trenches there, with caves burrowing beneath the damp soil. Stalactites dripped in the darkness of the earth, but we could only peer down toward their caves filled from winter storms with clouded pools of rain.
We clambered up the hillside, past branches occupied and guarded by brown-fuzzed macaques, silent and watchful. The hum of insects could be picked out from the forest noise only when I focused, training both my eyes and ears to spot them amid the green. Sound preceded sight of the bumblebee—a drone from which they take their Latin name, Bombus—which emerged enormous among the delicacy of violet flowers. The electricity of cicadas faded to the background as I listened, watching the bee’s clumsy flight from blossom to blossom.
At the end of the steady uphill path, we reached the cleft in the rock known as One-Line Sky. A crack in the tableland rent open by quakes—just wide enough for a person to pass through—ambled through the coral, a single bright strip of sky visible above the trench. It seemed, on first glance, like a corridor to another world, to something elemental and eternal rather than simply the other side of the hill. Sunk down into the mortal world of stone and soil, its walls reached toward the heavens. I gazed vertically to the vast ceiling of the world, and with one hand pressed to rough-worn walls and the other clasped in my mother’s, we ventured through that narrow passage.
•
WITH THE FOUNDING OF GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETIES, botanical gardens, and scientific groups in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there emerged a strong impetus for exploration concomitant with colonialism. It would take some decades for efforts to gather pace in East Asia. Exploration, in part, then became a process of exchange: China was opened to Western scientists in the last half of the nineteenth century, and so too was Japan, with travelers returning samples to the collections and botanical gardens of Europe or working with local surveyors to gain a grasp of the vast lands of the Asian continent. Within years, Chinese and Japanese branches of a range of sciences—cartography, geology, botany, zoology—began to emerge and thrive, with their scientists venturing to Kew, Berlin, Paris, and Edinburgh to survey and study lands and scientific collections distant from their own.
By the 1860s, British scientists were working the island into the Western cultural imagination by traveling to Taiwan alongside the Chinese gazetteers, who for centuries had conducted local surveys, often in traditional Chinese cartographic styles. But as the workings of government began to demand the mathematically grounded mapping style of the West, the process of scientific exchange explicitly served political and cultural aims. In cataloguing territory, mapmaking was a tool of colonial governance. The difficult terrain of Taiwan’s mountains became a vital target: first, under Qing administration in the late nineteenth century, and then, under Japanese rule.
In this same period, islands became an ideal object of biological study. They had long transfixed poets and writers and informed mythologies, but their hold on science was just as potent. Such famous isles come quick to mind: the Galápagos Islands, Darwin’s muse; Madagascar, beloved by botanists. They were and remain of curious fascination.
Islands can form in a multitude of ways: as land masses attached to continents before becoming encircled by water; at sea, risen from the depths of the ocean by forces tectonic or volcanic; or as accumulated barriers of sand, coral, or glacial remnants. We speak of islands of waste—though the trash vortex does not have the density of ground—and these unseen places enter our collective dreaming of the sea and its familiars, kelp and plastic, intermingled. Still other islands are made in our time: artificial islands, like those military installations hunkered along the coast of China, facing Taiwan, and the contested islands in the South China Sea.
What islands offer to science is as incalculable as their coastlines: species endemism—when a species is unique to a particular place, having adapted in isolation—is a common feature of islands. Many therefore make a contribution to global biodiversity that is disproportionate to their landmass. Think of the character for “island,” the single bird on the lone mountaintop: 島. It is on islands that life most strays from the continents. “Isolation,” after all, takes its root from the Latin word for island: insula.
Of more than four thousand vascular plant species on Taiwan, more than a thousand are endemic. More than 60 percent of mammals on the island occur nowhere else—the Formosan black bear, deep in the Yushan ranges, or the Formosan macaques, clumsily strutting throughout the south. Nearly half the amphibians and a fifth of birds, like Styan’s bulbuls, are unique to this place. On mountain ranges, in particular, the rate of endemism increases: though the number of different species decreases with elevation, as the air thins and grows cold, the singularity of those species increases. Life-forms arrange themselves in these ways. Swinhoe’s pheasants and shrill-voiced flamecrests flicker in the middle ranges. Long-lived Formosan cypresses steady themselves on gentle slopes, and montane angelicas frill the thin-aired plateaus.
The range can be dramatic: forest surveys are ringed and banded things that follow the growth of mountains. Oaks and laurels cling to the lower slopes, with cypresses making their languid growth in the damp middle ranges. Above the fog are hemlock and endemic fir, growing upward until snow dusts the shrubs of the highest peaks. With a changing climate and a warming world, for many species there is little place to migrate but skyward. Tree lines creep ever higher, and the realm of the cold-loving species shrinks. Bound to the summits, these species can live a lonely life. And in this way, mountains become islands of their own.
•
BURIED WITHIN THE FOLDS OF THE YELLOWED envelope, my grandfather’s letter felt surprisingly thin. Unfolding it, I lifted it to the light, so that the handwriting appeared backlit in glowing rows of parallel script, a landscape on a vertical lined page. It wasn’t much, perhaps twenty pages, but it was all that remained of Gong. Unsure of touching them, thin and brittle as they were, I dusted my fingers over the words, their pen marks deep-set in the page.
There were words I recognized—大 da (“big,” a person with its arms stretched wide), 媽 ma (“mother,” given its meaning from “woman” 女 and its sound from “horse” 馬), 口 kou (“mouth”)—their ideal forms scrawled as misshapen shadows. I had to squint to read them, one at a time, stranded in a crowd I didn’t recognize. I stopped at one: 哥哥 gege (a mouth and a man) rendered with the old radical for nail (丁), stacked and repeated like an anchor. Older brother. My grandfather was an older brother, and it was to his sister that he addressed his letter.
He had never spoken to me of his family, beyond the refrain, repeated by my mom, that he’d learned to cook at his mother’s side. His love had felt total, unequivocal to me, a small child. He had pressed his whole palm to my face in affection, and had always let me help feed his pet turtle, Xiao Wugui, using a miniature spoon saved from a McDonald’s coffee. When his illness became too much to manage, he’d given me the turtle, a red-eared slider the size of a tablespoon. I kept it in my bedroom, a reminder of Gong’s love. Now, almost thirty years after Gong first brought him home, the little turtle still grows.
In that single word—gege, “older brother”—an entire life appeared, the possibility of knowing Gong as a child and as a man, more of him than I had ever known.
I had the letter translated and then read it line by line, comparing the characters he’d written to the words typed into English. A work of excavation, of unearthing meaning and context from the lines, my reading stretched out over many days. I took the pages paragraph by paragraph, as if setting the limits of a survey plot, words and names the samples of my search. My mother’s notes put pieces in context, and I turned to her marginalia to find relatives she had never met but whose names she had known and historical dates she had memorized as a schoolgirl. Others still were obscure: place names and geographies unknown to us, in a China that no longer exists, from the years when my grandfather was a child.
The letter was disjointed and repetitious: unlike the lithic
