clams, and saw something of the past in her. In Taiwan, though so much had changed, my mother became a person with a topographic history, a person set into the scene in which she believed she belonged. In my childhood, I never saw that in her: In forty years of life in Canada, she had never rooted to the place and got lost easily. On her commutes in rush-hour traffic, she did not stray from her prescribed path. But on the beach I realized that she’d carried something of the island in her the entire time, molecularly, absorbed the way water swells beneath the skin. Tracing her way across the shore, she worked the place into her bones once more.
•
A FEW DAYS AFTER FINDING GONG’S LETTER, MY mother called me again. She had pried the envelope open to find twenty thinning sheets of loose-leaf paper, scrawled with Chinese script. It was my grandfather’s handwriting, faded with age. Letters from Gong, undated, unsent. Tentatively, having not seen her father’s writing in a decade, she began to read the pages.
An autobiography of his life, looping around and repeating his story, it traced his movement from China, as a child born in 1919 amid the turbulence of the May Fourth Movement, which protested China’s poor returns from the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles, the failure of Chinese diplomats to represent the nation’s interests, and the subsequent handover of Chinese territory to the Japanese. He grew up amid the cultural, intellectual, and political changes in the years following those protests, during which the Chinese Communist Party was formed. The bulk of the letter centered on the Second Sino-Japanese War, on his time as a pilot for the Flying Tigers. It followed his years in Taiwan, where he was an instructor for the Republic of China’s Air Force, and then it ended abruptly in the middle of a sentence, unanchored in any time. Perhaps he had begun writing to remind himself of who he was. The story was just a series of fragments, circled and repeated—pieces of his life told to no one before, pressed to paper, and perhaps forgotten by him soon after writing.
The grip of his disease had already wasted his memories by then.
My mother let me have them. She posted a copy to me, annotating the script with translations and insights known only from the intimacy of her relationship with him: she knew the names of friends or politicians and generals to whom he’d referred, and could sense when he’d recalled something in error, swapping a name or a place for another from the distance of decades.
In my hands, the pages brought out a choking kind of grief. I could barely hold them without crying. Their existence broke my heart doubly, for I could not read them. His handwritten scrawl was far beyond my abilities. Did he begin on the right of the page, writing top to bottom? Sometimes I’d seen him write from the left. When could he have written them? And why—why—had the letter been kept from us?
My earliest memory of Gong is from a photograph. It is my second birthday, and I am leaning over the candles of my birthday cake, a chocolate-frosted train with pineapples for wheels. Gong sits on a lawn chair behind in a white cardigan and a red polo shirt. He is silver-haired and smiling, eyes creased and skin browned in the summer sun, sitting half out of the frame. It is just a fragment of his image, but I hold it close, a time when all of him was there.
Alzheimer’s, I think, is a form of haunting. It possesses the people we love, takes them away in stages, devouring memory, life, personality. As the disease progresses, the proteins that gather in the brain begin to form plaque around nerve cells, structures that once transported nutrients collapse, and the brain tissue shrinks. First short-term then long-term memories disappear. The people we know fade as though gradually stepping out of a picture.
His was a slow leaving. He resisted it. In his letter were parts I had never seen of the smiling, quiet man who had made spaghetti or folded dumplings, who had danced giddy with me in stacked shoes at holiday parties. They were parts left in Taiwan, pieces he shared with no one, things he had lost in China. They belonged to those places and to the person he had been when all of him was there.
I asked my mother to write out the names of our family. On a scrap of paper, she shaped three names:
The first was my grandfather’s, Tsao Chung-chin, his name topped with 山 shan, the mountain radical. My grandmother’s name, Yang Kwei-lin, was replete with trees: the wood radical 木 mu stood scattered through its syllables. The third name was my own, my surname crowned with its arboreal root 李 li (for “plum”), and my Chinese name, Jie-ke. A stone washed clean by water.
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
