and the small inklings of banana leaf reaching above the asphalt’s fringe.
Beyond the lane, the green rises into the hills. Xiangshan—Elephant Mountain—is one in a series of four small peaks stretching across the southeastern edge of Taipei. Together, they make up the Si Shou Shan (四獸山, Four Beasts Mountains), forest-covered and undulating, sleeping beyond the edge of the Taipei Basin’s flat valley. Reaching only a modest elevation, the smaller slopes seem a gesture of welcome from the mountain’s heights. From their vantage, I hope to see the low-slung flatness of the basin, to sense the geological grammar of the cityscape below.
This is a young-enough place that uncertainty still prevails: geologists and seismologists continue work to explain the intricacies of the island’s formation, and the scooped-out center of the Taipei Basin garners steady attention. Early twentieth-century studies surmised that the basin had formed when a volcanic eruption led to the collapse of the subsurface, the layer of rock and soil beneath ground. Others have suggested that the basin may be a drained lake, dammed by the spoil of volcanic eruption. Still others have thought it a fallen hanging wall, the upper block of land remaining when a fault line fractured the ground. But today it is believed to exist, in part, because of the flexure of the earth’s crust as orogeny—mountain building—has taken place, through the slow-motion crumpling of the ground ahead as mountain ranges have advanced. The land dipped, the way a small valley forms at the base of a wave rushing forward.
Roaming into the hills surrounding the basin, it is more humid than on the streets. Steps mark the early reaches of the trail, and I take them two at a time, childlike, scarcely watching my footing on the aging stones, which are worn down as much by weather as the tread of climbers. A short distance up, I begin to peel off layers of clothing. It has been raining, and small puddles have formed at the edge of the path like tiny moats between the walkers and the forest.
The first plateau slows my pace, a more leisurely gait made possible by the widening of the trail. The scent of soil hovers above the hill, released by rain and by the consecutive footsteps of hikers churning the stone and ground. Mosquitoes rise like pollen from the clusters of damp growth. Taro leaves as wide as newspapers unfurl, their water-filled mouths open to the sky, green pools suspended in the air. The younger leaves are a lime color, curled upright as if pointing my way on the trail.
At the peak of Xiangshan, where a number of boulders cluster at the precipice, groups gather to take selfies. I roam onward to where the hill slips away and a view of the city opens outward: a checkered beige of tower blocks speckled with dark windows, the metal-blue glass of Taipei 101, once the world’s tallest skyscraper, stretching above them.
Hushan, Tiger Mountain, is to the east, its trailhead emerging near the end of my road. On quiet days I amble its slopes, idly, umbrella held tightly over my body to stave off the rain that falls from the canopy. It is here that I wander above the city my family called home and that I watch the gray streets rolling out into the hills, the city expanding at a rate faster than the movement of mountains.
MY GRANDMOTHER DIED A DECADE AFTER MY grandfather. I had long believed that her death would mark not simply the end of her life, but of the possibility of knowing a past for my mother’s family. Our relatives had been lost—either in death or by loss of contact—after the end of the Chinese Civil War. My mother became the sole inheritor of their history, the only person of our maternal family that remained.
What Po left behind stood towered on tabletops, tucked into closets and corners, dusted atop chair seats. In the years after my grandfather’s death she had moved to an apartment block near my mother’s home and battened herself within its walls. She allowed no one in to help her and gave us no authority to care for her. So when she died, my mother found monoliths of paper littering the apartment: bills, letters, documents, and newspapers. Old food, chipped dishes, and bottles of medicine lined the shelves. Perpetually suspicious that we or others were stealing, Po had built a home among these yellowed memorials to a lifetime past. Like an archaeologist set to a dig, my mother was left to dismantle and catalogue the enclosed world Po had built.
She took a week off work to sort through it all, sifting the newspapers, bills, and scrawled notes trying to find Po’s will, pension information, bank accounts, and Gong’s death certificate, which could not be unearthed.
She bagged up old clothes, thick with the scent of camphor, took pictures of heirlooms she planned to set aside for my sister and me, and spent hours scrubbing the filthy corners that had gone unkept in Po’s near-blindness. I was an ocean away, so she texted me photos and questions from time to time, asking if I wanted old things like a pair of sunglasses or a painted vase. With no one else to send things on to, anything my sister and I didn’t want, she said conclusively, would go to the Salvation Army.
In that clutter my mother made two discoveries. The first, a slim envelope from her father, sealed some decades earlier. It was intended, she could see from the label, to be given to her for safekeeping after his death.
The other was a phone bill, innocuous perhaps, except that it listed a series of calls to Taiwan and China. Who was Po calling? Three weeks later, my mother rang to tell me the news. She had dialed one of the numbers. The call connected us to family we’d believed lost forever.
•
ON THAT FIRST TRIP BACK, MY MOTHER AND I took a frill-curtained coach south along the coastal highway. On the Hengchun Peninsula, at the island’s southern tip, shelves of pockmarked coral dried inland; the large, brittle grains mingled with the soil of the hills. The slopes down south are lower than elsewhere, lazily unrolling toward the sea, an easeful geology.
Off-season traffic lolled around the clutch of holiday towns that had grown up out of the shoreline. We disembarked at Kenting and found our way to the empty beach. At three in the afternoon, there seemed to be no one around but us.
December winds blew down from the north: the 落山風 luoshanfeng (literally “wind that falls down from the mountains”), which surges each winter over the south of Taiwan from the slopes where the backbone range terminates. The wind blew hard from the hills, gusting between the spare buildings, out over the gray beach where my mother braced herself between the wind and the waves. She was combing for treasure.
The sea had not merely buried the things that once belonged to air. It was a place of building, where beneath the waves the calcite dance of coral accretion unfolded. In time, these limestone remnants of the sea were lifted and brought to dry in the light and heat, laid amid the crumpled waste of sediments shaved from the advancing mountains. But such movements occurred impossibly slowly, unseen; the beach grew languorous in winter, and the shoreline on which we stood seemed an unlikely candidate for such dramatic change.
My mother, in her sixties, moved across the beach with a childlike lack of urgency, her attention absorbed in the task of beachcombing. Every so often, she would stand up from her huddled position, a gleaming purple prize in her hands. She gathered the remnants of the sea in her pockets, which bulged with their irregular forms: smooth-washed sea glass and scrubbed stones. The occasional polished and gleaming spindle cone or cowrie shell presented itself, but most of what she found was softened coral, sanded down by a lifetime in the tides. She assembled and admired them over the afternoon, leaving mounds of stone and shell in the slack of the waves. One of them she kept: a purple clamshell the size of a coin.
Mom had been there many times before, and our return was an indulgence of her memories. She’d vacationed here with Po and Gong in the 1960s, when the white sand of Baisha Bay seemed a remoter place, its pale crescent receding into the South China Sea. She spent that day in Kenting as she had as a ten-year-old girl, losing herself in the trifles of the tideline.
I
