THE NORTHERN RAIN COMES HEAVY IN WINTER. Clouds hang wool-thick over the mountains around Taipei. I greet the peaks each morning as I leave the apartment, peering down Chengfu Road toward the Four Beasts. Their damp green seems to dissolve into sky, as if the rain comes from the trees themselves. The hills show me something my grandfather might have known well, because what else is flight if not a journey into cloud?
Qixing Mountain stands between the city and the sea, in a small chain of mountains that clamber steeply between the Tamsui River and the coast. Today, little of it is visible in the fog and heavy rain. But there is a sound, otherworldly and fierce, which is magnified by the sulfuric stench that rises with it, a firestorm shriek hissing into the air. I have never heard such a noise: volcanic fumaroles boil at the base where groundwater is heated until steam erupts from small cracks in the stone.
Sulfur drew the Han Chinese to Taiwan in the seventeenth century, when Yu Yonghe had ventured his way to the north. At the tip of the island the ground was known to smoke (fumaroles take their name from the Latin word fumus, for smoke), lakes and streams known to boil. In the nineteenth century, when Robert Swinhoe wrote to the Royal Geographical Society of his travels on the island, he noted that the volcanic chasms near the sulfur mines “had everywhere a pale sickly tint of yellow and red…hot steam gushed in jets with great noise and force, like the steam from the escape-pipe of a high-pressure engine.” Today, the slope looks like a gaping wound in the mountain. I come first to a small spring boiling at the trail’s edge. Where the cracks leach sulfur, the rocks are tinged yellow-green, a color that strikes me as belonging not to nature but to a world deep in Earth’s belly. The silver grass nearby blooms red instead of its usual white.
Qixing is part of the Datun Volcanic Group—a group of more than twenty volcanoes clustered north of Taipei—reaching eastward until Keelung. Some 2.8 million years ago, when the tectonic plates beneath Taiwan collided, eruptions began launching into the world. Lava oozed to andesite, cooled, went dormant. And then, eight hundred thousand years ago, the eruptions formed the small mountains of this northern mass: Qixing Mountain (literally, Seven Stars Mountain) is magmatic and multiple, eroded into seven peaks. Grass grows over the curving mounds, giving the entire region a softened look (the mountain was once named Caoshan, “Grass Mountain”). The eruptions stopped two hundred thousand years ago, but a volcanic underbelly remains: the magmatic chamber reaches eastward to the still-active volcano of Guishan Island, and scientists continue to speculate as to when the Datun volcanoes may erupt again.
Qixing Mountain’s height makes it vulnerable to the weather that courses in from the sea; it sits braced against northern monsoons. On this slope, only silver grass and cane survive; on southern slopes, shielded from the cold and warmed by the geothermal activity beneath the soil, a few trees grow. As I make my way uphill, every so often I spot a lonely windblown tree and glance at its leaves to check: Trochodendron aralioides, the wheel tree or “cloud-leaf tree” (雲葉樹, yun ye shu), has evergreen leaves that radiate, almost a whorl. In summer, its inflorescences resemble spokes. The species was first recorded mostly in the isolated forests of the Central Mountains and photographed by William Robert Price, the botanist who traveled with Henry John Elwes in 1912. Normally found at altitudes between two thousand and three thousand meters, at Qixing they live as low as eight hundred meters.
The tree’s botanical beginnings were unstable. The taxonomic science by which we ordered the tree shifted. First recorded in Japan, the tree was moved from family to family, until eventually the species was categorized in a new order: Trochodendrales, an order with two genera, both with just a single species. All of the tree’s other relatives—found as fossils on distant continents—are extinct.
Do our shifting orders and genera mean anything to the cloud-leaf tree? The tree dwells ever in solitude, in the sea winds of these battered hills.
SOME MONTHS FROM NOW, MY MOTHER WILL board a plane to China, a far different country from the land my grandparents left. Will she see the home my grandmother grew up in and meet the family who lived in her absence? I wonder what remains of the old homestead—the square block with the chandlery and the soy bean factories, the bakery and the teahouse. Will she see my grandfather’s village in the north and sweep the graves of our ancestors?
I think of what my mother might say when Dong-ping greets her. Will she find in my mother’s face something familiar?
I am leaving Taiwan soon, flying back to Berlin in the coming days. I feel the weight of the departure, a disjointed frustration at not being able to be in two places at once. I want to stay, but I have to return.
I have spent the past week in preparation. I visited my mother’s old apartment, memorizing the façade, its window frames and weathered concrete. I went to Jing-xien Ayi’s house for lunch and held her hand over a table laden with my Taiwanese favorites: braised eggs, marinated tofu skins, sticky rice dumplings, and cabbage. In the middle of our meal, she leaped out of her chair and came back with an enormous wooden cutting board, darkened with age.
“Ni Gong geile wo zhege.” (“Your grandfather gave me this.”) “Sixty years ago, when I was a girl,” she added in English.
She has used the board for her entire life, rolling dough on its smooth surface, the way Gong used to when he made jiaozi or hezi. I reached out and touched the cool butter-brown wood, feeling in my fingertips the closeness to something he once held, wood that had so much of my family’s life in it. I choked back the tears that flooded me then, not wanting to bring my grief to Jing-xien Ayí’s kitchen table, and turned to my tea, hiding my emotion in its warmth.
After lunch, she walked me to the lift, hugging me close in goodbye. The doors slid open, and as I stepped in to depart she cried out clearly in English, “Merry Christmas!” The lift doors closed, and I pressed myself against its mirrored wall, the wave of emotion I’d been suppressing overtaking me. I wept not from loss but from the knowledge that I’d gained family. But as I stepped into the street, my phone pinged with a message: a Snoopy sticker from Ayi, hearts flowing out from the black-and-white dog’s cartoon form. I felt joy at her lighthearted affection as I made my way along Heping Road.
That evening, Charlene walked with me to Longshan Temple. We found it swathed in the half-light of the city, brightened only by the glow of the joss sticks in its halls. Shadows lingered in the corners, a vision of the temple’s past made possible by an unexpected power cut. In the absence of light, the tourists had left and the temple stood near empty.
Charlene led me through the process of bai bai, each clutching a single joss stick as we moved through the temple. At Matsu, in the rear hall, I felt a familiarity. I was able to think clearly. Po and Gong had been granted safe passage to the island, a home at sea. Taiwan gave us a place to return to. I held my breath a moment, hearing only the darkness, and then the electricity was restored. A golden light flooded through the halls, and a pumped stream swelled in the waterfall at the temple’s gate. I left grateful for the moment of silence the darkness had offered.
QIXING MOUNTAIN BLEACHES MY SENSES. THE wind above the cane is so loud I cannot hear my thoughts. As I near the peak, I tuck my body low to the steps to avoid being blown back. Fog turns the world to white, and every inhalation I take has the cut of ice. The rain has thinned to erratic drops that every so often fall directly on my face. But it is no matter; I am soaked through, as much with rain as with cold sweat. I discover exhilaration in my discomfort.
The peak opens to an empty plateau, spread over with rocks and a small platform of wood. A pillar is carved with the altitude—1,120 meters. Beyond the slopes, somewhere beneath the volcanic heights on which I stand, is the city. On a clear day, Taipei can be seen from the height of Qixing, and so can the coast in the opposite direction. Now the storm is spread thickly against the sky. I can scarcely see the ground I’ve walked over, and I cannot see the lanes of the city or the swathe of Songshan Airport near the river. But I can taste the rain as it drips into my mouth and feel the cold wind as it unfurls against my limbs.
I long for a view, to see the island from a height, but it does not come. In this pale, damp firmament, there is no clearing. Instead, I have come to know the whiteness of a rain-cloaked canopy. I know the water that washes this place, spreading from the north; the sunlit fog that gathers at the heights of clouds; the trees that huddle green together, catching mist in their crowns.
I spend a few moments in that delicate cold, against the mantle of the island sky. Seeing only light, I make my way back down the mountain.