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WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, MY GRADE-EIGHT English class was assigned William Bell’s Forbidden City, a young adult novel that follows a Canadian boy as he accompanies his cameraman father to document the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. It was the first and only book we read in school that documented the culture from which my family came. I read it rapt, staying up late into the night turning the pages. I wondered if the other two Chinese students in my class felt the same, but they came to lessons with the same quiet, adolescent disinterest as usual.
It was not my family’s story. I had never been to China, knew little of it, and knew that we were somehow different from the other students whose families had emigrated from the mainland. My family had left China and been unable to return.
A lifetime later, the letter and the phone bill were what remained. One number in Taiwan, one number in China.
My mother dialed the Chinese number repeatedly for months, getting no answer. Often, the call wouldn’t connect, but still she called, just to see. After two months, the call went through and a woman named Dong-ping answered.
My mother had never heard of Dong-ping, but they began, haltingly, to learn of each other’s lives, pulling the frayed threads of their shared history; Dong-ping was my mother’s cousin, my grandmother’s niece.
What my mother feared most was confirmed: coming from a wealthy family of landlords, Po’s sister and her husband, both teachers, had been denounced as capitalists and counterrevolutionaries. They were sent to labor camps like so many who toiled and died under long sentences in remote parts of the country. Their properties had been confiscated, the businesses closed. I thought of the way my grandmother had listed them, counting them on her fingers, and wondered how much else she might have hesitated to say. In those years, Dong-ping lived with her grandparents—Po’s parents—in Nanjing.
For four years after her daughter left Nanjing, Po’s mother hobbled to the end of the road, every day awaiting her return. Each afternoon, Po’s father sat with a Danish butter cookie tin on his lap. Inside it was a stack of photographs: pictures of Po throughout her childhood. Of Po’s three siblings, one was denounced; one committed suicide; and one, her younger brother, survived.
The mainlanders who fled could not return to the country they had known; for decades, travel between Taiwan and China was banned. Many took shelter in Taiwan in the belief that they might one day be restored to their homeland. It was a potent but brutal dream: the Nationalist state supplanted much of the complexity—linguistic, cultural, and intellectual—that had for so many centuries distinguished Taiwan from its neighbors. Any illusion of the possibility for self-determination or democracy for the island dissolved. Taiwanese and Japanese languages were forced out of daily use, and once more Taiwan faced a rewriting of history: its legacies now belonged to China, to a motherland across the strait to which no one could even go, but to which they were told they would be rightfully restored.
Political migrants. Exiles. Colonists. Diaspora. The past has many words for my grandparents’ generation, all of them containing a grain of the truth. In recent decades, anthropologists and sociologists have attempted to make sense of their dislocated identity. 籍貫 jiguan (“identity based on one’s family’s native province”) remained a legal means of categorizing identity until 1992. But many descendants of mainlanders—in my mother’s generation and thereafter—have increasingly identified as both Chinese and Taiwanese, or some as Taiwanese alone.
A reluctance to relinquish ties to past places and the reality of seven decades severed from the mainland complicates what ought to be simple: articulating who we are.
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.
In the 1980s, the travel ban between Taiwan and China was finally lifted. Still my grandparents did not go back; after the civil war, it seemed that the old country they had left, the homes to which they hoped to return, no longer existed. My grandmother never spoke of her wounds, but they were there, in raw words. My grandfather’s family had scattered long before 1949, and no nationalism could have rectified that. The home to which he longed to return was the hearth where he cooked by his mother’s side as a child. He had lost that long before.
Much of what I’ve learned of the past I gleaned from books, from novels and historical studies. Families remain silent so often, and often understandably. But in those few recordings of my grandmother, and in the erratic lines of my grandfather’s letter, the past transmuted into something personal, painful. In Taiwan I seemed to carry their haunting inside, ready to inhabit the places I found.
AFTER SIGHTING THE SPOONBILL, I RETURN TO the courtyard house where I’ve taken a room for a few days. The house stands at the end of a quiet lane in Tainan’s university district, three stories tall with a narrow staircase to the rooftop, where the streetlights shine at eye level. I sleep, the wind still rattling the window frames, and I dream of white-winged birds. They have turned, in the way that dream creatures often do, into other things: powdered wings of sugar, mounds of sweet cream. I am in the pink-walled bakery in Niagara Falls where my grandmother took me as a child. She stands admiring a doily-lined tray of cream-puff swans. Their hooked necks sit golden above their bodies—the birds static in a refrigerated landscape—perched on the golden ground of a bakery tray. She hands me one, smiling, and I wake.
The house is quiet. Five o’clock and the morning has barely spread its blue warmth through the sky. I reach for my camera, to study once more the smudge of white against the blue that I know to be a spoonbill. I zoom in until I can just see the dark curve of its bill. It traveled a thousand miles to overwinter in those muddy pools.
A gateway to the island, the Tainan area gazes out over the strait, beneath the westernmost nose of the island, raised toward China. Political and military tensions now choke the strait, but nature alone once sufficed to make crossing the Black Ditch a risky endeavor. When ships first ventured to the coastal islands beyond China, sailing the strait could be treacherous. Fog would set in and swells would rise around ships.
I often think of the myth of the sea goddess Matsu. Her legends took many forms, shapeshifting like a turbulent sea. In one popular account, the young girl Lin Mo was born to a family of Fujianese fishermen. At the temple one day, she was given the gift of future sight by the goddess Kuan-yin. Lin Mo’s powers grew, until she began to predict the tides and the storms that raged off her coastal island. One day while weaving, she saw a vision of her father and brother drowning amid a tempest. She fell into a trance that enabled her to reach and rescue them from the sea. But the girl’s mother, seeing her asleep at her loom, shook her awake too soon. The father drowned.
In another tale, she waited on the shore in a red dress, drawing sailors back to safety like a beacon. In another, she drowned after swimming for days to find her missing father, and was celebrated by her village for her filial piety. In Yu Yonghe’s version of the Matsu legend, she would fly to the sea in her dreams like a bird, saving drowning sailors. It is said that in death she climbed the highest mountain, ascending to the heavens encircled by fog.
In every story, Matsu was a young woman who faced the waves. Matsu dwelt in a peripheral space, in the sea between, until she was swallowed into fog. A swimmer myself, I feel drawn to her.
Down a back alley in the town, in the early morning, I cross over a construction site, through a narrow lane, and find Matsu’s temple, buttressed with steel girders, cast in shadow. The doorway is painted with fading murals, and darkness shrouds the sanctum. The shadows are broken only by a lit altar where Matsu sits, cast in gold and aglow. I stand in the temple studying Matsu’s serious gaze, her broad cheekbones glittering gold, her image framed in light. A young-girl savior worshipped by rough-tongued sailors, Matsu is so venerated that Taiwan has nearly a thousand temples devoted to her.
The shining mudflats I saw at Taijiang reach out into the water, speckled with the migrant birds that seek these shores each winter. Do the seabirds fly above the strait as Matsu once did? I once saw a map of spoonbill migration corridors with cartoonish arrows lining the coasts of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, over the East China Sea, toward the strait. Wading the salt flats, the records of their movements on land wash out with every turning tide. The birds’ survival is predicated on migration by flight through these fraught places. For them, like Matsu, the dark waters of the Taiwan Strait are no barrier. They are a corridor, a passage between seasons, salt-soaked and sunlit.
ON A WHIM ONE AFTERNOON AT THE LIBRARY in Berlin, I’d called up a stack of Chinese and Taiwanese literature. I’d been curious, perhaps, because my grandfather’s letter had been interspersed with quotations and imagery from texts he’d studied in his youth, the florid inflections of Chinese language that I would never learn in my perfunctory, childlike Mandarin. Names appeared every so often—Yuan Zhen, Shen Kuo—and the text was laced with untraceable proverbs. I was stunned by Gong’s spongelike ability to carry names and aphorisms, to reference long-dead painters and philosophers in everyday correspondence. Within the limits of our language barrier, I had never heard him speak in borrowed words. Our conversations were basic and domestic: the language of cooking and mealtimes, of grandparents offering affection. He had said only as much as was needed. I hadn’t seen many books around him in his old age. But somehow those old phrases stayed with him as his mind corroded. I read the books greedily—their words a corrective—and began to plot out a list of texts in translation to work through.
There were those that dwelt in the world of nature, like The Classic of Mountains and Seas, which was written around the fourth century B.C.E., remained popular through two millennia, and has been read variously as mythology, cosmology, and fiction. Throughout the first millennium, it was viewed by many as a descriptio mundi, a valid geographical survey of the world: indeed, the Classic’s unknown author was in some sense a well-traveled naturalist or was at least advised by locals from all regions of China. It was in such texts that a notion of Chinese territory was explored, with regions both “within” and “beyond the seas,” as Taiwan once was. The Classic was a trove of botanical and zoological knowledge, with species so strange as to be of myth or others documented in its pages and now extinct, unrecorded, or otherwise unknown to us in the present. It catalogued plants that could stop swelling, blossoms that could prevent you from going astray, some for virility, some for good hearing, and it laid out a topography of a land long in the past, with mountain ranges scattered with unknown fauna. Though a far cry from what we might call science today, the book gleamed with inklings of a scientific method in the making.
In Brush Talks from Dream Brook, sometimes translated as Dream Pool Essays, written by Shen Kuo in the Song dynasty around 1088, I found a miscellany of observations of the natural world: the movements of celestial bodies, river types, and the etymology of words used to describe them. Shen preceded modern geology with his studies of stones. He wrote of petrified plants and fossils, of magnetism and the poles, of the shadows of hawks and how they shift with the movement of the sun.
In one passage, he told the story of a cluster of mollusks brought up from the riverbed by a fisherman, layered like fish scales into a solid shape. The fisherman pried open the shells and found inside a pristine copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, a book of spiritual discourses. The pages had survived the river in their calcified cage. I thought, reading this, that our fleeting human worlds are so easily swallowed up by nature, our fate fastened to its course. What we believe to be culture is only ever a fragment of natural world that we have sectioned off, enclosed, pearl-like, for posterity.
I turned then to the nativist literature of Taiwan, which first emerged in the 1920s, in response to Japanese rule, as a means for preserving links to the Chinese languages. I found in these modern works that to speak of Taiwanese literature is often to speak of the landscape: the island’s literature, from both indigenous and Han Chinese perspectives, has long been preoccupied with the land, with the mountains and forests that form the backdrop for the cities below. The nativist movement subsided in the war years only to reemerge, shapeshifted in the 1970s, as a form of resistance to Chinese Nationalist rule. Alongside it was the Tangwai opposition movement, which sought political representation amid a system in which opposition parties to the Kuomintang were forbidden; it resulted in the creation of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party.
Literature has since become a means of asserting the island’s distinct cultural identity, in direct contention with its difficult colonial past. Rejecting the notion of Taiwanese literature as mere “frontier” writing, authors in a new tradition pursued their autonomy as part of their writing. In efforts to de-sinicize the island’s identity, the Japanese colonial period was a point from which to argue that the island’s cultural heritage diverged from China’s. Such literature would be marked by its engagement with political struggle, with democracy, and with nature.
ONE MORNING I FIND MYSELF AT THE NATIONAL Museum of Taiwan Literature, off a busy roundabout in central Tainan. I’ve come to see the permanent exhibition on the history of Taiwanese literature but instead see a large banner in the front hall, forest-hued, pointing to a darker, much smaller hall. It is a special exhibit on Taiwanese nature writing.
Inside is a plethora of work far from the nature-writing traditions I know, tracing a lineage to nature writing in the United States. There are echoes of Carson and Thoreau but few of British Romanticism. I find in Taiwanese nature writing rather realist worlds, with essays, poems, and stories tied inextricably to activism. The words I read are subtle but matter-of-fact, not elegiac, though they so often deal with loss. Emerging in 1981 with the writers Han Han and Ma Yigong’s “We Have Only One Earth” (我們只有一個地球), the genre’s early texts tackle the scale of environmental loss on the island. Drawing deeply on the natural sciences and written at a time when forestry had all but devastated Taiwan’s hills, when cities were growing apace, the early works contain an energy quite unlike the sweetened prose I’ve grown used to in British nature writing.
It was protest and activism that enabled the protection of the wetlands, something that in my grandparents’ time in Taiwan would have been impossible. In the period of martial law, from 1949 to 1987, the very act of bird-watching could have brought you trouble, the use of binoculars an accusation of espionage. But following the turn to democracy—which arose in parallel to protests for democratization elsewhere in South Korea and in China at Tiananmen—activism driven by local communities thrived. The end of martial law created an opening for a burgeoning environmental movement, particularly as economic development was increasingly shaping public planning across Taiwan. Conservation and bird-watching societies formed, and writing that tackled both nature and activism flourished.
After the museum, I read what I can track down, writing to translators of local authors, finding so little Taiwanese nature writing that has made the journey into English. I am wholly absorbed. The contemporary Puyuma indigenous author Badai tells stories of millet fields grown on ancestral lands sold to city strangers and of river floods and the trees farmers use to document the rising waters. I search for the poems of Liu Ka-shiang, one of Taiwan’s leading contemporary nature writers, and the novels of the lepidopterist and literature professor Wu Ming-Yi. In their pages, the minutiae of the mountains dwell in words.
In his 1984 poem “Small Is Beautiful,” Liu Ka-shiang traces the journey of the Dadu River upstream. There are sandpipers, snipes, and ducklings at the river’s mouth, egrets and the crowding of factories and waste. His river carries ever backward, upward, past swallows and kingfishers, river birds darting through the leaves of the thickening woodland. The poem reaches the mountains—the water’s source—and once more there are the river’s sandpipers. Liu writes that grouped everywhere along its waters, they find their place together, “Using themselves as the center of their living territory, / Crying, guarding, / telling the world that the stream beneath the wide-leaved woods is their home.”
I feel a flush of envy for the sandpipers. These birds that exist on the page—and indeed, the space between real and poetic birds is vast—call the length of the river home. Their territory is demarcated, and their river is the poem: they appear where the stanzas open to the sea, and once more at their source, near the poem’s close. But I know too that these birds—common sandpipers and wood sandpipers and others, Liu does not say which he means—live beyond the page. Sandpipers work their way over nearly all our world, save the coldest and the driest places (they are found neither in Antarctica nor in deserts). Tied to water, sandpipers move with the tides.
Along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, more than five hundred species migrate. The route spans the thousands of miles between the Arctic—from Alaska to Russia—and New Zealand, taking in the entirety of the East Asian shore. The birds that travel its currents find regularity in their seasonal movements, though their coastlines are changing, whether from wetland encroachment, climate change, or industrial development. As with the spoonbills, the fortunes of migrant birds are tied to ours: to our abilities to protect them, to our willingness to afford them space in our worlds, to offerings that were never ours to give.
Back at the house, I take tea with Magumi, a Japanese artist living there. She takes me to a dimly lit back room with one wall open to the courtyard to show me a sculpture she has been working on. It is taller than me, almost to the ceiling: a coil of plaited newspapers turned into rope, the kind of thick, seafaring cable I’ve seen at the docks. She does not tell me anything about the work—indeed, between Japanese and broken Mandarin, we have few avenues for communication via words—but merely lifts the end of the coil to show me its frayed edges. I think of the Chinese-language newspapers at my grandparents’ bungalow, stacked and aging. The memory of their smell has never left me. I think, distantly, I can smell them here. These papers are printed with human stories, with things that tie places and people far distant close together. Their binds are woven from heavy things. I glance into the coil and see the thinning newsprint wind around itself in a tangle. The tales have become tethers.
IN OCTOBER 1971, THE UNITED NATIONS PASSED Resolution 2758. Taiwan—the Republic of China—was expelled from the United Nations; the People’s Republic of China took its place.
Gong wrote little of the decades when he worked as an instructor at Gangshan and then as a director of political warfare at Hsinchu Air Base, serving as counsel to young pilots who were flying surveillance missions over China with the support of the CIA. I tried and failed to gain more information, learning only that his military records remained closed. I wrote to the base at Hsinchu and was told, succinctly, that they remained grateful for his service. I worried, wanting to know my family’s role in a regime that meant everything to those who sought to return to the mainland; a regime that exercised incalculable brutality against those it deemed a threat. But I could not know more than he had put to the page, and knowing what I did of the complex workings of the Cold War and of the martial law period in Taiwan, I came to realize that I might never account for those years of his life.
But I knew how his story ended.
Before the world shifted, a number of my grandfather’s friends and colleagues had left for the United States and Canada, finding better working conditions on the crews of commercial airlines. Forced into early retirement, Gong had been out of flight for a handful of years. He had tried his hand as a salesman—not among his skills. He was miserable.
On the advice of those who had gone before, he applied to move the family—Po, my mother, and him—to Canada. In Canada, he could fly again, taking up a post with a commercial crew. In Canada, he would not be confined to the house, in a country to which he devoted his life, in a place he felt forgotten.
They moved in 1974, when Gong was fifty-five.
On arrival in Canada, the recruiters explained the process he would need to undergo. It was a surprise: coming from Taiwan, a country no longer recognized by the world, his credentials and citizenship would not carry over. He would not be given immediate clearance to fly. Gong asked how long it would take. Five years, they replied.
In five years, he would have been sixty. Too old to fly, the age restrictions ruled.
My mother and her parents found themselves in a new, cold country, speaking halting English, starting again.
With no experience beyond the air force and the government, my grandparents did what many immigrants do, taking whatever work was available to them. They became cleaners.
Throughout my childhood, I visited Gong on the industrial floor of that Niagara Falls canned-food factory. Did the strangers he met there know anything of his past? I watched him as he mopped, huddled and silent among the machinery, after the workers had gone home.
He rarely spoke to me of airplanes. For so long I could not imagine him in the sky, in flight.
