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IN 1969, TAIWAN’S NATIONAL SCIENCE COUNCIL and the U.S.A.’s National Science Foundation agreed to the joint publication of the first comprehensive, contemporary flora of Taiwan. In the years that followed, they formed an editorial body, charged with the task of compiling the text. The six-volume Flora of Taiwan appeared in 1975—some sixty years after Bunzo Hayata attempted to document the island’s botanical wealth in totality—and spanned more than five thousand pages. The first volume opens with a black-and-white photograph of the editorial committee, five lean men in suits, quietly smiling. One from the University of Pennsylvania, three from the National Taiwan University, and another from the New York Botanical Garden.
Once the civil war had ended and it appeared that Taiwan was not a temporary stop-off for the mainland Nationalists, the building of infrastructure and boosting of the economy became key priorities. In parallel, scientific research blossomed once more. Taiwania, the island’s journal of plant science, was launched in 1947 but published only a scattered number of volumes until the 1960s, when it began to publish extensively and in earnest. There was a pressure to view the island’s nature as a resource: one article noted the need for plant science to serve economic development, listing a variety of plants, methods for their identification, and their uses. In a sense this was not new—indeed, much of the botanical research in the Japanese period served the needs of the forestry industry—but was formalized, reflecting the rapid development of the island. This increase in biological research eventually led, in the late 1970s, to the island’s conservation movement. An updated second edition of Flora of Taiwan was published in the 1990s. And in 2008, scientists finalized the nation’s first vegetation inventory.
I think often that it is in plants that Taiwan’s recent history can readily be seen. Plants make visible so much of what humans have sought: in how they grow and thrive, how they mix in a wooded glade, in which species planted for our uses intermingle with those that have grown up quite spontaneously in home soil. Many of the island’s botanical research centers were opened by the Japanese: the forest at Kenting was used as a forestry research center in the late nineteenth century and contains a wealth of introduced tropical species, while Taipei’s Botanical Garden opened in 1896.
Plants come to represent us on city streets, in parks, in our poetry, and in shared dreams. Nature unfolds amid our worlds, shaped by our commitments—whether scientific, cultural, or political.
Botanical texts can teach us just as much. Historic floras interest me in part because lists of old plants and their semblance of order reveal a continuity between past scientific cultures and our present understandings of nature. Meaning is held in who named a species and how they came across it. The existence of historical specimens or their entries in a flora enables scientists to track which species appeared where and when. Looking backward, these samples allow us to understand transformations in how we manage the land, and how nonhuman nature, in turn, replies. Breakages appear too: plants that can no longer be found; plants that have been rehoused under the new genetic parameters in the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, which orders flowering plants through DNA; plant names that have shapeshifted so that I can only retrace their steps through online indices of plant names, searching for an etymology of nature. Plant histories—like human ones—have gaps in their genealogies.
I read old papers from Taiwania, scanning for titles that catch my interest, and revel in the places and species I know. Species of Polytrichum moss found on Qixing Mountain, mosses found submerged in ice water on Nenggao Mountain. I might never see these species myself, but in the careful words of botanical description I find ways to picture their ideal forms: lanceolate leaves, measurements in millimeters, serrate margins, and cells I would not see save for a microscope. I imagine, too, the journeys ventured to take those samples: botanists hauling packs and specimens over the same steep trailways I know, and with them I feel closer to something I cannot articulate. I search books and plant keys for something much greater than the specificity of specimens collected and pressed to a page.
On the southern Hengchun Peninsula, by the pools at Qikong Waterfall, there stood a Barringtonia asiatica fifteen feet high, alone on the edge of a lane. The tree’s long leaves hung glossy green, a mere background to their flowers: white, puckered clusters of petals opening to a brush of fine filaments. They looked, I thought, like those fiber-optic lamps made from fishing line, with great feathered clusters of pink strands, yellow at their tips, and so lightly fused to the base of the flowers that the slightest disturbance showered the ground in a floral rain. I didn’t know what the tree was at first, but I looked it up.
The fruit of the Barringtonia—known also as the “fish poison tree” or “box fruit tree”—hung heavy among the flowers, pale green cubic things the size of a fist, close to the branches. The species is listed variously as introduced and native to Taiwan, its status muddied. Like coconuts, the fruit is dispersed by water: floating by sea until tides bring it ashore in some distant place. And so this migrant tree has spread, from India through Oceania to the South Pacific. Afloat, its fruit can survive for longer than a decade awaiting landfall.
In Chinese, the Barringtonia’s name, 玉蕊科, means “jade stamen tree,” but its pronunciation, yuruike, is what brought me joy: privately, I began to call it the eureka tree. A tree ever in search of newness, it makes a home wherever the sea might send it.
IT IS A GRAY WEDNESDAY IN TAIPEI WHEN Charlene and I venture toward the river intent on a walk. I have spent many days in the forests and long only for the flat span of the city. I ache from movement, and my knees are still knotted from the mountains. The waterside trail runs flat for a long distance, bordered only by the grasslands that cover the scrappy edges of Songshan Airport. Concrete covers everything else, from the riverbanks to the pavilions that sit between the streets and water.
So often Taipei has a kind of quiet to it: my body becomes anonymous amid innumerable others. I cannot stop to name the people any more than I could identify each tree in an overgrown wood, so I move swiftly, unnamed and unnaming. But here, the river flows slowly, where the low-rises cease their advance across town, and where the thickets of crowds disperse. The occasional cyclist or walker passes us. We greet strangers with a nod, as one does in the countryside, and stop only to notice the rare things that grow up amid the grasses, alone.
The Taiwan Basin is cut through with rivers. The Tamsui River, fed by three tributaries, runs into the city from the foothills in the south and east, a confluence flowing toward the strait. The Keelung River, which flows from the northeast, moves at an ambling pace, and we follow it seaward. We trace our course through where the land feels sunken down, bordered by mountains on the northern horizon, where I know we walk the edge of a single geological fault. As we round a bend, we pass a cluster of old fishermen spread out on chipped plastic stools, their lines bobbing in the shallows. They have come for the day: a Thermos sits on the ground next to them, as well as a plastic bag of fresh fruit. We offer them a quiet nod as we pass, and they return it. Quite what they might catch in the city, I’m not sure; the river is in a sorry state. A short distance past the fishermen, a shallow pool surrounded by reed grass seems a scenic improvement on the concrete banks, but a dead fish and what looks like the remains of a dog sway with the water. When we swam in the waterfall upstream at Huiyao, I didn’t imagine the river flowing out to this.
We walk onward, past a park Charlene has never seen before, and she begins to tell me of the city’s changes.
“I remember when Taipei 101 and that whole area was built, when the MRT lines were built. There’s a station right outside my house. The construction took forever. It’s all so new,” she says.
I laugh, thinking that my mother has told me much the same. She remains confused by the network of trains and tall buildings overlaying the city she knew. I try to envision that scale of change. An app on my phone lays historic maps and aerial photos over Google Maps, and I do this often, wishing to see things as my mother did. In 1958, a field lay where her house would one day stand. A grainy photograph from 1974, the year she left, shows me the rooftop of her home, clustered amid the lanes and tenements that grew like a game of Tetris, spontaneous and erratic in shape. Taipei rose from low Japanese-style buildings with tiled roofs, to be replaced by apartment blocks, and then glassy office towers.
“My mom once told me a story,” I say, “about taking her pet turtle for a walk at the city’s edge. She tied a string around its neck as a leash, and when some neighborhood kids invited her to play, she tied the string to a rice plant. She never found the turtle again.” I laugh at the thought of the turtle on a leash, then recover. “Mostly I just wonder how Taipei was so rural then.”
I’ve watched my mother move unsteadily here, despite her knowing the language and in some deep-rooted way knowing the culture. I’ve navigated for her, moving between map and world, while she has searched for a trace of recognition. When she told me about restaurants she once knew, I would find them online and lead her to them. I worried, always, that she would get lost in her home country. But I have thought, too, of that day I watched her on the shore, beachcombing. Place-memories, however precarious, work their way into the body.
Like mine, Charlene’s family came from the mainland. Born not long after my mother left for Canada, Charlene grew up as Taiwan changed.
“I grew up while people fought for democracy,” she tells me, “when the censorship was really strict. I remember in the eighties my friend ordered an Encyclopaedia Britannica from overseas. And when we unwrapped it, the entry on China had the Chinese flag blacked out, all perfect, with a square glued over the top. There was just a blank in the middle of the page.”
I nod, unsurprised. At sixteen, I’d asked for a copy of The Communist Manifesto, and despite having lived for many decades in Canada, my mother couldn’t believe it was a book we were allowed to buy. I read that under martial law book bans in Taiwan extended not just to Marx but to authors whose names sounded similar: Mark Twain, Max Weber. My father told me once that when he had traveled to Taipei carrying a fax machine—a new technology back then—which he had needed for work, it had been confiscated; the authorities said it was a tool for espionage.
“During the Olympics, when the Chinese team was on screen, the flag was always blurred out. I didn’t see that flag until I moved to the U.S. to go to college!” Charlene laughs.
Despite what she tells me, I feel a kernel of something: envy, perhaps, however misplaced. “You were here in all the decades my family wasn’t,” I say softly, and then immediately feel ashamed.
We reach a bend in the river. The Keelung is more beautiful here, open and free-flowing. A group of kayakers make their way upstream, their red helmets bobbing like buoys over the horizon.
I turn to the grasses, clasping a spike between my fingers. I repeat a rhyme I learned when studying botany, a small thing I have to offer: “Sedges have edges, rushes are round, grasses are hollow right down to the ground.” I pluck a stalk as Charlene repeats the rhyme, and then we examine the grass, peering into its hollow center. Words made in another place feel strangely false here, ill-fitting, like a stretched-out knit. But still, I find comfort in knowing them.
Charlene and I walk farther, following the curve of the river westward past Songshan Airport. At an open field just beyond the runway, the rush of a landing plane reverberates overhead, tearing into the silence of the riverside. I stop short, having never been this close to the runway, and the memory it brings up is not mine. It is taken from the letter, and I have read it repeatedly in the last few days, as if in reading I might polish it like a stone. I’ve turned it over in my mind for weeks. I hold the words for a moment in my mind before speaking.
ONCE, I FLEW WITH THE AIR Force Academy’s principal to Taipei for a meeting. The temperature was bad, so we flew above the clouds. As we reached the city, Songshan Airport was closed due to the heavy fog. But it was an important meeting, so I decided to land. Songshan was familiar to me from my old days; I knew it better than my own hand, knew where the small river curved around it. Above the river, there was no fog, and following it, I could make my landing.
After we landed, the control tower messaged to ask where we were; they could not see a thing. I replied, “We are parked on the runway.” The principal leaned forward and gave me four words: “Riding clouds, driving fog.” When the ground crew arrived, they said they’d known it had to be me, that only I could have landed in that fog.
These old men’s praises made me sad.
I ONCE STOOD ON THE OBSERVATION DECK OF Taipei 101, scanning the horizon. My gaze came to rest on that runway—graying beneath the hills, wrapped by the river—where planes cut a parallel course across the city skyline. I could just about imagine him there.
The letter spanned twenty pages but never concluded. There was no signature, no cohesive ending. The final pages spiraled, paragraphs coiling back into the preceding story, ending mid-sentence. The letter was a map of his mind then, a labyrinthine thing of memory. Geographies blurred. Time shrank and receded in its pages, only to emerge once more, disjointed. I wondered if, in his illness, time had layered. Perhaps it flattened and folded into a single, multitudinous moment, the same way I carried words and places in my mind at once, multilingual and moving.
Reading, I felt at times in the spray of its branches—rows of characters overgrown in the wildness of his script—longing to emerge into a clearing. But his confusion thickened. And then, abruptly, it ceased.
When a storm releases a burst of air—a column known as a microburst—the rapid descent of the wind reaches the ground with the force of a tornado. On impact, it curls outward, its outflow changing direction, roiling the air through which it erupts. It spreads the way water from a tap turned on too quickly hits the sink, flooding outward and then up into the sky. Though it is merely wind, the force of the microburst can be deadly.
It was through such a storm that my grandfather took his last flight during a routine patrol over the Taiwan Strait. It was 1969. The technology to detect microbursts would not exist for another twenty years.
He never spoke of it and mentioned it without detail in his letter. I learned of the accident instead through my mother’s memory.
Flying the coast, the sudden gust—the microburst—thrust his plane down. It fell rapidly, but the landing was braced by sand. He was lucky to crash on the beach not far from the Hsinchu Air Base. Had he been at sea, my mother said, he would likely have died.
My grandfather emerged from the plane entire, walking, and was rushed back to the base. In shock and never wanting to make a nuisance of himself, he insisted he was fine. He was a colonel in a senior role; perhaps no one thought to question him. Just hours later he drove himself to Taipei for a meeting. On arrival, he collapsed. Several vertebrae had been damaged in the crash and would cause him pain for the rest of his life.
He never flew again.
In the old myths of the sky ladder the heavens were reached by scaling a mountain or climbing a tree. Matsu reached heaven by climbing to a height and swaddling herself in fog. From such heights was the world held in order: our human realm beneath a vast, unreachable sky.
I think often of what Gong might have seen racing toward that vault of white. Tumbling into the coastal wind, did he see the ground as it rose up to greet him?
