Two Trees Make a Forest. Jessica J. Lee
MY GRANDMOTHER DIED A DECADE AFTER MY grandfather. I had long believed that her death would mark not simply the end of her life, but of the possibility of knowing a past for my mother’s family. Our relatives had been lost—either in death or by loss of contact—after the end of the Chinese Civil War. My mother became the sole inheritor of their history, the only person of our maternal family that remained.
What Po left behind stood towered on tabletops, tucked into closets and corners, dusted atop chair seats. In the years after my grandfather’s death she had moved to an apartment block near my mother’s home and battened herself within its walls. She allowed no one in to help her and gave us no authority to care for her. So when she died, my mother found monoliths of paper littering the apartment: bills, letters, documents, and newspapers. Old food, chipped dishes, and bottles of medicine lined the shelves. Perpetually suspicious that we or others were stealing, Po had built a home among these yellowed memorials to a lifetime past. Like an archaeologist set to a dig, my mother was left to dismantle and catalogue the enclosed world Po had built.
She took a week off work to sort through it all, sifting the newspapers, bills, and scrawled notes trying to find Po’s will, pension information, bank accounts, and Gong’s death certificate, which could not be unearthed.
She bagged up old clothes, thick with the scent of camphor, took pictures of heirlooms she planned to set aside for my sister and me, and spent hours scrubbing the filthy corners that had gone unkept in Po’s near-blindness. I was an ocean away, so she texted me photos and questions from time to time, asking if I wanted old things like a pair of sunglasses or a painted vase. With no one else to send things on to, anything my sister and I didn’t want, she said conclusively, would go to the Salvation Army.
In that clutter my mother made two discoveries. The first, a slim envelope from her father, sealed some decades earlier. It was intended, she could see from the label, to be given to her for safekeeping after his death.
The other was a phone bill, innocuous perhaps, except that it listed a series of calls to Taiwan and China. Who was Po calling? Three weeks later, my mother rang to tell me the news. She had dialed one of the numbers. The call connected us to family we’d believed lost forever.
•
ON THAT FIRST TRIP BACK, MY MOTHER AND I took a frill-curtained coach south along the coastal highway. On the Hengchun Peninsula, at the island’s southern tip, shelves of pockmarked coral dried inland; the large, brittle grains mingled with the soil of the hills. The slopes down south are lower than elsewhere, lazily unrolling toward the sea, an easeful geology.
Off-season traffic lolled around the clutch of holiday towns that had grown up out of the shoreline. We disembarked at Kenting and found our way to the empty beach. At three in the afternoon, there seemed to be no one around but us.
December winds blew down from the north: the 落山風 luoshanfeng (literally “wind that falls down from the mountains”), which surges each winter over the south of Taiwan from the slopes where the backbone range terminates. The wind blew hard from the hills, gusting between the spare buildings, out over the gray beach where my mother braced herself between the wind and the waves. She was combing for treasure.
The sea had not merely buried the things that once belonged to air. It was a place of building, where beneath the waves the calcite dance of coral accretion unfolded. In time, these limestone remnants of the sea were lifted and brought to dry in the light and heat, laid amid the crumpled waste of sediments shaved from the advancing mountains. But such movements occurred impossibly slowly, unseen; the beach grew languorous in winter, and the shoreline on which we stood seemed an unlikely candidate for such dramatic change.
My mother, in her sixties, moved across the beach with a childlike lack of urgency, her attention absorbed in the task of beachcombing. Every so often, she would stand up from her huddled position, a gleaming purple prize in her hands. She gathered the remnants of the sea in her pockets, which bulged with their irregular forms: smooth-washed sea glass and scrubbed stones. The occasional polished and gleaming spindle cone or cowrie shell presented itself, but most of what she found was softened coral, sanded down by a lifetime in the tides. She assembled and admired them over the afternoon, leaving mounds of stone and shell in the slack of the waves. One of them she kept: a purple clamshell the size of a coin.
Mom had been there many times before, and our return was an indulgence of her memories. She’d vacationed here with Po and Gong in the 1960s, when the white sand of Baisha Bay seemed a remoter place, its pale crescent receding into the South China Sea. She spent that day in Kenting as she had as a ten-year-old girl, losing herself in the trifles of the tideline.
I watched her, skittering from incoming waves like a sandpiper searching for clams, and saw something of the past in her. In Taiwan, though so much had changed, my mother became a person with a topographic history, a person set into the scene in which she believed she belonged. In my childhood, I never saw that in her: In forty years of life in Canada, she had never rooted to the place and got lost easily. On her commutes in rush-hour traffic, she did not stray from her prescribed path. But on the beach I realized that she’d carried something of the island in her the entire time, molecularly, absorbed the way water swells beneath the skin. Tracing her way across the shore, she worked the place into her bones once more.
•
A FEW DAYS AFTER FINDING GONG’S LETTER, MY mother called me again. She had pried the envelope open to find twenty thinning sheets of loose-leaf paper, scrawled with Chinese script. It was my grandfather’s handwriting, faded with age. Letters from Gong, undated, unsent. Tentatively, having not seen her father’s writing in a decade, she began to read the pages.
An autobiography of his life, looping around and repeating his story, it traced his movement from China, as a child born in 1919 amid the turbulence of the May Fourth Movement, which protested China’s poor returns from the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles, the failure of Chinese diplomats to represent the nation’s interests, and the subsequent handover of Chinese territory to the Japanese. He grew up amid the cultural, intellectual, and political changes in the years following those protests, during which the Chinese Communist Party was formed. The bulk of the letter centered on the Second Sino-Japanese War, on his time as a pilot for the Flying Tigers. It followed his years in Taiwan, where he was an instructor for the Republic of China’s Air Force, and then it ended abruptly in the middle of a sentence, unanchored in any time. Perhaps he had begun writing to remind himself of who he was. The story was just a series of fragments, circled and repeated—pieces of his life told to no one before, pressed to paper, and perhaps forgotten by him soon after writing.
The grip of his disease had already wasted his memories by then.
My mother let me have them. She posted a copy to me, annotating the script with translations and insights known only from the intimacy of her relationship with him: she knew the names of friends or politicians and generals to whom he’d referred, and could sense when he’d recalled something in error, swapping a name or a place for another from the distance of decades.
In my hands, the pages brought out a choking kind of grief. I could barely hold them without crying. Their existence broke my heart doubly, for I could not read them. His handwritten scrawl was far beyond my abilities. Did he begin on the right of the page, writing top to bottom? Sometimes I’d seen him write from the left. When could he have written them? And why—why—had the letter been kept from us?
My earliest memory of Gong is from a photograph. It is my second birthday, and I am leaning over the candles of my birthday cake, a chocolate-frosted train with pineapples for wheels. Gong sits on a lawn chair behind in a white cardigan and a red polo shirt. He is silver-haired and smiling, eyes creased and skin browned in the summer sun, sitting half out of the frame. It is just a fragment of his image, but I hold it close, a time when all of him was there.
Alzheimer’s, I think, is a form of haunting. It possesses the people we love, takes them away in stages, devouring memory, life, personality. As the disease progresses, the proteins that gather in the brain begin to form plaque around nerve cells, structures that once transported nutrients collapse, and the brain tissue shrinks.