A perfect blend of memoir, non-fiction, epistolary, and poetry, Two Trees Make a Forest was not a read I wanted to rush. In it, Jessica J. Lee recounts some of her family histories as she hikes through Taiwan, confronting secrets about her Mom, Gong, and Po she’s learned from translations of her Gong’s own memoirs. A British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian, intertwined with her own lore is the history of the landscape, flora, and fauna of Taiwan itself coupled with terrific little illustrations. The effect is that of a personal tour through the Taiwanese mountains and forests alongside a friend.
Lee does not shy away from her grief—as complicated for her as it is for anyone—and throughout the book, she returns again and again to the question of identity: how does who our ancestors were make us who we are and in what ways can we ever truly understand family members who are separated from us by language and time?
“I retreated to the forests, but even there, once in a while, I felt unmoored. Thoughts of my grandparents came often as I walked the mountains, rhythm giving way to notions I dared not entertain in normal life. My stride worked itself into a charm, hypnotic, and the worst came to me. I hadn’t done enough. Hadn’t learned enough Mandarin, knew no Taiwanese, at all, and hadn’t taken enough of an interest.”
Jessica J. Lee, Two Trees Make a Forest
I took many hikes during my long reading of Two Trees Make a Forest, and Lee’s stories of her maternal family’s origins and study of her own place in Taiwan’s rich history landscape only gave me more to contemplate on my own circumstances. Like Lee, I was born on Turtle Island (or Canada) to immigrant parents and am multi-racial with a complicated history of diaspora running through my family line. Multi-racial people are far from new but so often we reduce rich family histories to a single country name or narrative in the name of simplicity. But being a person existing within history and on land with a history of its own is complicated. Land has such a rich history on its own, yet there is so much about it to study that is completely unrelated to human existence. As Lee points out in Two Trees, the story of Taiwan really begins about 9 million years ago when the island first began to form.
I really appreciated how Lee grappled with these tensions throughout the book. I haven’t always been a fan of non-fiction books, but this work really blends it in with personal and environmental contexts that made me appreciate it much, much more. It is a love letter to the past and place which anchors us all in the world and within ourselves.