The trees are so tall I can hardly see their branches, their green foliage hanging in flat sprays that droop ever so slightly near their crowns, the way shaggy hair might drape around one’s neck. The greenery's sloping shape, held against the military exactitude of the trunks, resembles to me the Chinese character that builds forests: 木 mu (the wood radical). Arboreal 木 spreads wide and tall. And like timber set to work, 木 builds the words around it: 樹 shu ("tree"), 林 lin ("grove, woods, or forest") and 森林 senlin ("forest"), the multiplicity of tree shapes indicating the scale of the woodland. 木 carries a vastness of possibility, like the giants in these hills. And at their scale, just two trees would make a forest.
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian author (with a Welsh father and a Taiwanese mother) who has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics, and Two Trees Make a Forest is her prize-winning memoir about seeking meaning in the land of her mother. With a particular focus on the flora and fauna of Taiwan, Lee gives an account of the three months she spent there — climbing mountains and brushing up her Mandarin while exploring the history of both Taiwan and her own family — but just as her views from the tops of Taiwanese mountain peaks were usually obscured by cloud and fog, finishing this book makes me feel like something important was accomplished without me being able to quite see what it was. There is so much packed in here, not all of it totally interesting or relatable to me, and I’m not left feeling like I’ve learned much of anything; this is certainly well written at the sentence level, but didn’t add up to that something more I look for in a memoir.
Our versions of the truth so often dwell in the language we choose, but the words we use have consequences: they signify allegiances, shared histories, harms, and losses. In my childhood I heard phrases like “Taiwan, the true China” or “Chinese, but from Taiwan,” and rarely felt pressed to make sense of them. The task of naming so often exceeded me. Instead I felt a discomfort, like an amorphous thing. My complacency, I know now, was a privilege afforded by distance, by the ease of light skin and features that passed for whiteness. I do not know why we did not visit Taiwan during my childhood, and I never asked. Instead, I negotiated the world as a dual citizen of Britain and Canada, casting my life in those frames of reference. The question of whether to call myself Taiwanese or Chinese felt a complication too far. I often found myself with too many names, too many homes, and no fixed sense of which order to arrange them in. A use of just one was an erasure of another. For most of my life — until Gong’s Alzheimer’s, until his death — I gave it little thought.
Lee’s maternal grandparents (Gong and Po) were both from mainland China and met after each of them had settled in Taiwan in the concluding years of the Chinese Civil War. After only spending twenty or so years there, Gong and Po relocated to Niagara Falls, Canada with their only daughter (Lee’s mother) when she was a teenager; and as the grandparents knew that they would never be allowed to return to either China or Taiwan, theirs was a family tree without roots or branches. As neither of them liked to talk about the past, Lee was surprised to discover that her grandfather had written a meandering memoir-like letter before his death and that some biographical clues would be found among her grandmother’s effects after Po’s passing; these clues would inspire Lee’s trip to Taiwan in search of herself.
On the inside cover of Two Trees Make a Forest, it calls this “An exhilarating, anticolonial reclamation of nature writing and memoir”, and I can’t help but get hung up on that word “anticolonial”. I honestly have no idea what that means in this sense. Lee doesn’t explain anything about her absent Welsh father here (her parents divorced and Lee seems to have more closely identified with her mother’s half of her heritage, as one would), but even if she has disavowed the British half of herself, is she really half Taiwanese just because her mother was born there? And what does being “Taiwanese” really mean anyway? As she shares information about Taiwan’s history, Lee eventually explains each of the countries that colonised the island over the years — her grandparents’ flight to Taiwan coincided with the end of Japanese rule and the birth of the Republic of China (Taiwan’s official name) — so doesn’t that technically make her grandparents colonisers? With the island’s indigenous peoples (two per cent of its population) forced into the hills and out of power, and with its shaky democracy vainly attempting to prevent reabsorption into the People’s Republic of China (with most world bodies siding against Taiwan’s fight to maintain independence), what is “anticolonial” about someone of ethnic Chinese descent claiming Taiwanese heritage?
For so long I have treated Taiwan as a haunted place, guided by memories that are not mine. I’ve carried the weight of my grandfather’s death into the landscape, guilt and grief intermingled. But his death and Po’s have brought me new possibilities for knowing. Sadness has lightened, grown lean on my bones. I find in the cedar forest a place where the old trees can span all our stories, where three human generations seem small. The forest stands despite us.
One of my favourite passages: “A taxi driver asked me why my Mandarin was so good for a foreigner. ‘My mother is from Taiwan,’ I explained, and he turned on me in reprimand. ‘Then why is your Mandarin so poor?’” That feels like both the corniest old joke and an arrow to the heart of being alienated from one’s heritage; I do understand what Lee was going for with this experience and this book — I guess I’m mostly just distracted by the politics (and bored by some of the details). Through her grandmother’s effects, a distant cousin was contacted and visited, and just like that, Lee’s small family grew a little bigger. Just as with Mandarin, where adding the character for wood (木) to one more wood (木) makes a whole forest (木木), you only need one relative to join you in making a whole family. (On a side note: I see that Lee’s last book, Turning, was about her quest to swim in a different lake around Berlin, where she now lives, every week for a year, and that looks more interesting to me than this; and again, her writing is definitely strong enough to make me want to revisit her.)
