Islands transfix us, their mythologies tied as much to their isolation as to imagination. Long-sought Ithaca or the seaport in a tempest, the islands I know from stories can be both real and fanciful; material places of rock and soil, they come laden with the ideological weight of Edens and arcadias, with visions of paradise.
The Chinese coastline is littered with islands close at hand—easy to reach, knowable—but for centuries, those in the distance across the Taiwan Strait or the East China Sea remained treacherous to reach and explore. It is easy to imagine how they might have been idealized, or likewise abhorred, for their distance from Chinese civilization. In Chinese myth, Penglai—described as both a mountain and an island—was the home of the immortals, blessed with cups that never ran dry, with rice bowls that never emptied. In the third century B.C., the first emperor of a unified China sought the mythic island, sailing his ships to the east. It is said that the emperor’s emissaries found Japan instead.
But Penglai—蓬萊—is also one of the traditional names for Taiwan. It was for this wealth of natural resources that Qing explorers first ventured to the island that was renowned for its abundance. In 1697, the colonial scribe Yu Yonghe traveled in search of sulfur. In his journey along the coast, led by indigenous guides and servants, he described rice grains the size of beans and island crops providing perhaps twice the harvest of the mainland. Coconuts could be split and used as cups for wine. He wrote that Taiwan’s fruit—plentiful but mostly unfamiliar to the voyagers—would spoil on the journey back to the mainland; the island was vital and abundant but entirely unto itself. For those from the continent, these eastern archipelagos were brimming with life, mountains in a turbulent sea. But unlike the immortal islands of myth, Taiwan belonged to the material realm, a living world on a fault-ridden terrain.
This is a story of that island. And it is also a story of family.
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LANGUAGES BECOME A HOME. IN ENGLISH, I find my mind, and in German, my present life in Berlin. But my earliest words in childhood were in Mandarin, my mother’s tongue. I know them still. 狗 gou (“dog”), 老虎 laohu (“tiger”), 愛 ai (“love”), and especially:
婆
Po
Grandmother.
公
Gong
Grandfather.
Po and Gong had moved from China—from homesteads no one had left in generations—to Taiwan, where they lived for nearly four decades, unable to return to the mainland. They arrived in the years after the Second World War, along with more than 1 million other mainland Chinese when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) government fled to Taiwan at the end of the civil war.
Taiwan had changed hands repeatedly: Though its indigenous inhabitants had lived there for thousands of years, the arrival of the Spanish and the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century spurred a continuous scramble for the island. The Dutch and Spanish both set up trading posts on the western shores and were succeeded by Chinese colonists, who held the island for over two centuries. After the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan ruled the island from 1895 until 1945, when it was transferred back to China. When my grandparents arrived, the decades of cultural separation were an even greater gulf to cross.
People like my grandparents and their descendants became known in Taiwan as 外省人 waishengren (literally “people from outside the province,” meaning mainlanders), a term so imprecise that even now I wonder how to explain our origins. Our histories stretched across places imprecisely until our borders grew too hazy to define. Eventually, with my mother, my grandparents immigrated to Canada, where I was born. My grandfather, nearing his death, left Canada and returned to Taiwan. I grew older and then moved away myself—first to Britain, where my father is from, and then to Germany, where I made my life as a writer and academic. My mother, sister, and I stumbled over whether to call ourselves Chinese—we weren’t from a China that exists any longer—or Taiwanese. No single word can contain the movements that carried our story across waters, across continents.
Names are rarely uncomplicated markers. So often they are born from the snares of conquest, from the declarations and misunderstandings of those who sailed from foreign shores. From China and Japan; from Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. Ilha Formosa: Portuguese for “Beautiful Island.” Tayouan, an ethnonym taken from a local indigenous settlement. Ryukyu or Liuqiu, the island arc of Okinawa, of which Taiwan marks a geological end. Taiwan is rendered in script as 臺灣 or 台灣, tai for “platform” or “terrace,” wan for “bay.” A foothold in a churning sea.
Names here are buried and written-over things, erupting from the ground underfoot the way faults emerge from a quake. 中華民國 Zhonghua Minguo, “Republic of China” as the country has been officially known since 1945. Or that incendiary marker, “Taiwan, Province of China.”
Disruption is written in the island’s stone: forged in movement, scattered with dormant volcanic hills and slopes that rise from sea to sky so swiftly they cannot be captured in a single glance. It is a place that demands time and slow attention but can be undone in a single moment of subterranean trembling.
I was eighteen when my grandfather forgot who I was. I was napping on the sofa at my grandparents’ bungalow in Niagara Falls, waiting for my mother to drive us back home. I’d stayed in the bungalow a hundred times before: on school holidays, at weekends, and when my parents would travel for work. Its thick orange carpeting was familiar underfoot. I knew the feel of its light switches in the darkness, where the edges of the smoked-glass dining table protruded, and which of my childhood photographs belonged on which shelf. Mildewed stacks of Chinese newspapers dwelled in the corners, absorbing the polypropylene smell of the VHS tapes of Taiwanese soap operas that towered in the basement. I’d memorized the sounds and smells, the landscape scenes wrought in jade that my grandfather loved, and had helped care for the bonsai tree he kept. I slept comfortably, curled into the summer stickiness of the black leather sofa, until Gong stood at my feet, pointed at me, and spoke in the only language he had left.
那是誰?
Na shi shei?
“Who is that?”
Gong’s Alzheimer’s had made itself apparent to me, and I began to ask questions. The realization that the past was quickly dissolving gave an urgency to the task of knowing it. I had taken so much of my grandparents’ lives for granted, and language had been a barrier. I had stopped going to Saturday Chinese school when I was eight, dreading being the only half-Chinese kid in the classroom as we plowed through the three-hour span of calligraphy and folk songs, so my Mandarin dwindled and faded to its most basic. Our lives together took on a simplified form: my memories of Po and Gong are mostly of the food they cooked.
My father’s large family held a kind of gravitational pull. His parents moved from Wales to Canada when my older sister, Nika, and I were young, and with them I felt the warmth of a shared language, of cousins and distant relatives. But we didn’t have other family on my mother’s side—no aunties or great-grandmothers or cousins to call on. It had always been this way; I thought it was like that for many immigrant families, spread across the world as we were.
I knew that my grandparents had been born in China, but considered Taiwan home. I had a vague sense of why, though I’d visited the island only as an infant. I heard occasional mention of past wars and government leaders, of fighter jets and the ills of communism, but that history was not taught in Canadian schools. When people heard my family was from Taiwan, they would often reply, “Thailand? I love Thai food.” I learned to correct them, tactfully and smiling, never wanting to make my frustration known; but I realized, too, how little I knew myself.
To me, Po had simply always been my irascible, difficult grandmother. She squabbled with my mother and father