dog vendors of my youth. There was no wind, and there were no trees. The light was yellow, and the only smell was that of the choudoufu my mother missed most after leaving Taiwan.
“But does it really smell like poo?” I would ask her, having never smelled choudoufu before.
“Not at all! It smells delicious,” she would reply, tucking me into bed.
“Then why is it called stinky tofu?”
She would shrug, smiling as if a morsel of that memory had just passed her lips.
Every day as a schoolgirl my mother would linger on the hillside buying snacks, avoiding going home after school. She loved to eat, so her face was rounder then, her body plumper, like the one black-and-white photograph I had seen from that time. She bought tofu and spring onion pancakes and sugarcane juice with handfuls, I imagine, of silver coins.
By the time she would make it home, it was sundown. The apartment was green-gray and dark, with bars over the windows and plants everywhere. Dust hung suspended in the air. She would sneak in quietly to avoid getting into trouble. But she wasn’t quiet enough. My grandmother had been angry that she had taken so long to come home. Worse, she was getting a bit fat. Po waved the meat cleaver. There were angry words, and my mother was bundled into her bedroom. The door locked.
She told me about Taipei in fragments, and sometimes I wondered if this was all she could remember. Taipei in 1960 was home to nearly 1 million people, but the past she reconstructed for me was a small picture: my grandparents, herself, and a wok full of deep-fried tofu. An entire city reduced to a single road of street vendors.
In adulthood, my time in Taiwan relieved me of this naive picture. I found a city unfolding from the flatlands of the western coast, a web of aging concrete apartment complexes towered over by glassy high-rises. Elevated highways spiraled, ensnaring the scooters that pollinated the thoroughfares with fumes. Tiled walls were caked with algae, and on every old building the signs of nature’s tenacity showed themselves: ferns growing from brick-thick ledges, flowers springing skyward from the joints of old awnings. Tucked into a river basin with leaf-laden slopes on all sides, the city center was flat and uniform. The stark, lonely hillside of my childhood imagining was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the green hills that surround the river basin were the dark background to my every movement.
I walked Taipei’s streets—with my mother and alone—in search of an anchor, my map a jumble of transliterations and characters pressed into the too-small spaces of the lines of roads. I wanted to learn the island by its landmarks, the way my mother had once done, but the open stretches of rice paddy and field that she had once known had become part of the city, with broad avenues and famous skyscrapers.
Once, we found one of the old city gates stranded in the middle of a roundabout, and my mother knew immediately where she was, despite the new road. A hundred meters beyond it, she was lost again.
I found myself drawn to the island’s backbone. In forests and on mountains, the urgency of time receded and the pacing minutes I’d grown accustomed to in the city stretched molten until they evaporated, small and inconsequential things in the face of arboreal and lithic time. It was on trails that I ceased to check my phone, turning my attention instead to the multitudes that arrayed themselves at my feet: the compression of ages, packed tight by many walkers, the patient growth of moss on weathered stones, and, when I was very high up beyond the tree line or on some rocky outcrop, the layered stones that tell the story of a mountain. I moved from the human timescale of my family’s story through green and unfurling dendrological time, to that which far exceeds the scope of my understanding: the deep and fathomless span of geological time.
Many of my days roaming these slopes were shrouded in trees, and on the occasions that I rose beyond them, I found myself in cloud. The tree line here was a good thousand meters higher than on the European mountains I’d grown used to, up to 3,500 meters altitude, a remarkable thing when traveling the island’s short span from sea level to the mountains. The geology of Taiwan tells a complex tale of emergence into air and compaction over time, of magmatic flows and stark coral limestone thrust from salt water. But on shattered slopes—made worse by tree clearance, mining, and mono-crop plantations—I saw the damage wrought by typhoons and quakes, the slow steadiness of stone diminished to scree, the tracks of graveled mud left in the flow of landslides. Mountains could be rattled all too quickly, their timelines fractured in mere moments.
•
IT IS 2017, AND I HAVE COME ALONE WITH A plan to stay for three months to work on my Mandarin, to write, and above all, to hike. It is October. I’ve taken an apartment in the east of Taipei, the last house on the last lane before the mountains curve along the southern edge of the sprawl. In the shadow of that lithic presence, it is a home akin to the one in my mother’s memories. An old concrete building—tiled in white that has grown thick with mildew—with bars framing the few small windows and jade plastic awnings reaching out from the balconies on every floor. It is dark inside; the glassy towers of new construction have not yet come to this stretch of road.
From here, I watch the streetlights blink into life, casting a yellow gleam on the asphalt. A dog sleeps outside the temple next door, curling amid the scalene patches of light that fall from the windows above. In time he will come to know me. The scent of choudoufu carries down the lane from the hawker who sets up his stall each night next to the 7-Eleven on the corner.
It is easy to see the traces of the city around me in the snares of polyethylene bags strewn by the roadside, discarded umbrellas, bald tires and spare pylons, and scooters lined up for the evening. But there is more than these human relics: leathered leaves of Osmanthus and fig, the frilled skyline of acacias and banyans looming in shadow. Cicadas sing a susurrus in hiding, amid the swell of growth
