Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa’s resonant call to make island a verb—discussed in the introduction to this forum—has been on my mind as I read Jessica J. Lee’s award-winning creative non-fiction text Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family’s Past Among Taiwan’s Mountains and Coasts.1 A child of immigrants from Taiwan and the UK, Lee is presented in this text as a British Canadian Taiwanese author and environmental historian, educated in Canada and the UK, residing in Berlin. The result of extensive research (the text includes an eighteen-page bibliography—a list that, despite its length, is not comprehensive),2 Two Trees presents Lee’s reflections on visits to Taiwan in 2013 and 2017, in which she traversed the island from points north to points south. In doing so, it interweaves glimpses of a family history in diaspora, including in Canada, with partial accounts of Taiwan’s environmental and political complexities.
Lee’s text makes a number of noteworthy contributions to Asian Canadian literature and other related fields. It draws attention to what Szu Shen identified some years ago as “the ways in which ‘Asia’ has been conceptualized through different representational practices surrounding subjects that might or might not be considered as enacting and embodying Asian Canadian experiences” (116), in this case by depicting the experiences of a mixed-race Taiwanese Canadian writer and members of her family. In telling these stories, Two Trees also illuminates some of the ways that, as Christine Kim and Christopher Lee contend, “the Cold War remains embedded . . . in the very construction of Asian Canadian literature” (271). And through its mobilization of creative non-fiction as a genre, Two Trees further affirms what Rob Nixon calls this genre’s “robust adaptability, imaginative and political” (25)—notably through its depictions of colonial and settler-colonial Taiwan.
The first of four main sections in Lee’s text begins with the Chinese character for island and romanized pinyin indicating the Mandarin pronunciation “dao.” Presenting island as a noun, the text then pluralizes and glosses it to emphasize motion: “Islands emerge through movement, through collision, and through accretion” (3). Moving across languages, and from the singular to the plural, Two Trees presents us with a challenge. How can we learn to read, with and beyond this text, such movements, collisions, and accretions? What sorts of critical practices are needed to adequately attend to such forms of motion, often violent, and their varied impacts on peoples, lands, and waters? Lee’s text presents Taiwan as “an unstable landmass in perpetual confrontation,” as an island “[b]orn into conflict” at the intersection of the Eurasian and Philippine sea plates (6). Evoking the work of Epeli Hau‘ofa, whose epiphany on Hawai‘i’s Big Island about the vastness of Oceania remains widely read, Lee notes, “Through the forces of orogeny that form great mountain chains, Taiwan’s peaks stand taller every day” (7).
Yet far from being a celebratory account, Two Trees consistently draws attention to questions of knowledge production and the challenges of interpretation when reading across languages and moving across histories and geographies. A keyword that emerges in this process is the fragment, a term which appears prominently in Lee’s text, as well as in other recently published Asian Canadian creative non-fiction.3 In Two Trees, the fragment appears as the author obtains incomplete glimpses of Taipei through her mother’s stories (22); through “examining the fragments” she has heard from her grandmother, including in a taped interview conducted before she passed away (103); and through a twenty-page autobiography left by her grandfather, described as “a series of fragments,” with some parts of this found text “end[ing] abruptly in the middle of a sentence, unanchored in any time” (35). This use of the term recalls the work of Gyanendra Pandey, who is not cited by Lee, but whose work may nevertheless help us to engage more closely with Two Trees. Allow me then to make a quick detour to Pandey’s work.
A founding member of the Subaltern Studies collective and a scholar of recent Indian history, Pandey has written brilliantly about the fragment as “an attempt to modify, or at least clarify, our understanding of historical amnesia” (15). The fragment, for Pandey, can enable “an interruption in the narrative, a recalcitrant element, the hint of another vision—now frequently irrecoverable” (15). The specific case Pandey turns to is the Bhagalpur attacks in India in 1989 and what he calls “how much of this history we will never be able to write” (42).4 Underlining that his intervention is concerned primarily with the writing of history (45), he emphasizes that the fragment can help illuminate “the limits of scientific history and the scientific historian’s search for truth” (39). He then turns to a collection of poems by Manazir Aashiq Harganvi, a survivor of these attacks. By reading these poems as a fragment, Pandey calls attention to sources typically neglected by orthodox historians and also to groups in Indian society positioned as “minorities by the ruling class” (47).
Two Trees can likewise be read as an extended “defence of the fragment,” as Pandey memorably puts it. In tracing her family’s history, Lee does draw upon recognizable scholarly sources which can be accessed in libraries and museums and schools, but despite the evident importance of such sources, their limits as sources of learning are almost immediately apparent. Regarding the political history that forcefully redirected the course of her grandparents’ lives—including Japan’s invasion of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the outcomes of the Chinese Civil War—Lee notes “that history was not taught in Canadian schools,” leading her to realize “how little I knew myself ” (14). Likewise, her subsequent training as an environmental historian “taught [her] a great deal about temperate plants” and how to “[navigate] through a Canadian pine forest or a European heath with familiarity”—yet, in Taiwan, she notes that she found herself “botanically adrift” (17). Depicting an extended process of learning, Two Trees at times misfires, as when it names a variety of banana named bajiao as “inedible” (20)—as a resident of Taiwan and an enthusiast of this fruit, I can state with some confidence that it is in fact widely available in the markets and commonly eaten! More significant than such misfires is how the text emphasizes unsteady translations and obscured views, as Lee walks and bikes and hikes and swims across parts of Taiwan’s fractured and damaged ecologies.5 In one case in central Taiwan, Lee notes that “[t]he mountain remains encased in cloud, indifferent to [her] movements across its heavy spine” (112). In another key episode, on Mount Qixing north of Taipei, Lee “long[s] for a view, to see the island from a height”—but, amid clouds and rain, “it does not come” (257).
Despite this epistemological and phenomenological circumspection, not all readers have been fully satisfied with the stories told in this text. From a Taiwanese American perspective, Yi Shun Lai has described reading Two Trees as “an exercise in contradicting emotions,” with admiration of Lee’s “intimate knowledge of Taiwan’s flora and geographical history” colliding with what she calls “a burgeoning rage” over the relative absence of the Taiwanese language (that is, Taiwan Hokkien) in this text, as well as over what Lai considers to be the limited depictions of the forms of political violence which actively suppressed the use of this language and the basic human rights of the people of Taiwan following the Chinese Nationalist Party (that is, the KMT) takeover in 1945. Some key moments in Taiwan’s political history do appear in Two Trees, including for example the Indigenous Seediq-led Wushe Rebellion (also known as the Musha Incident) in 1930, the last major anti-colonial uprising in Taiwan during Japanese colonial rule;6 as well as the February 28 Incident in 1947, in which incoming Chinese Nationalist forces shot indiscriminately at the people of Taiwan, a traumatic incident which was followed by White Terror, a multi-decade period marked by state-directed arrests, detentions, disappearances, and executions of actual and perceived opponents of the ruling party.7 As Lai acknowledges, Two Trees openly presents how Lee’s grandparents worked for and served this regime, with Lee’s grandmother working as a secretary for none other than Chiang Kaishek, and her grandfather working in the air force.
Lai’s response to Two Trees seeks to resolve some of these contradictions by thoughtfully questioning the basis of her nationalism (in this case, a form of long-distance Taiwanese nationalism) before concluding: “in my need to establish my own Taiwanese heritage, I was too eager to take it away from someone else.” But rather than following a path of what we might call competitive Taiwaneseness (a path which Lai first follows and then reconsiders), I would like to follow another path, also seeking to track questions of community, forms of belonging, and webs of connection and exclusion. I would like to do so by focusing on the problem of how to read Two Trees through two of the many fragments it provides. The first fragment I would like to discuss presents glimpses of the grandparents’ bungalow in the town of Niagara Falls in southwest Ontario after they immigrated from Taiwan to Canada in 1974. Lee’s text vividly depicts this specific time and place, noting the “thick orange carpeting,” “smoked-glass dining table,” and “black leather sofa” (12). Living here, Lee’s grandfather led a quiet life while also working as a janitor (14) following his unanticipated decertification to work as a pilot in Canada; Lee’s grandmother, the former KMT government employee in Taiwan, became a cleaner (189). In describing this bungalow and the lives of its inhabitants, Lee presents it as “an island unto itself ” where the family spoke Mandarin, with the surrounding neighbourhood “a suburban sea” navigated and seen from “the plush comfort of the Oldsmobile” (221), with which they could also cross the US border to shop in Buffalo. This mix of a settler suburban geography imposed upon Six Nations territory, downward mobility in the Canadian labour market for racialized immigrants, and automobility reliant on the extraction and burning of fossil fuels all present challenges for us to develop a critical language that would be adequate to, as Christine Kim puts it, “understanding Canada as produced by global forces and movements” (11–12). In responding to this fragment in Lee’s text, such a critical language could seek to better understand this time and place in Canada as profoundly impacted and shaped by settler colonialism, petroleum-fuelled transportation infrastructure, Cold War complicities, and diasporic displacements.
Now I would like to turn to a second fragment, which appears almost immediately after Lee’s memorable description of her grandparents’ bungalow as an “island”: the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Taipei, where Lee and her mother met a long-lost relative named Jing-xien. Like Lee’s grandparents, Jing-xien had left China in the mid-twentieth century, and like Lee’s mother, she had grown up in Taiwan during the White Terror period, living in one of the many military dependents’ villages established by incoming KMT forces after 1949. Depicted with warmth and care, Jing-xien later gifts Lee “an enormous wooden cutting board, darkened with age” (254)—bringing back powerful memories of Lee’s beloved grandfather who had earlier given this wooden board to her. In this moving scene, Two Trees signals the possibility of intergenerational continuities and exchange stretching across continents. Yet this fragment also does more. Presenting the Sheraton Hotel as a site of a reunion, the text inadvertently reminds at least some of its readers of other histories. Before this hotel was built, this site in Taipei served as a military training ground toward the end of the Qing Empire, as well as during the Japanese colonial period. Following the arrival of Chinese Nationalist forces in the 1940s, the site gained notoriety as a military detention centre to incarcerate political prisoners during Taiwan’s White Terror. These details do not appear in Two Trees, but they can nevertheless supplement and extend our reading of this textual fragment, where a site of family reconnection in Taipei also remains a site of militarized settler-colonial violence and attempted Indigenous erasure.8
Returning now to Teaiwa’s evocative work mentioned at the outset of my contribution to this forum: What would it mean to think of island as a verb? What is at stake in “islanding” Canada and “islanding” Taiwan? As I have discussed, the fragments presented in Two Trees remain partial and incomplete; institutionally validated forms of knowledge in this text are often shown to be inadequate, and the grand views the author seeks often remain obscured. No established nationalisms emerge from this text, disappointing at least one reader. The text instead presents an island in motion through movements, collisions, and accretions. By thinking of island as a verb, we may learn to attend more carefully to the often violent impacts of such motion and their varied aftermaths in Taiwan and Canada and beyond. Doing so would require us to question not only the sources and assumptions informing the writing of history, as we saw in Pandey’s work; it would also require us to continue rethinking and recalibrating the frames we use to engage with notions of “Canada,” “Canadian literature,” and the subjects of “Canadian literary studies.”
Acknowledgements
I would thank my fellow forum members for their inspiring insights; Christine Kim for initiating this conversation and for first mentioning to me Jessica J. Lee’s work; and the wonderful team at Canadian Literature for expertly guiding this forum to publication. Support from the National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan (110-2410-H-002-152-MY3 and 113-2410-H-002-053-MY3) enabled me to help coordinate and contribute to this forum and is gratefully acknowledged.
Notes
1. Two Trees won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction in 2020 and was shortlisted in the Canada Reads competition in 2021. It has also been translated into a traditional Chinese edition, published by Lianpu in Taiwan.
2. Lee, for example, repeatedly refers to the work of Edward Said, but his work does not appear in the text’s already extensive bibliography.
3. For an important example, see Troeung, who refers in her preface to the “allusive fragments” structuring her moving text as “a perforated language of cracks and breaks.”
4. These attacks were, in Pandey’s account, characterized by
[a]rson, looting, and murder [which] spread from the city to the surrounding countryside and raged practically unchecked for several days. The situation was then brought under some sort of control by military and paramilitary forces, but an atmosphere of fear and terror remained for months afterward . . . Possibly as many as a thousand people were killed in the course of violence, most of them Muslims, but estimates of the casualties vary greatly. (24)
5. Lee’s text notes that “[a]round Taiwan, where land has been cleared for plantations or mineral excavation, to say nothing of the worsened storms wrought by climate change, much of the risk [of landslides] is anthropogenic” (77). These risks, as seen, for example, in the devasting impacts of Typhoon Morakot in 2009, have disproportionately affected Indigenous communities living on or near these slopes.
6. For various accounts of the Musha Incident, see Berry.
7. There is a growing body of scholarship and range of cultural texts depicting the February 28 Incident and Taiwan’s subsequent White Terror, addressed in part in my recent discussion of Shawna Yang Ryan’s novel Green Island; see Beauregard.
8. The details presented in this paragraph about the Sheraton Hotel site in Taipei are drawn from the Taiwan Cultural Memory Bank website, with a specific entry on this site accessible at the time of writing (“Detention Center of the Military Law”). On the attempted erasure of Indigenous presence in Taipei, see Lopesi, who, as a visiting Pasifika artist and writer in Taipei, found “not the Austronesian homeland [she] had imagined,” but instead what she pointedly calls “a branch of China’s empire” (12). I am indebted to Alice Te Punga Somerville for generously alerting me to Lopesi’s work.
Works Cited
Beauregard, Guy. “‘There but Not There’: Green Island and the Transpacific Dimensions of Representing White Terror.” MELUS, vol. 48, no. 3, 2023, pp. 1–24.
Berry, Michael, editor. The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan. Columbia UP, 2022.
Kim, Christine. “Editorial: Methods, Objects, Fields.” Canadian Literature, no. 255, 2023, pp. 7–14.
Kim, Christine, and Christopher Lee. “The Cold War and Asian Canadian Writing.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, edited by Josephine Lee, vol. 1, Oxford UP, 2020, pp. 261–73.
Lai, Yi Shun. “I Thought This Memoir Wasn’t ‘Taiwanese Enough’—Because That Was My Fear About Myself.” Electric Lit, 1 June 2021. electricliterature.com/i-thoughtthis-memoir-wasnt-taiwanese-enough-because-that-was-my-fear-about-myself.
Lee, Jessica J. Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family’s Past Among Taiwan’s Mountains and Coasts. Catapult, 2020.
Lopesi, Lana. False Divides. BWB Texts, 2018.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2013.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories. Stanford UP, 2006.
Shen, Szu. “Where is Taiwan on the Map of Asian Canadian Studies?” West Coast Line, vol. 45, no. 3, 2011, pp. 112–17.
“Detention Center of the Military Law.” Taiwan Cultural Memory Bank, National Museum of Taiwan History, https://tcmb.culture.tw/zh-tw/detail?indexCode=Culture_Place&id=301603&keyword=sheraton%20hotel&limit=24&offset=0&sort=relevance&order=desc&isFuzzyMode=false&query=%7B%7D&recOffset=6. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.
“To Island: Poetry Written by Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, Performed by Katerina Teaiwa.” YouTube, uploaded by Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), 10 Nov. 2022, youtube.com/watch?v=WO5bmGtLWyE.
Troeung, Y-Dang. Landbridge: [life in fragments]. Alchemy/Knopf Canada, 2023.
Guy Beauregard is a professor at National Taiwan University and an associate member at Simon Fraser University’s Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research. Over the past decade, his work has appeared in Amerasia Journal, Canadian Literature, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, MELUS, and Studies in Canadian Literature. He also co-edited The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique (Temple UP, 2020).
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