Two Trees Make a Forest by Jessica J. Lee
Jessica J. Lee travels to her mother’s birthplace of Taiwan to trace her grandparents’ background, something they rarely spoke of while they were alive. Lee is an environmental historian, and she leans on this expertise to braid the conventional trappings of memoir with a geological understanding of Taiwan’s mountainous regions, rivers, and forests.
THE PREMISE: As Lee was growing up in Canada, she learned more about her father’s British background than her mother’s Chinese roots. The only time she spoke her mother’s Mandarin was when she visited her grandparents in Niagara Falls. It wasn’t until she found a letter penned years earlier by her grandfather that Lee learned the truth: Her grandmother had escaped the Rape of Nanking, and her grandfather was a pilot with the fabled Flying Tigers before and after they flew to Taiwan as the Communists began taking over China in 1949. As she traces the contents of her grandfather’s letter, she becomes especially interested in Taiwan, her mother’s birthplace and her grandparents’ home for decades.
THE SETTING: Everything about this book is luscious. Geologically speaking, Taiwan is a relatively new island (it formed from volcanoes nine million years ago). It has suffered colonization by the Dutch, Japanese, and Nationalist Chinese. Lee could have dissected this layered political history to learn more about her family’s background. Instead, she finds in the natural landscape the answers she is looking for; answers that go beyond her grandparents’ stories to show an ever-evolving world. “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.”
Lee climbs mountains, worried about the fragility brought by erosion, landslides, and rockfalls. At other times she winds her way through the lanky vines hanging from the branches in forests. Lee also writes about the tectonic plates that will forever leave Taiwan vulnerable to earthquakes, even after it’s survived the metaphorical earth-changing decades of martial law when her grandparents lived there.
IN THE END: Lee’s journey began with a mysterious document from her grandfather and a yearning to understand her fraught relationship with her grandmother, but she moves far beyond her original questions, developing a growing understanding of the environmental elements of her mother’s birthplace. The overall effect is a suspenseful, engaging read that allows her to re-know her grandparents on a higher level. Instead of the quiet couple she only knew of through halting Mandarin and vague family stories, she learns about the foggy airstrips her grandfather navigated around the island in his army plane, and the relatives her grandmother never cared for and subsequently cut ties with after moving to Canada. Lee reunites with these long lost relatives in Taiwan, providing even more of the family story. Two Trees Make a Forest takes memoir to a new, multidimensional level, and I hope it’s one other writers will pay attention to.
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