I PRINT OUT A MAP IN FULL COLOR, COUNTING each of the active fault lines with the tip of my finger. Forty-three in total, most of them cracked into the space of the narrow flatlands. They have names I’ve come to know: the Sanchiao and Chinshan Faults, which run across the north, past Taipei. The Chukuo Fault, inland from Tainan and Chiayi, where the Eurasian and Philippine Sea Plate meet. The Chelungpu Fault, where in 1999 the surface ruptured so violently that the fault line remains visible today, the ground excavated for public viewing.
I check my earthquake app. There have been only a handful in recent weeks, small ones, but more will come. Some researchers say they come in hundred-year cycles, arriving in a cluster of violent quakes and their aftershocks once each century. Their detractors point out that since the data spans little more than a hundred years, it could be impossible to know. But the island, some believe, is overdue for a bad earthquake. Like hurricane watchers, they await “the big one.” There are predictions hoping to lend clarity to the opaqueness of future devastation. For now they tremble subtly, unnoticed beneath the ground. I mark their locations on my map and read websites on what to do in an emergency. If indoors, stay there. If in bed, stay there. If outdoors, stay in the open.
The records we keep of earthquakes depend upon our abilities to measure them. The nineteenth-century Gray-Milne seismometers in Taipei, Tainan, Keelung, Taichung, and Hengchun were followed by Japanese-made Omori types, and then the enormous Wiechert devices dampened with springs. A disastrous quake in Taichung and Hsinchu in 1935 prompted the creation of even more earthquake monitoring stations, such that Taiwan’s network spanned sixteen locations by the end of the Second World War. With U.S. support, new instruments came into use through the 1950s and ’60s. By 1973, the groundwork for an advanced detection system capable of recording magnitudes as low as 1 was put in place.
Taiwan now has one of the world’s most advanced earthquake monitoring networks—with an early warning system designed to give notice to trains, hospitals, gas pipelines, and elevators—stretched over seventy-one locations. Its scope is broad: standard seismometers positioned throughout the country, accelerometers to measure seismic waves in differing geologic conditions, seismometers plunged into deep wells beneath the ground, sensors and cables installed in buildings, GPS observation, groundwater observation wells, and air-pressure gauges. The Central Weather Bureau collates the Earth’s movements, and its website lists dozens a month. When an earthquake swarm—a cluster of quakes over a short period of time—arrives, the online list grows into the hundreds.
But we do not yet know how to predict earthquakes; we search for clues across science and folklore. Water in wells changes levels before and during quakes, so hydrographs are used. There are other more ethereal and less understood phenomena. In Haicheng, China, in 1975, it is said that in the days leading up to a 7.3 magnitude earthquake, the city’s animals began to behave erratically. The city was evacuated, a decision that prevented massive loss of life. Some say that earthworms leave the soil in the moments before a quake, while according to Japanese legend catfish flee their ponds. In other places, strange cloud formations and lights in the sky have been observed before a quake: luminous glows that conspiracy theorists have called UFOs. But the glut of evidence for such strange sightings in recent years—thanks in part to the ubiquity of camera phones—has led to more scientific attention. There are those who believe these strange “earthquake lights” are just a burst of electricity working its way through stressed mineral structures or are like the triboluminescent flash produced when an object is cracked or broken, when the earth creates light like a peppermint snapped in a darkened room. The tales go back centuries, to ancient times, woven into myths and science. But regardless of our explanations, the temblors come.
I have found a strange quietude in following these attempts to chart nature: through maps, through flora, through seismicity. They give me something tangible to keep track of, not because a map can be equated with its territory but because it gives me some way of ordering the world and its complications. I once saw my grandfather write out words from an English dictionary, using each one in a sentence. Perhaps they gave him access to a world different from his own. When I walk a trail and feel foreign, I can name a tree or a rock. A map of fault lines, I think, might enable us to watch for things slipping away.
“I SAID GOODBYE MY FAMILY,” PO CROAKED TO me once, dropping words the way she often did. I didn’t ask anything more, realizing as young kids do that there are some sentences that do not ask for a reply.
She told us the past carefully, through stories delimited and composed. But my sister and I had trusted the boundaries of our Chinese lives, as if that entire aspect of our history was concentrated in one place and in this single relation of grandparents to grandchildren. The Niagara Falls bungalow was an island unto itself. It was the only place we spoke Mandarin; they were the people with whom we explored that side of ourselves. The neighborhood around their house was a suburban sea; we rarely wandered beyond the chain-link fence that lined the driveway, except to pick peaches from the neighbor’s yard. If we saw the surrounding area, it was from the plush comfort of the Oldsmobile. Once in a while, we’d take the car on day trips over the U.S. border, stopping at Topps supermarket in Buffalo for loganberry juice and at Ponderosa for the all-you-can-eat buffet.
The bungalow was a place I loved: I spent long hours preparing food with Gong, rolling and folding jiaozi, and wasted mornings lying on my tummy on the orange shag rug in front of the television. As a child, I had Po’s palate, a love of salt and sugar that meant we would slice and eat cold salted butter when no one else was around and then sprinkle white sugar on thin Chinese pancakes, rolled up and devoured in a mouthful. In the afternoons we ate Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream with cornflakes.
My grandmother hid from view the past she didn’t want us to know. I see it now, as if its traces had existed amid the old newspapers and soap-opera videos she’d fall asleep to in the basement.
My mother dialed two of the numbers on the old phone bill. One to China—her newfound cousin, Dong-ping—and one to Taiwan. When the call to Taiwan connected, my mother asked the stranger on the line if she had known my grandmother. “Chi-chien?” the voice replied, saying my mother’s name. “Is that you?”
Months later, standing before us in the lobby of the Taipei Sheraton, Jing-xien wore a plaid coat, thick and quilted against the cold. Her shoes, I noticed, were as small as my mother’s. She stood a good foot shorter than me, with cropped and graying soft hair. Across the table, over cups of tea, I watched her expressions: the wrinkle of her eyes, the intentness of her face while listening. Once in a while she would smile and nod, gracious and kind. In her seventies, she looked, I thought, uncannily like my grandmother.
On our way over, we had fretted over what to call Jing-xien, my grandmother’s cousin. The complications of kinship were a tangle with which we were unacquainted. Every family member, depending on whether they are on the mother’s or father’s side, has a different title in Chinese. Having only ever known our grandparents, my sister and I never learned those names. My mother didn’t know either: when I asked, she shrugged, unsure. Like so many children after 1949, she’d grown up without extended family. I searched the internet for names and found a table of titles for extended family, but there was nothing for a maternal elder cousin twice removed. This was a language none of us spoke. My mother decided that it was simplest if we just called Jing-xien auntie: Ayi.
Ayi lived near Daan Forest Park, a short distance from where my mother had grown up. She had left China as a small child and, like my mother, grown up in Taiwan, her own parents living in a military village like the one Po and Gong had lived in at Gangshan. She was only a decade older than my mother.
Unpacking a large envelope from her handbag, Ayi passed me an old photograph. In it, a much younger Jing-xien sat in the corner of a sofa wearing an oversized Christmas jumper. A three-year-old in turquoise overalls sat beaming next to her. Me.
I held the photograph for a minute, absorbing every detail. The jade-inlaid screen stood behind and the black leather sofa gleamed in the flash. It had been taken in the Niagara Falls bungalow.
Tears welled in my eyes, but I suppressed them, swallowing hard, not wanting to cry in front of someone new to us. But I had the evidence in my hand. I—we—had known her.
At the table, Mom and Ayi perused the menu, names for foods lubricating the slight awkwardness of this decades-stalled meeting. A plate of fried tofu appeared, followed by snow fungus speckled with wolfberry and lotus seeds. I could hardly eat, wanting only to focus on understanding the conversation between Ayi and my mother, their quiet revelations being laid out across the table. I turned to my tea, waiting for my mother’s pauses for translation.
“Jing-xien says that she was always close with Gong. They used to play cards,” my mother explained. “But she didn’t always get along with Po.”
In the late 1980s, Ayi and her family came over to Canada, staying for a few weeks in Niagara Falls. It was then that the photograph had been taken. A few others from the same roll of film offered a timeline of their visit: a stop at my father’s office, a trip to McDonald’s, Happy Meals unboxed and spread across the plastic table. In one photograph, my sister, Ayi, and I sit close, smiling.
Something trivial but powerful had passed between her and my grandmother—she still did not know what. But in the years after, Po never spoke Jing-xien’s name to us; her existence was covered over as to be invisible.
Beneath the table, Ayi clasped my mother’s hand, holding her with tearful eyes. She said something in Mandarin, too quickly for me to understand. I turned to my mother.
“She says that she remembers when I was born,” Mom translated. “In Kaohsiung. I lived with her until I was three, while Po worked in Taipei.”
I had never heard of these years my mother spent apart from her parents, had always believed she had been born in Taipei. My brow furrowed, and Mom shrugged her shoulders in reply. She did not know either.
I felt troubled. My mother had known Jing-xien in her childhood, but had said nothing of her to us. That, I could not account for. I wondered why she hadn’t sought Jing-xien out in the decades that had passed. I turned to her, searching, but found in her face a grief I had not seen before. She held her breath a moment, her eyes creased with tears. I saw her gathering her strength. My mother’s world had been as bounded as my own. How could she, alone, have strayed from the limits Po had set?
Midway through the meal, while my mother was in the restroom, Ayi leaned over to me and spoke for the first time in quiet, halting English.
“Your mom and daddy—” She broke off, gesturing separation by moving her hands apart. I nodded, not knowing how to tell her that my parents had divorced nearly twenty years ago, not wanting my mother to return in the midst of such an explanation. I did not know how to ask why we had all been kept apart. The years hung between us anyway, unspoken.
My sister and I had grown up not knowing of Ayi’s existence. She had lived not knowing what became of my mother or of us.
In the weeks that followed, I went back over the recordings I’d made with Po, looking for a slip that indicated she had mentioned Jing-xien to us, just once. I searched Gong’s letters, looking for her name: my grandfather had never said anything, and the letters, too, showed nothing. I looked for some evidence that it was I who had been mistaken. I had spent my life repeating the words of my mother, my grandmother: we had no other family. Were our memories so short?
The loss of my grandmother’s family on the mainland, as abrupt as it was, was something Po had shared with us. We had mourned it, in what small ways we could. I had turned to that story for explanation so often—for her anger, for the distance she had kept between all of us—but could never find satisfaction in its reasons. The instincts I had to order and make sense of the past fell flat. I knew only that there were words she could not speak, explanations that dwelt only in the darkness between feeling and form. There exist losses impossible to distill into mere stories.