Gong had always been quiet, reading or caring for his plants in a solitary way during his time off from work as a janitor. When I was small, I would visit and watch him mop the floors of the Chef Boyardee canned-pasta factory. The brown-bricked building fascinated me, with its enormous steel machines and the pervasive smell of boiled starch and citrus cleaner. I would watch him clean, quiet as ever, and then beam with childish pride when he bought me a can of beef ravioli. I never questioned how his life had taken him there, long past retirement, dragging a hot mop across the floor of a Canadian factory.
I was twenty-seven when I went to Taiwan for the second time, my first visit since I was a baby. It was 2013. Gong had returned there and died a few years earlier, and my mother and I had gone to visit his remains. He had died alone, his memories wasted. It felt, to us, an irrevocable betrayal, though we’d had no say in what had happened and we couldn’t have changed it.
Decades had passed since my mother had emigrated. But the island had called my family back. My mother began to talk about returning for good when she retired. I saw the ways she had tried on a different life on a different continent, and how it bristled speaking a language she’d inherited, asking her children questions in Mandarin and receiving replies in English. We mocked her errors, as children do, and she would reply, “Well, you speak Chinese, then,” jokingly, though I sensed a loss in her tone. I saw in Taiwan something of the ways that places draw us in—and sometimes push us away again—and there grew in me an inarticulate longing.
My mother and I spent the better part of that visit wandering overgrown hills and trails outside the cities, in the hot and overgrown forests she had once known, where as a child she had roamed the green sprawl near her home, wandering wet through rice paddies on late afternoons, where she had memorized the plants that sprung vivid from every patch.
We ventured to the south, to Kenting, where she’d spent childhood holidays on the peninsula of coral. We soaked in northern rain in Yangmingshan, and delved into the mist that blanketed Taroko. Those first days in the cloud forest softened me to fog. In the mountains, I saw curtains of growth that clung to the cliffs, draping and enfolding every jagged bone of the mountainside. They petered out into clumps of withered brown stone where rock had not yet relented to root. But spiny trees grew from the holes left by erosion, and vines navigated the smoothed-down faces of the stone. The green was unceasing in its efforts.
It felt as if we were finding in the landscape an expression of this place and our lives beyond my grandfather’s death, beyond a past I did not fully understand. I developed a love for these mountains and their forests, a need to return and return again.
I lamented the years we’d stayed away. It wasn’t nostalgia—a dangerous thing, if it sees too narrowly—but still, other words could not account for it. Sehnsucht, from my adopted language, German—a yearning for another course, for things that could have been different—perhaps. Hiraeth, from Welsh—a homesickness for a past to which I could not return—came close. There is a Chinese word—鄉情 (xiangqing)—that means “longing for one’s native place.” But none of them quite fit. Unable to determine my feelings with words, I began to think, perhaps, that whatever force had stitched my grandparents and my mother to this place had caught me, with just a thread at first, and then bound me to it still stronger. My grief was displaced by deep affection. Does regret, by nature, transmute into longing?
I do not think it was a unique desire. I know others who have lost places or relatives, who have taken comfort in returning, as if exercising a muscle memory passed down through the generations. I found a constancy and a comfort in walking the island’s hills.
And where I couldn’t find words, I fell to other languages: to plants, to history, to landscape. My work as an environmental historian had taught me a great deal about temperate plants and navigating my way through a Canadian pine forest or a European heath with familiarity. In the vast and unrolling woodlands I grew up with in Canada, there is the red flame of autumn, the spare and silent retreat of winter. The pines and maples do their seasonal dance: pollen, senescence, bare branch.
But in Taiwan I found myself botanically adrift, as unsure of the trees as I was of the ferns that sprouted from windowsills. Taiwan’s plants are too many to name.
A green washes itself over Taiwan’s hillsides, a mottled, deep hue that reminds me more of lake than of land, of darkened waterweed more than tree. The green rolls out on the horizon, glinting with occasional light, but more often steaming with the low-hanging clouds that cling to the border between hillside and sky. That verdant hue is unlike any other I know.
Taiwan’s hills form a natural boundary between the cities and the mountains. Camphor laurels, peeling elms, charcoal trees, banyans, and sugar palms are overrun with the unfurling of ferns beyond number, with giant taros that stand gaping under heavy rain. The parasols of the eight-fingered Diplofatsia reach their hands to the sky. Their many greens stand layered, saturated, and deepened.
The island holds both migrant and endemic species. There are plants that came from the continent, carried by birds or other animals, by air or by the land bridge that once filled the Taiwan Strait when sea levels were lower, many ages ago. Some came from the island chain to the east—Japan—while others floated atop the southern seas, sprouting on the shores. There are newer plants that arose only here, a quarter of them evolved in isolation on their island home. In Taiwan’s plants I saw both movement and change: species adapting to climate, to altitude, to soil.
I met mimosa that curled at my touch. Dendrocalamus latiflorus, Latin for “tree reed”: sweet bamboos whose tall heads swayed. In my visits, I came to know them by walking, by crouching low to the ground to catch a scent, and by training the lens of my camera on their distant reaches.
I searched books for a guide. I found in the works of nineteenth-century British geographers a strange vision of the island. Their accounts of Taiwan’s inner reaches held a trace of terror—the plants too foreign, the forests too thick. They wrote of the island as beautiful yet threatening, a wilderness overgrown; the sublimity of extremely high mountains found an analogue just as readily in darkened woods. John Thomson, a photographer and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote of softly beautiful mountain scenery cut through with gigantic forests, where “climbing parasitic plants passing from tree to tree formed a chaos like the confusion of ropes on a Chinese junk.” These portrayals mingled beauty with fear, with curiosity and exoticism, occasionally with disgust. Though written in English, I struggled to find in them a language I could share.
But this was the green my mother grew up with. She told me the Mandarin names of plants I had no reference for, passed on from my grandfather to her: 鳳凰木 fenghuang mu (phoenix or flame trees) and 芭蕉 bajiao, a fibrous, inedible species of banana; her childhood through the names of trees. I turned their names over in my mouth, stretching their shapes into my mind, and found in them a longing to remember the things I had not known.
TAIPEI WAS A CITY THAT BELONGED TO MY childhood imagination. Built of words spoken quietly to me by my mother, its streets were paved with her longings. The air was made of memories. In this place, Taipei was a single hillside, a school at its crest and a tenement block at its base. A packed-dirt road cut a straight line between them, bustling with street-food sellers in carts that looked uncannily like the Toronto hot dog vendors of my youth. There was no wind, and there were no trees. The light was yellow, and the only smell was that of the choudoufu my mother missed most after leaving Taiwan.
“But does it really smell like poo?” I would ask her, having never smelled choudoufu before.
“Not at all! It smells delicious,” she would reply, tucking me into bed.
“Then why is it called stinky tofu?”
She would shrug, smiling as if a morsel of that memory had just passed her lips.
Every day as a schoolgirl