Excerpt from Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 by Emma Jinhua Teng. Copyright © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted with permission of the Harvard University Asia Center.
Excerpt from Mountains of the Mind © 2003 by Robert Macfarlane. Reproduced with permission of Granta Books.
Excerpts from Liu Ka-shiang’s “Small Is Beautiful” from The Isle Full of Noises, edited by Dominic Cheung. Copyright © 1987 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Excerpt from Liu Ka-shiang’s “Black-faced Spoonbill,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2004, vol. 11, issue 2, pp. 268–69, by permission of the Association for Literature and Environment.
ISBN: 978-1-64622-000-7
Cover illustration © Harriet Lee Merrion
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Calligraphy by Shih-Ming Chang
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954451
Printed in the United States of America
13579108642
For my family
Suddenly the tree was like the stake at the base of which the ashes of ghosts had cooled.
BRANDON SHIMODA
“The Papaya Tree”
CONTENTS
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Shui
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Lin
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
LANGUAGE BARRIERS PLAY A PROMINENT ROLE in this story. Attentive readers of Chinese will note that, while I have used traditional Chinese characters, as is common in Taiwan, I’ve used a combination of the older Wade-Giles romanization system and Hanyu Pinyin (mainland Chinese) to transliterate names, places, and other details from Mandarin.
I’ve retained both forms in this book because usage in Taiwan and among those around me fluctuates—itself a lively illustration of the complexity of language in Taiwan today. Generally speaking, if I am writing about mainland China I have used Hanyu Pinyin, while for Taiwanese place-names I have mostly used Wade-Giles or occasionally the Tongyong Pinyin transliterations commonly used by local people and on signage. Google Maps—which uses Hanyu Pinyin—renders the process of moving between digital maps and local usage somewhat complicated, so for places where Hanyu Pinyin has supplanted Wade-Giles (for example, Nenggao Mountain), I have used those names. For simplicity of reading between the two styles, I have omitted tone marks from my transliterations.
It should be noted that Wade-Giles is the preferred style of my elders; Hanyu Pinyin is what I was subsequently taught.
The gaps that bind us span more than the distances between words.
n. ISLAND
Islands emerge through movement, through collision, and through accretion.
I HAVE LEARNED MANY WORDS FOR “ISLAND”: isle, atoll, eyot, skerry. They exist in archipelagos or alone, and I have always understood them by their relation to water. The English word “island,” after all, comes from the German “aue,” from the Latin “aqua,” meaning “water.” An island is a world afloat; an archipelago is a place pelagic.
The Chinese word for island knows nothing of water. For a civilization grown inland from the sea, the vastness of mountains was a better metaphor: 島 dao (“island,” pronounced “to” in Taiwanese) is built from the relationship between earth and sky. The character contains the idea that a bird 鳥 (niao) can rest on a lone mountain 山 (shan).
Taiwan is just eighty-nine miles wide, but in that distance it climbs nearly thirteen thousand feet from sea level. The jump to precipitous peaks creates a wealth of habitats, such that the island sustains a range of forests much vaster than its small footprint. The coasts are muffled with salt- and sun-soaked mangroves, and moving south, thick tropical jungle grows. The wet heat of a tropical rain forest thrums to temperate trees, and their hardwoods climb to pines. Boreal forests—with towering, size-of-a-house cathedral trees—grow up from the middle slopes of the island. Beyond the tree line, the mountains peter out to prairie, cane grasslands widening toward an alpine sky. Like topographical rings on a map, the trees array themselves by elevation.
Born into conflict at the junction of two volcanic arcs, Taiwan is an unstable landmass in perpetual confrontation. Set along the Ring of Fire—the Pacific zone plagued by quakes and eruptions—southeast of China, west of Japan, north of the Philippines, the island marks the border of two tectonic plates: this is known to geologists as a destructive plate boundary. The collision of the Eurasian and Philippine Sea plates forced the island into being some 6 to 9 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch. Such collisions are powerful, with one plate thrust beneath another, raising land from the sea and into the air. But these borders can be devastating, too.
The Central Mountain Range, running some 170 miles, four-fifths of the island’s length, and the Hsuehshan Range, arcing halfway across the island’s north, are flanked on either side by faults. The foothills and flatlands to the west wear breakage like errant stitching on a quilt, determining and dividing the landscape. To the east, the Coastal Mountain Range