Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan's Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Family's Past

And where I couldn’t find words, I fell to other languages: to plants, to history, to landscape.

The gaps that bind us span more than the distances between words.

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.

Wading into silver grass is akin to bathing in a sharpened pool of reeds, the fronds of seed holding fast to the rain. A wet slap is followed by the leaves, whetted as a blade, leaving paper cuts on the skin of our necks and hands. The grass rises above us, screening our view of the trail ahead, leaving us to traverse a patch just wide enough to set one foot in front of the other. I soon find myself lost in the task of swimming through them.

Our versions of the truth so often dwell in the language we chose, but the words we use have consequences, they signify allegiances, shared histories, harms and losses.

His was a slow leaving. He had resisted it. In his letter were parts I had never seen of the smiling, quiet man who had made spaghetti or folded dumplings, who had danced giddy with me in stacked shoes at holiday parties. They were parts left in Taiwan, pieces he shared with no one, things he had lost in China. They belonged to those places, and the person he had been when all of him was there.

A taxi driver asked me why my Mandarin was so good for a foreigner. “My mother is from Taiwan,” I explained, and he turned on me in reprimand. “Then why is your Mandarin so poor?

This is not a place I could simply learn, and it is not mine anyway. I belong in a forest in a much bigger, colder country. I am not built for heat any more than my mother was built for winter. I speak in broken tones, making half sense to everyone I meet in Taiwan. My worlds exist in halves.