The range can be dramatic: forest surveys are ringed and banded things that follow the growth of mountains. Oaks and laurels cling to the lower slopes, with cypresses making their languid growth in the damp middle ranges. Above the fog are hemlock and endemic fir, growing upward until snow dusts the shrubs of the highest peaks. With a changing climate and a warming world, for many species there is little place to migrate but skyward. Tree lines creep ever higher, and the realm of the cold-loving species shrinks. Bound to the summits, these species can live a lonely life. And in this way, mountains become islands of their own.
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BURIED WITHIN THE FOLDS OF THE YELLOWED envelope, my grandfather’s letter felt surprisingly thin. Unfolding it, I lifted it to the light, so that the handwriting appeared backlit in glowing rows of parallel script, a landscape on a vertical lined page. It wasn’t much, perhaps twenty pages, but it was all that remained of Gong. Unsure of touching them, thin and brittle as they were, I dusted my fingers over the words, their pen marks deep-set in the page.
There were words I recognized—大 da (“big,” a person with its arms stretched wide), 媽 ma (“mother,” given its meaning from “woman” 女 and its sound from “horse” 馬), 口 kou (“mouth”)—their ideal forms scrawled as misshapen shadows. I had to squint to read them, one at a time, stranded in a crowd I didn’t recognize. I stopped at one: 哥哥 gege (a mouth and a man) rendered with the old radical for nail (丁), stacked and repeated like an anchor. Older brother. My grandfather was an older brother, and it was to his sister that he addressed his letter.
He had never spoken to me of his family, beyond the refrain, repeated by my mom, that he’d learned to cook at his mother’s side. His love had felt total, unequivocal to me, a small child. He had pressed his whole palm to my face in affection, and had always let me help feed his pet turtle, Xiao Wugui, using a miniature spoon saved from a McDonald’s coffee. When his illness became too much to manage, he’d given me the turtle, a red-eared slider the size of a tablespoon. I kept it in my bedroom, a reminder of Gong’s love. Now, almost thirty years after Gong first brought him home, the little turtle still grows.
In that single word—gege, “older brother”—an entire life appeared, the possibility of knowing Gong as a child and as a man, more of him than I had ever known.
I had the letter translated and then read it line by line, comparing the characters he’d written to the words typed into English. A work of excavation, of unearthing meaning and context from the lines, my reading stretched out over many days. I took the pages paragraph by paragraph, as if setting the limits of a survey plot, words and names the samples of my search. My mother’s notes put pieces in context, and I turned to her marginalia to find relatives she had never met but whose names she had known and historical dates she had memorized as a schoolgirl. Others still were obscure: place names and geographies unknown to us, in a China that no longer exists, from the years when my grandfather was a child.
The letter was disjointed and repetitious: unlike the lithic record geologists find underfoot, Gong’s writing had no chronology. The past appeared out of context and out of order, paragraphs out of place. It could be made sense of only when broken into pieces, reemerging in a new linear arrangement. I read it both ways, enclosed in the brambled path of memory and chronologically, identifying the gaps that spanned months or decades. There were stories to which he returned repeatedly, in identical words, like a pilot circling for landing. I marked out the dates and places on a map: the village of his childhood now a rectilinear sprawl, the homes he adopted by necessity. I searched his words for the substrata of a changed land.
THE EARTH WAS PATTERNED RED AND BROWN. She had watched it from the porthole of the plane, waiting in silence as a geometric patchwork became fields cut for harvest and the arboreal carpet sharpened to individual trees. Sugar maples, red oaks, and pines. Suburbs scattered out in all directions, and through them cut a snaking vein of concrete, dotted with cars. Flat, everywhere was flat. The ground rushed up to meet the landing gear, and then all she saw was gray, cloaking the bare ground and low buildings, sending a dusty smell through the air.
This is how I imagine it. On October 13, 1974, Thanksgiving Sunday, my mother arrived in Canada. My grandfather, who had moved a few months earlier, was waiting to pick her up.
She told me about the drive from the airport, her disbelief at the vastness of it all. Immigration was not something she had planned: she had just turned twenty, had been enrolled in secretarial college in Taipei, hadn’t wanted to leave. She had friends there, a young life. Taipei at that time had 2 million residents; Niagara Falls, just under seventy thousand.
But Gong had seen places like the Canadian suburbs many times before and was more comfortable in this new terrain: He had trained as a pilot in Arizona and Colorado and spent time in New York and California for work. He had grown familiar with North American sprawl, with a vast uniformity unseen in the sheltered depth of the Taipei Basin. But I cannot erase my imagined memory of their shared longing for the warmth of Taiwan and its hills and the vision of a new land creeping up beneath them, the country ceaseless and cold.
My grandfather had been born into winter, in the rural lands beyond Beijing. Today’s maps show me perfect, rectangular fields, a square of clustered buildings forming a dense village. The open homestead he wrote of in his letter is nowhere to be found. But I have formed its walls from his words and my mother’s stories, inhabited the scene with this unknown family. Nearby sit our ancestors’ tombs—unkempt, I imagine, for who is there to sweep the graves come springtime?
It was 1919, the Year of the Earth Sheep. The Great War had not long ago finished, and the world was in the midst of negotiating what would become the Treaty of Versailles. In a small courtyard house in Hebei Province, my grandfather, Chung-chin, was the first boy in a family of sisters. He was nicknamed San-ni (Third Gentle Girl), as if a girl’s name might make life easier.
The world outside grew turbulent. The aftershocks of Versailles rattled out in dispersion: The May Fourth protests had spawned a movement; student activists were proclaiming a new culture, seeking an end to the Confucianism that had shaped China for centuries. Nationalists, communists, and warlords allied and disavowed one another, purges and betrayals forming a brutal beat. The time was a blur to a young boy, coming into focus only when it touched Gong’s small life: fleeing the conflicts and staying in far-off Beijing hutong houses in lanes with names like Bamboo Oblique Street, Pine Alley, Little Four Eyes Well. The March 18 Massacre in 1926—in which the military fired into a crowd of protestors, killing forty-seven—was a violent interlude he witnessed uncomprehendingly. Warlords and generals passed through town; their names he would recognize only in later life.
At home, Gong found some regularity and comfort. He slept each night in his grandmother’s room and listened to stories each afternoon as he lay on his grandfather’s tummy. From the age of five onward, he spent some of each day in the kitchen, learning to cook as he played sous chef to his mother. I imagine, now, that she taught him all the things that I remember, memories from my great-grandmother passed on as meals. Together they made fluffy mantou, packed into bamboo steamers in their small kitchen. They folded pork jiaozi and seared spiced Xinjiang lamb. In those early years, his mother taught him to cook an entire Chinese banquet, with formal dishes from every region. She died of heart failure in 1929, when my grandfather was ten.
“After that,” he