6
I CANNOT ACCOUNT FOR WHY PO HID THE LETTER or kept us from the family with which she was so clearly in contact. But it was not the first of such puzzles: She had grown erratic in old age. In the decade after my grandfather’s death, my mother and I often visited her, and I would sip tea while trying to follow their conversation in Mandarin. I learned the words for criticisms, for complaints, and the expression my mother’s face took on when she held her tongue. I thought often about something my grandmother had said to me in passing—“The lashings I gave your mother weren’t half of what my mother gave me”—and wondered how we’d managed her behavior for so long, shrugging it off as a quirk of personality.
Years ago, just before I was due to move to Germany, we had taken her to lunch at a sushi place she enjoyed, and things were strained. She turned abruptly from praising me to criticizing my mother, spitting her words between mouthfuls. She was perpetually angry that my mother thought she needed more care. She permitted no one to help.
When we returned to her apartment, her anger shifted to something less defined, uneasy and uncontrollable. She hugged me a little too tight for a little too long, and I sensed the shift as it welled up through her body.
Po fell to the ground weeping and clutched my hands tighter than I had imagined a ninety-year-old woman could. She screamed in Mandarin and then in English: “If you go, I don’t want to live anymore. I’ll never see you again.” She made for the balcony, moving quickly. I lurched forward and held her back, trying not to injure her brittle limbs as they flailed. Her wrists had grown so thin. How was she this strong?
I looked to my mother to call for help while Po clutched at my ankles, toppling us both, and made for the balcony once more. I tried to hold her still, to reason with her. “I will come back. I will see you again.”
But I thought of my grandfather, how I hadn’t seen him go.
An ambulance came, and the paramedics removed her grip, the fingers wound around me like roots. She ran toward the balcony again, and they restrained her. A needle, and she was quiet.
When we arrived at the hospital she smiled placidly from the gurney. I felt unsure of what we had done and regretted bringing her there. I wondered if I had overreacted. The geriatric specialist came and then the psychologist. They told us there was nothing wrong: she did not have dementia; she was not a risk to herself. She had in fact been particularly friendly to all the doctors. Would we like to see a social worker?
I felt rattled, fury and pity and grief intermingled, and did not know how to approach Po. She had leaped toward death, and I had held her back. I remembered a story she had told me one afternoon over a decade earlier.
In 1929, in Nanjing, China, my grandmother died. She was five years old. At nine in the morning, her heartbeat had stopped. No one was alarmed; she had been prone to fainting spells and often enacted a range of amateur dramatics that frustrated both her mother and the servants of the house. But when she didn’t begin to move within a few minutes, the family panicked.
Feebly, they attempted to revive her, pinching her arms and lighting incense. They massaged her chest, rubbed her feet (her third toe marked with the birthmark I share). Exasperated, they applied warm cloths, but nothing worked. By evening, they gave up. Her father ordered that a door be removed from its hinges and placed on the floor. They laid her young body on its back, ready to be buried.
One of the kitchen hands intervened.
“Noble madam, have you given up reviving Kwei-lin so soon?” he asked.
“We don’t know what else to do,” her mother replied, breaking her silence.
“You didn’t even take her to the hospital. You didn’t call for a doctor!” the young man cried. “If you don’t want to be bothered, please let me assume responsibility.”
With permission from the family, the kitchen hand ran into town just before sunset. He returned accompanied by an old junk collector, known also to locals as an acupuncturist. The family, having resigned themselves to their daughter’s death, allowed the old man to do as he saw fit. Squatting to the ground, he assessed the situation. He reached into his bag and unpacked a wooden box holding an array of needles. Silently, with precision, he inserted gold needles in rows of two from the top of her head down to her narrow heels. At pressure points he added a further ten pairs of needles, until her body resembled a glittering, doll-like pincushion. Satisfied, he settled in his crouched position and told the family to wait.
They waited three hours, shuffling around the house quietly. At eleven o’clock that night, a rasping sound came from Kwei-lin’s throat. Quite suddenly, she sat upright—the gold needles glinting in the lamplight—and screamed.
“Ma!” Mother.
Returned from the dead, seemingly intact and with all her limbs working normally, my grandmother resumed her life. Though she always fretted about her weak heart, having seen what lay on the other side of the living, she never fainted again.
BEYOND THE LANDSLIDES, WHERE CLOUDS tumble at the fringes of the Nenggao Trail, the moss-damp forest grows thick. It progresses from the oaks and cypresses of the lower elevations to the perfumed air of hemlock and fir, banding in rings of forest around the slopes with our ascent. Every species has a stretched-out quality, carpeting one another, reaching toward the thin light. Lichen glows from the exposed rock walls, blanketing the mountain with a bryophyte gleam, resting in shadow, awaiting rain. The mosses drape and hang on the trees, too, shielding the Formosan flamecrests that perch on the branches. As I walk farther, white pines begin to reach over the mountain’s outcrops into the nothingness of sky, moving toward the veil of pale clouds that gathers in the valley between here and the peaks of Nenggao Mountain, an ink-dark interruption on the bright horizon.
Hiking groups divide along natural rhythms, the peak-baggers racing ahead, hiking poles swinging with the regularity of their gait. I inevitably loll behind, far more interested in the minutiae of the ground than the goal of a distant crag. The trail cuts over reptilian ridges toward the sheltered side of Qilai Mountain, and I savor my slow pace. A fellow hiker—keen also to take time for photographs and the small glimpses only possible when one gets down on the ground to see a species at eye level—falls into step beside me.
Christoph is from Munich, and though I haven’t felt myself missing my home in Germany, I am excited to salt our conversation with German words, feeling their elongated shape in the back of my mouth, unlike Mandarin, which occupies my teeth and lips. We chatter through the afternoon, bringing thoughts of literature and landscape poetry to the side of the mountain. He tells me of Kafka’s story “The Great Wall of China”—a story of empire, national identity, and the eponymous wall’s construction—and of Taiwanese painters he has grown to love. A dramaturgy professor who spends every spare minute in the mountains, he is nearing the end of a lengthy sabbatical in Taipei. The mountains have a hold on him, and he seems dejected about leaving.
It is mid-conversation on an exposed stretch of trail when we both abruptly stop: a pocket of air smells of almonds and fresh-baked cakes, sweet and sugared. We instinctively look upward to a nearby flowering tree and press our noses to it with disappointment. It smells of nothing, and we realize that with one step forward and one step back the perfume disappears. I look at the side of the trail but there is little but packed soil. Frustrated, I turn to the ditch near the precipice and see a scattered range of herbs and shrubs, one patch of red-green leaves starred with tiny white inflorescences. We tuck ourselves low to the ground—Christoph crouching from a towering Teutonic height—and the scent intensifies, an extraordinary wonder from such minuscule flowers. We each take a photograph, wondering what the plant might be, but it will take weeks before I track it down and match the scent to its flower: Persicaria chinensis, also called creeping smartweed or Chinese knotweed.
Its tiny blooms have the look of rice—indeed, in Taiwan, one of its common names is rice smartweed—scattered amid the green carpet of the trailside. Native to Taiwan and southeast Asia, it tends toward ditches near villages and the slopes of tea farms in the lower hills. When it has sought foreign shores, the vine has been labeled invasive. But here, in the upper reaches of its home range, it is a thing of beauty. Sweetened by its breath, I am carried upward toward the tree line.
IN 1900, BUNZO HAYATA ARRIVED IN TAIWAN for a two-month sojourn before beginning his studies in Tokyo. It was the culmination of more than ten years of longing to formally study botany: the twenty-six-year-old Hayata had been long waylaid in his efforts to complete his studies. Despite a keen interest as a teenager and his joining the Botanical Society of Tokyo, family obligations had delayed his entry into university.
By the time he embarked on graduate studies, his intellectual path had been marked out for him: his supervisor, Jinzo Matsumura, a pioneer in Taiwanese botany, decided that Hayata should focus not on mosses, as he desired, but on the flora of Taiwan. Hayata took to the topic wildly and with great ambition. With almost youthful zeal he sought to distinguish the flora of Taiwan from other regions in East Asia, noting that the conditions that had previously made it difficult to survey—the western flatlands unfolding to steep, inaccessible mountains that dropped to the eastern seacoast, and ranging from subtropical to alpine habitats—were precisely what made it unique. Once the Japanese government worked its way into the higher mountain ranges, as it had along the Nenggao Trail, new pathways opened for botanical expeditions. In 1911, after several years of study both in Japan and Taiwan, followed by a period visiting herbaria in London (at Kew Gardens), Berlin (at Dahlem), Paris, and St. Petersburg, he published the first volume of his Icones Plantarum Formosanarum. In its opening pages, Hayata outlined an ambitious, multivolume plan: “For a long time, I have had a desire to publish a flora of Formosa…which might be completed in fifteen years.” In reality, he devoted ten years and as many botanical excursions to producing a ten-volume flora, cataloguing 3,658 species and 79 varieties across nearly 1,200 genera and 170 families of vascular plants.
Hayata’s legacy remains in the names of plants today: botanist Hiroyoshi Ohashi has counted more than 1,600 Taiwanese plant names listing Hayata as their author among the more than 2,700 species named by him in his excursions across East and Southeast Asia. But his ability to catalogue so wide a range of flora was partly because his work coincided with Japanese incursions into previously inaccessible territory. Botanists in the previous century had simply been unable to reach those places.
Of course, many of the island’s plants were known and named by those who lived there. But efforts to document, catalogue, and distinguish Taiwanese species from others worldwide began in earnest with the rise and spread of modern taxonomy, which itself had developed but a century earlier. As with geology, Western botanical sciences came to the island through exploration and colonial expansion. In 1853, the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune—most famous for his theft of Chinese tea plants and processing methods in order to establish British tea production in India—catalogued a number of coastal plants, marking the first record of botanical study on the island. In the 1860s, Robert Swinhoe, an English biologist who was also a consul in Taiwan, surveyed the island’s natural history, and in the late nineteenth century, the Irish botanist Augustine Henry published a list of nearly 1,500 Taiwanese plant species.
Scientific labels contain so much of the past, entire histories rendered in nomenclature: the many plant and animal species named for Swinhoe, like Lophura swinhoii (Swinhoe’s pheasant); or Fagus hayatae (Taiwan beech) and the genera Hayatella (a Rubiaceae genus endemic to Taiwan, recorded just once, on the east of the island) named for Hayata. Yushan (Jade Mountain), Taiwan’s highest peak, was for many years known as Mount Morrison, named for a foreign sea captain. More than a hundred species are named for the mountain, many of them recorded by Hayata himself. Morrison’s name thus remains in the botanical record: from Berberis morrisonensis (Taiwan barberry) to Angelica morrisonicola.
Language is a tricky thing: scientific labels cannot delimit the many names by which our world is ordered. As I learned the plants in Taiwan, I learned to match their common names to their scientific binomials, Mandarin names to Taiwanese. Once in a while, I found no English translation, and a plant was left to exist only in the linguistic limits of my mind; I could name but a tiny fraction of this island, and much remained caught between worlds. I began to write them out, using the gridded worksheets given to me by a Mandarin teacher in Berlin, noting the names of plants in English, in traditional characters, and transliterating their pronunciation for myself in Pinyin. 八角金盤 was bajiao jinpan—“octagonal gold plate” fatsia. 鞭打繡球 was bianda xiuqiu, a forb with no common name in English but whose Chinese name means “whip hydrangea.” I wrote them out in Latin, as if it rendered the names stable: Fatsia polycarpa, Hemiphragma heterophyllum.
But between languages, words are unsteady: when I asked my mother to name plants or places, she often wrote out their names in Wade-Giles romanization, a transliteration of Mandarin used around the world until the 1980s when Hanyu Pinyin from mainland China became the common standard. My mother read the translation of my grandfather’s letter and came back confused, struggling to match places she knew with their new transliterations. In text messages, I used Pinyin names and places, and my mother would reply frustrated that she couldn’t understand them. Pinyin was a new-fangled, mainland thing; how could q be pronounced “ch,” or x as “hs,” she asked. It didn’t make any sense, she concluded.
I didn’t need to tell her how much had changed. A gap opened between us every time we put our words into writing.
A STORM HAS BEEN BATTERING THE TENT ALL night. I can feel it seeping through the fly sheet, the luminous cold of mountain rain penetrating the walls. At 2:30 in the morning, the mountain is inked in darkness. But I cannot put off getting up any longer. I delicately try, without touching the walls of the soaked tent, to dress. Leggings, rain pants, dry socks. I work a shirt, fleece, and jacket over my shoulders, pulling the hood down tight. I unzip the tent and flick on my headlight.
Torrents of water howl past, and I suppress an urge to return to the warmth of my sleeping bag. Before setting out on the hike, while researching the landslides, I read up on the mountain nicknamed Black Qilai, and came across a chronological list of hikers who had died on its more treacherous northern slopes. I put this out of my mind now, shaking as I struggle to tie my boots. From the Nenggao Trail, the route over the mountain will be much safer, a kilometer of steps followed by an alpine track and a brief scramble to the south peak. But if Qilai is tormented by ghosts, as the rumors go, then the storm seems to call them forth.
The sky roils with dark clouds and is blacker still for the emptiness of the new moon as we make for the peak, hoping to arrive for sunrise. With my headlight lit, I can just about see the wind that tangles persistently around the other members of the group. Rain streaks across my field of vision. The only relief is in the low shelter of the grassy Yushan cane lining the stone path. The steps are oil-slick and running with mud. I look down, narrowing my attention to every movement I make, listening for a rhythm in the click of my hiking stick and the rustle of the grass in the wind. Beyond the krummholz, the crooked wood of high mountain ranges known in Chinese as 高山矮曲林 gao shan ai qu lin (or “high mountain low-bent forest”), we pass the final stands of cane on the tree line, the green wall around us quickly shrinking.
At the top of the steps, a meadowland flashes into view. Despite the work of the climb, I am chilled with a skeletal, creaky sort of cold. I think back to yesterday morning, my longing to breathe thinner air, the scent of the smartweed. I am guilty of idealizing the trip, imagining a view and a sense of intimacy with the mountain. Instead, I feel alienated by it; I can hardly see, and what I can see is sodden.
Halfway across the meadow, a large group of hikers has stalled, their matching rain ponchos stretched over their packs so they look not unlike a caterpillar. The trail ahead has turned to swamp, and they’ve stepped into the scrub in hopes of avoiding it. Making little progress, they pick their way through the plants, humpbacked and achingly slow. I look to my own group, ready to step into the scrub myself, when I see the others plow forward along the soaked trail. Their expressions require no explanation. There can be no more complaint, no more room for pause. I follow, sinking to my ankles, feeling water seep through every hole in my battered boots. We are nearing the peak, and the conditions are too brutal for discussion. I tuck my chin inside my jacket, breathing warmth into my neck, a small solace.
We reach plateaus of smaller plants, growing minutely and staunchly in the cold. The ground is a tangle of evergreen shrubs that are dull without their summer flowers, short-cropped rushes, prickling meadow plants, and the puckered leaves of stonecrop sedum clustering at this height. It looks like a Scottish moor transported across the world. Most of the plant names remain unknown to me in the darkness. With time, I know these plants will recede even farther from reach: both climate change and increased use of the mountains are pushing lower-elevation species to higher altitudes. Warmth ascends the peaks like islands in a montane sea, and the alpine plants have nowhere to go but up. Through the predawn storm I watch the ground in passing, the plants grown from wind and stone, seeking the coldest part of a warm island.
At the base of the peak, the plants dwindle, and only long-lived rocks stand ahead. Wind pummels my jacket, pressing it tight against my frame. I press on, reaching my hands out to pull myself up meter-high stones, planting my hiking stick in the mud below me. With every jab and release I see rainwater pooling in the holes I’ve left. With little else to occupy my mind, I begin to count steps. One, jab, two, jab, three, jab, ever upward. Sweat drips a trail down my chest and back, mingling with the rainwater. I begin to feel sensations in isolation: the tunneled sound of the wind against my hood, my pulse hot in my ears, the tastes of salt and chalk in my mouth. I feel myself dissolve in movement the way sediment flows downriver.
I am roused from the labored trance of climbing to find an open windswept meadow at Qilai’s south peak. Rocks are scattered around the perimeter of this high point where a chipped yellow aluminum sign hangs from a chain welded to a boulder. 3358 M, it reads.
I thought, when I first heard of it, that the mountain was named Qi for 七 (“seven”), but its name 奇萊山 pleases me more. 奇 qi means “to be astonished, surprised,” and 萊 lai (like the second character in Penglai, the mythic island) means either “lamb’s quarters” or, as I prefer to imagine, the more archaic “meadow.” It brings to mind the plants here, their cold peaks disappearing like islands beneath a swallowing sea.
We take turns in the darkness, posing in the glare of one another’s headlights to snap photographs of each of us holding the battered sign. It is icy to touch, but in exhaustion I care little. I wanted the light of the sky, to sense something of height and stone, and what I got was a deluge. I wanted a view, perhaps, a feeling of having the range unfolded beneath me like a map, but the mountains refused to show themselves. But I do not feel disappointment. I grin for my photograph, air gusting into my lungs, and in that cold shock, endorphins force their way through my body. I suddenly feel the elation of movement.
The sun rises without our noticing, muffled behind the gray of the clearing storm as we descend. The waxing light is dull, with mist softening the edges of Qilai’s crags and cliffs. Despite it all, I begin to feel warm. Like the flicker of lamplight evacuating the night, I feel a small glow in having seen the storm.
THE CHLORINE HAZE HUNG LOW TO THE ground. The mist, resisting the gravity of the fall, had carried it upward. I leaned over the railing, catching a glimpse of the roiling white, and then ducked back, shaking. I’d been to Niagara so many times, but still the waterfall scared me.
It couldn’t have smelled that way, I’m sure. It’s a trick of my mind, adding detail to scenes I’ve not been in for decades. Unable to pin down the ionic scent of fast-moving water, I’ve substituted the smell of swimming pools. The fountains nearby, where Po used to take us to watch the water dancing, backlit in blue and pink: they smelled of chlorine. We’d been there every summer, on the weekends when Po and Gong ventured with us into town from their bungalow on Armstrong Drive.
Those moments I remember with clarity. The plush blue velvet seats of the Oldsmobile, the crumbs of some long-finished snack worked down into the seams. Stacks of McDonald’s napkins were stuffed into the center console, and a discarded coffee cup—stained and milk-sticky—lay crumpled on the floor. The plastic cassette tapes clicked as they unspooled to play Chinese ballads. And all the way, Gong sat smiling on the back seat, gripping the safety handle on the ceiling of the sedan. It never made much sense to me as a child: I knew he’d flown fighters and imagined him tracing loop-the-loops in the sky, rolling upside down like the jets we saw at the air show each spring. But he never drove the car.
I wonder now when his mind began to change. Had it already started when I was ten, when he came to stay for a weekend and cooked my favorite tea eggs? At thirteen, I saw him rest in complete darkness on his bed—a wooden plank laid atop a soft mattress, as he’d slept in his military training—and just lay there, silent. I couldn’t stay still as a child, so I couldn’t understand it. Something had to have been wrong. Had he changed by then?
The small, incremental shifts in the brain begin years before we can notice them.
When he’d begun writing the letter, his memory was already failing. Detail remained, but order had gone.
Still, his details were sharp.
IN JULY 1937, THE SECOND SINO-JAPANESE WAR began. A Japanese soldier failed to return to his post after a military exercise in Chinese territory in Beijing. When Japanese forces were refused entry to the Wanping fortress to find him, tensions rose, and there were the first flares of all-out war. Much of this history hangs on mishap: it is said the soldier returned to his post later that evening, having merely been lost. But forces clashed outside the fortress that night, along a bridge of carved granite, where water flowed heavy in the Yongding River. The beginning of the war thus became known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. My grandfather had just come of age in his small northern village.
He had hardened himself to the coming war. As a teenager, he’d gone to study military management, shaving his head and purging himself of the softness of the years he’d spent curled up with his nainai, from the afternoons following his mother through the kitchen. He slept on wooden planks—a habit I realize he never shook—and began bathing in ice water. With the war begun, he escaped to find his father, who’d left and remarried, only to be turned away and sent back on the same train.
Millions of people moved west, outrunning the advancing Japanese army. Soldiers dismantled the railway tracks as they traveled, hoping to stem the pursuit. Alone, at eighteen, my grandfather took the road west in a cobbled-together journey of buses and cars, traveling some twelve hundred miles across China. He was lucky; most people went on foot.
In meetings and in partings, serendipitous forces draw some together and others apart. On the road, my grandfather met an old school friend he’d not seen in years, Liu Shen, who encouraged him to stop at Guiyang to finish high school and prepare for university entrance examinations. My grandfather wished to study architecture or engineering, wanting a quiet job in which he could apply focus and precision, but that was not to be. One connection led to the next. They coincided with recruitment for the Republic of China Air Force. Liu Shen recognized the examining officer as a classmate of his brother’s. And so both he and my grandfather took their first steps in the air force.
