the book’s title—its harkening of an imagined geography—that had caught my attention as I flitted through the stack of hardcovers the librarian had handed over. Taiwan and its past had inhabited my imagination for most of my life. My family had arrived there centuries after the period covered in the book, but still, ours and the island’s identity—and our relationship to China especially—was troubled. The past presented a mirror: much of Teng’s book focuses on the images and maps from when Taiwan transitioned from being cast as a miasmic wilderness beyond the seas of China to a valuable part of the empire. This shift was influenced in no small part by the wealth of natural resources on the island. It was the moment the Chinese first laid claim to Taiwan. Of course, as Teng is quick to note, the success of the current “One China” view claiming Taiwan as part of Chinese territory can be “measured by the disappearance from the Chinese collective memory of the pre-Qing conviction that Taiwan was ‘beyond the pale.’”
From Teng, I moved to the travelogues of Yu Yonghe. In 1696, the Qing imperial gunpowder stores exploded; the depleted stocks created enormous demand for the wealth of sulfur to be found in Taiwan’s volcanic north. In 裨海紀遊 Bihai Jiyou (Small Sea Travel Diaries) Yu documented his journey from Xiamen, on China’s southern shore, to what is now Tainan. From that newly claimed Chinese harbor, he traveled north in search of natural resources. Yu followed the coast, fording the wide rivers that ran down from the mountains to the strait, documenting the island’s flora and fauna, and gave troubling but detailed descriptions of Chinese colonial efforts to “subdue” the indigenous population.
Yu combined verse with prose narrative, flitting from the pearls of light and color splashed by an oar in a dark night’s sea—bioluminescent algae, I thought, reading on—to an account of how the Chinese had defeated the Dutch colonists at Tainan. The island was absorbed into the empire grudgingly—because it was needed—but remained, in every way, a remote place.
Today, maps continue to show Taiwan tangled in mystery. The nation occasionally wears a veil of gray; unrecognized by so much of the world, like many disputed places, its status is not a given. But it is as real a place as any. On survey maps—contour maps, seismic hazard maps, geological surveys, bird migrations, forest distribution, and vegetation charts—I’ve found its materiality set to paper.
In Taiwan, fault lines craze the ground. One map has a list of geohazards and a pile of statistics on Taiwan’s natural disasters; another—a seismicity map—has the appearance of a Jackson Pollock painting, only the splatters are denser, set to overwhelm. Having grown up in eastern Canada, where the greatest threat was usually a snowstorm, the turbulence of the island holds for me a certain macabre fascination. My mother’s childhood was punctuated by storms and quakes: the swell of the typhoon and an occasional rumbling beneath her feet. She has long repeated what I had believed to be hyperbole as if it were a mantra: “Every day, somewhere in Taiwan, there is an earthquake.” In fact, according to a study by the weather service, the island experiences more than fifteen thousand quakes a year, nearly a thousand of which can be felt by people. When I’m in Taiwan, I keep a tracking app on my phone, set to follow every quake above 1.0 on the magnitude scale. The dangers are many: earthquakes, landslides, coastal erosion, land subsidence, volcanic eruption. They are tensions that I cannot fathom.
When earthquakes come, or typhoons sweep across the island, landslides will often follow. Where humans have cleared the land for timber or mined the mountains for gravel, the slopes will flow freely. But in places and in time, their devastation is allayed by trees: the root structures of the forests help stitch the mountains back together. The earth and forest are concomitant things, the trees in need of the right altitude and soil, the ground holding itself together in a web of roots.
From a distance, Taiwan takes the shape of a sweet potato, growing long at its southern tip. On a standard digital map, the landscape appears innocuous: the peaks that form the island’s crown are only subtle deviations from the flatlands of the west. But adding terrain to the map, the contrast sharpens. A band of rock forms on the virtual terrain. With a map’s satellite view, the deep green body of the island’s mountains and foothills presses hard against the ligature of roads and pale farmland in the west. A small place already, so much of Taiwan is given to wilderness and altitude. Seventy-five percent of the land is on a slope, and nearly 60 percent is covered in forest.
The Tropic of Cancer cuts through the midpoint of the island. It is an unseen border, but known to the life that inhabits this place: what is damp mist in the north evaporates into the scorched light of the south. Humidity reigns over all, but the south is hotter, with parched and arid sweeps of mudstone dried into jagged teeth. On islands, as on mountains, the weather shifts on a whim.
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ON THAT FIRST VISIT AFTER MY GRANDFATHER died, my mother and I had been tracing our way through the southernmost jut of the island, winding the coral-strewn route uphill to where the tip of Taiwan could be seen touching the sea. The forest grew thickly there, a short distance inland from the salt of the shore, and the humidity hung heavy. With green-glossed leaves and aerials over everything, the region felt vastly different from the forests I knew well. The trees were heavy-slung with the lazy shapes of lianas dangling from the branches. Every so often in a clearing, we’d find a looking-glass tree, its buttress roots like pale batwings propping the base of the mangrove, its shape a bizarre reflection of its funhouse name. The tree seemed to belong to an inverted fantasy world, with roots braced perpendicular to the ground, exposed to the air and tall enough to reach a child’s height up the trunk, a visible reminder of the vast worlds contained beneath the soil, beneath all the other trees.
The thought of my grandfather hung there, between us, amid the fig trees. I knew my mother’s mind was on him whenever we went south—his ashes were not far away, in Kaohsiung—and there weren’t words that could salve his absence. She dreamed of him often, she had told me, but in her dreams he was always a ghost, hovering near the ceiling. I didn’t tell her that I dreamed of him too, but the scene was always in his darkened room, him perched at the end of the single bed, hands on his knees, silent. Instead, I clasped her hand every so often, hoping the pulse of my palm might convey our shared grief.
There is a motif in Chinese myth that transmutes and shapeshifts depending on the tale and the teller. The “sky ladder” could be a mountain, but at other times it was a rope, a rainbow, or occasionally a cobweb. In my favorite tales, the ladder is a tree, impossibly high, a bridge between the earth and the heavens. What might I see at the crown of such a tree? The tree spanned the distance between mortality and immortality, the profane and the sacred. Climbing it was a feeble grasp toward godliness. I thought of my mother’s dream and wondered what Gong had known of the sky, of height. He had been a pilot, after all. He had never had need of such a ladder.
A song cut through the woods, a sweet-toned trill that rippled on the rustle of the banyan leaves. I glanced up to see a small flock of white-masked, black-mustached birds flitting from tree to tree. Their wings glistened in the afternoon light, bellies quivering with the staccato, pitchy tune they piped without end. I settled beneath the trees and watched them, Styan’s bulbuls. Endemic to the island, while they are common in the south, they are disappearing elsewhere, edged out of their habitats by construction, cities, and encroachment by other mainland species. Already gone from the northeast, they are found only on this peninsula and the eastern coastal mountains. But here they gather in busy flocks, tittering despite the threats, with a wholehearted mirth in their music.
A short walk uphill, the scent of crushed leaf and rainfall permeated the air. The dusty peaks of limestone coral smelled of dried chalk mingled with the woody scent of the banyan aerials creeping over them. The aerials wound their way into the crevices and pools of shadow, and the trees were just as delicate, hanging precariously atop the fissured outcrops. Banyan roots secrete an acid to erode the coral, enabling their near-acrobatic perches on the rock walls. Among them hung the leathered green-gray of musk ferns and other clutching, epiphytic growths from the trees, and along the paths I saw fine fingers of maidenhair ferns. Having
