Book summary “Two Trees Make a Forest”: summary

Introduction

You often feel disconnected from the history that shaped your existence when your family spans multiple continents and languages. Jessica J. Lee explores this quiet displacement by returning to the rugged landscapes of Taiwan, where her maternal grandparents fled during times of immense political upheaval.

An ecological and personal memoir tracing the author's family migration through the rugged mountains, volatile tectonic history, and complex identity of Taiwan.

You discover how personal memory intertwines with the physical earth through a journey across fault lines, dense high-altitude forests, and shifting colonial archives. The book examines how landscapes hold the stories of those who crossed oceans and mountains to survive.

You will find answers to several core questions as you read:

• How do volatile geology and mountain ecosystems reflect human displacement?
• In what ways do colonial maps and wartime histories shape modern identity?
• How can you recover a lost family narrative through the study of nature and archives?

1. Geology, Language, and Family Migration

Taiwan is a geologically volatile island formed by tectonic plates where rapid elevation changes create immense ecological diversity, mirroring the displacement of mainland refugees.

Tectonic Origins and Topography

Language records the shape of the land before maps exist. The Chinese character dao combines the symbol for a bird resting on a lone mountain, reflecting a relationship between earth and sky rather than water.

Formed some 6 to 9 million years ago during the Miocene epoch by the collision of the Eurasian and Philippine Sea plates along the Ring of Fire, the island features hundreds of peaks over three thousand meters tall that continue to rise as the Philippine Sea Plate moves westward at eighty millimeters a year. Though only eighty-nine miles wide, the land climbs nearly thirteen thousand feet across a 170-mile Central Mountain Range. This narrow width creates a massive diversity of ecological habitats, transitioning from coastal mangroves through tropical jungle, temperate hardwoods, pines, and towering boreal cathedral trees, up to alpine grasslands beyond the tree line.

The Taipei Basin is a flat, river-encircled urban center framed by steep forest-covered hills and shaped by complex geological forces. Theories ranging from volcanic collapse and a drained lake to crustal flexure explain the basin's formation beneath the surrounding peaks.

The author walked through Taipei streets and climbed the neighboring Four Beasts Mountains, including Xiangshan and Hushan, to observe the cityscape and surrounding hills during a three-month solo stay in 2017 when the urban population had long exceeded the 1 million people recorded in 1960.

Waishengren Diaspora Identity

More than 1 million other mainland Chinese refugees fled to Taiwan with the Nationalist government after the Second World War. This displaced diaspora population is known as waishengren.

The author's grandfather Tsao Chung-chin, born in 1919, and grandmother Yang Kwei-lin lived in Taiwan for decades as mainlanders before moving to a bungalow in Niagara Falls. When the author was eighteen, her grandfather suffered from Alzheimer's disease and stood at the foot of the sofa asking who she was in Mandarin.

Alzheimer's acts as a form of haunting that progressively devours the memories, personality, and personal history of loved ones. As brain tissue shrinks and plaque forms around nerve cells, both short-term and long-term memories disappear.

Archives of Memory

Unsent personal documents and letters left behind by aging relatives can serve as unexpected archives of lost historical trauma and personal identity. After her grandmother's death, the author's mother discovered an envelope containing twenty thinning sheets of loose-leaf paper covered in her grandfather's handwritten, unsent autobiography detailing his early life during the May Fourth Movement and his service as a Flying Tiger pilot.

Twenty-seven years old when she returned to Taiwan after her grandfather's death, the author explored the southern peninsula of Kenting with her mother. The southern tip of Taiwan features a distinct landscape shaped by ancient coral reefs and seasonal mountain winds.

On the Hengchun Peninsula, pockmarked coral shelves mingle with hillside soil, while strong winter winds known as luoshanfeng surge down from the terminating mountain backbone. The author and her mother walked an empty beach at three in the afternoon in December amidst the falling mountain winds and collected smooth-washed sea glass and coral fragments.

2. Mapping, Colonialism, and Mountain Ecosystems

Historical Cartography

Historical maps of Taiwan reveal shifting colonial ambitions. Early Spanish and Dutch charts exaggerated strategic coastal regions while leaving the mountainous interior blank. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century European and Chinese maps treated Taiwan's precipitous eastern coast and high mountain ranges as an unknowable wilderness beyond the bounds of civilization and cartographic knowledge.

Cartography and scientific surveys served as explicit instruments of colonial governance and territorial control in Taiwan under both Qing and Japanese administrations.

Hernando de los Ríos Coronel's 1597 Spanish map emphasized northern bays for military and commercial import. Jacques-Nicolas Bellin's 1763 map noted that very little was known of the east coast. The Portuguese reportedly passed Taiwan in 1542 and dubbed it Ilha Formosa. A Qing map from 1700 was tilted to a horizontal perspective for migrants crossing the Black Ditch.

Seismicity and Root Systems

To suppress indigenous populations and exploit natural resources, incoming regimes replaced traditional gazetteers with mathematically grounded Western mapping, land censuses, and military-backed expeditions. Taiwan was transferred from Qing China to Japan on May 8, 1895. The colonial government commissioned the first geological and mineral surveys, took population censuses, and used landscape painters like Ishikawa Kinichiro to document the pacified mountains. Ishikawa was sent in 1909 to draw topological maps of the Central Mountain Range. The first Gray-Milne seismometer was installed in Taipei, then called Taihoku, in 1897.

Taiwan sits on the Ring of Fire and experiences more than 15,000 quakes a year, with nearly 1,000 felt by people. The mountain chains forming the island are 6 to 9 million years old. Tectonic pressures and heavy monsoon rains constantly destabilize Taiwan's steep slate and shale slopes, creating hazards frequently exacerbated by human deforestation and mining.

Typhoon Morakot in 2009 brought 2,500 millimeters of rain over a single weekend, triggering thousands of massive mass wastings. Over a thousand landslides were estimated in the Nenggao region after Typhoon Morakot swallowed infrastructure and altered the landscape.

Colonial Governance

Islands serve as vital sites for biological study because their isolation leads to high rates of species endemism. Species evolve in isolation on islands, so a large percentage of their native flora and fauna occur nowhere else on Earth. Endemism increases at higher elevations in mountain ranges.

Taiwan features more than 4,000 vascular plant species, with over 1,000 endemic. More than 60 percent of mammals on the island occur nowhere else, alongside unique mammals like the Formosan black bear and birds like Styan's bulbuls. Nearly half the amphibians and a fifth of birds are unique to Taiwan.

Forest root systems play a critical role in mitigating mountain erosion and stitching fragile landscapes back together. Nearly 60 percent of Taiwan is covered in forest, while 75 percent of the land is situated on a slope. You can observe ecological recovery when you follow specific restorative actions:

• Allow pine seedlings and tree islands to take hold on eroded slopes to restore vegetation.
• Rely on forest root structures to stitch mountain soils back together and slow wind forces.

Pines and other resilient trees act as the first wave of vegetation to restore landslide-scarred areas. They create tree islands that help shelter wildlife and foster further growth.

3. War, Flight, and Botanical Taxonomy

Decisive historical upheavals, wartime aviation, and early botanical cataloging shaped the complex fabric of modern Taiwan and family memory.

You trace botanical exploration back to Japanese incursions into rugged mountain ranges. Botanist Bunzo Hayata arrived in Taiwan in 1900 at 26 years old for a two-month sojourn. He devoted ten years to producing a ten-volume flora, cataloging 3,658 species and 79 varieties across nearly 1,200 genera and 170 families of vascular plants. His success relied heavily on colonial expeditions opening unreachable peaks.

Resurrection and Botanical Taxonomy

Shifts in language and romanization create emotional and communicative gaps between generations in immigrant families. You might use text messages with Pinyin names, causing your mother frustration because she cannot understand the newer mainland standard. The 1980s standard of Hanyu Pinyin from mainland China largely replaced the older Wade-Giles system.

A childhood medical crisis in 1929 Nanjing left your grandmother clinically dead until an acupuncturist revived her with dozens of gold needles. When Po was five years old, her heartbeat stopped at 9 in the morning during a fainting spell. A kitchen hand brought an old junk collector and acupuncturist who inserted gold needles into her head, heels, and ten pressure points. At 11 o'clock that night, a rasping sound came from her throat and she sat upright, fully recovering.

Before wartime upheavals, Po grew up within a wealthy family empire occupying an entire city block. You can count her family's commercial enterprises on your fingers:

• a money lender;
• a grain wholesaler;
• a chandlery;
• a soybean processor;
• a bakery;
• a teahouse.

Wartime Flight and Exile

In July 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War began, and Japanese soldiers arrived in Nanjing by December 1937. Your grandfather Gong traveled 1,200 miles across China on foot at age eighteen. In October 1942, trainees boarded a C-47 transport aircraft to begin a global journey. Gong trained with the Flying Tigers, crossed the Himalayas over The Hump to India, traveled by naval cruiser to New York, and trained at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona before joining the Chinese-American Composite Wing activated in October 1943.

Gong flew B-25 bombers on dangerous missions, such as targeting the steel railway bridge over the Yellow River in March 1945. During the corruption of the Chinese Civil War and his VIP transport duties with Civil Air Transport, many pilots engaged in smuggling gold. Gong was transferred to a new air force post in Taiwan in 1947. When a pilot asked him why he did not do business like everyone else, Gong replied that he was afraid greed would blind his conscience.

In January 1949, Po arranged to leave Nanjing for Taipei just before her twenty-fifth birthday. As government workers evacuated, her parents refused to leave, believing they would starve. Po's mother wrapped a fortune of gold bars doubly around her waist, securing it with a tidy pin before Po boarded a boat on the Yangtze River. Her mother arrived at the docks hobbling on bound feet with a tin of cookies, marking their final separation.

River Pollution and Moral Integrity

Taiwan's rivers experienced severe ecological degradation as a byproduct of rapid twentieth-century industrial growth. Major outlets were pronounced dead by journalists in 1990, bearing the heavy weight of economic success. Yu Yonghe had crossed 96 rivers on a journey from Tainan to northern sulfur hills in the seventeenth century, while the majority of Taiwan's rivers have a length limit of sixty miles.

4. Martial Law, Nature Writing, and Diaspora

Decades of martial law and political suppression intertwined with environmental activism, shifting diaspora identities, and coastal conservation.

On February 28, 1947, government security fired into a crowd demonstrating against Nationalist encroachments, filling Keelung Harbor and Taipei rivers with bodies. Following protests against Nationalist rule triggered by the assault of a cigarette vendor, thousands of dissidents, intellectuals, and mainlanders labeled as Communists were executed without trial. This ushered in thirty-eight years of martial law where open discussion was strictly constrained until the 1990s. The 1928 incident sparked decades of violent state suppression and the longest period of martial law in human history under the Nationalist government.

Nature Writing and Conservation

Taiwanese nature writing emerged as a realist genre inextricably linked to environmental activism and political resistance during and after martial law. Unlike Western Romantic traditions, early Taiwanese nature writing focused on the scale of ecological loss and environmental protection. During martial law, even bird-watching or carrying binoculars could risk accusations of espionage, making conservation inherently tied to democratic movements. In 1981, early texts like "We Have Only One Earth" tackled environmental loss. In 1984, Liu Ka-shiang published his poem "Small Is Beautiful".

In 1994, Tainan residents protested a proposed industrial park and naphtha plant, eventually leading to the creation of Taijiang National Park after two decades of campaigning. The birds migrate along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, wintering in coastal shallows and feeding on small fry and shrimp in milkfish ponds. Industrial encroachment threatened them, but public protests and the creation of Taijiang National Park successfully protected their feeding grounds. Black-faced spoonbills rebounded from near extinction due to the establishment of protected wetlands and conservation agreements with local fisheries.

Local conservationists and fishermen coordinated to empty specific milkfish ponds in winter to create better feeding habitats for the wading spoonbills. There were 300 birds, the critically endangered population remaining in the early 1990s. A 2017 survey counted 4000 birds. A total of 500 species migrate along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway.

Migration and Legal Identity

Displaced by the Chinese Civil War and the loss of Taiwan's international recognition, the author's grandparents immigrated to Canada later in life and were forced to work as cleaners. Gong had served as an air force instructor and political warfare director counseling pilots on surveillance missions. When the family moved to Canada in 1974, his credentials from unrecognised Taiwan were not accepted, preventing him from flying commercially and reducing him to factory cleaning work. He was 55 years old when they moved to Canada. A 5-year required retraining period would have made him too old to fly.

The author visited her grandfather Gong on the industrial floor of a Niagara Falls canned-food factory where he mopped silently after workers left. Mainlanders fled to Taiwan believing they would be restored to their homeland, a dream enforced by a Nationalist state that erased local Taiwanese and Japanese linguistic and cultural legacies. Decades later, descendants navigate mixed identities between being Chinese, Taiwanese, or both. The concept of jiguan legally categorized individuals by their ancestral province, complicating identity for descendants of mainland exiles severed from their homeland.

The author's mother repeatedly dialed an old Chinese phone number for months until a cousin named Dong-ping answered, revealing that her grandparents had been denounced as capitalists and sent to labor camps. Jiguan ceased to be a legal means of categorizing identity in Taiwan in 1992. Born as a young girl named Lin Mo who possessed future sight and saved her drowning family in a trance, Matsu became deeply venerated by coastal communities and sailors traversing the dangerous waters between China and Taiwan. The sea goddess Matsu represents a mythical protector of sailors whose legend mirrors the hazardous navigation of the treacherous Taiwan Strait.

In Yu Yonghe's version of the legend, Matsu would fly to the sea in her dreams like a bird to save drowning sailors before climbing the highest mountain into the fog. There are a thousand temples, the approximate number of temples devoted to Matsu across Taiwan.

Conclusion

Geological instability, colonial legacies, and family migration connect deeply through the landscapes you inhabit and study.

You can trace your own understanding of landscape memory and personal history by applying practical steps based on these themes.

1. Investigate the geological and tectonic history of your local environment to understand how the earth shapes human movement and survival.
2. Examine the colonial maps and historical records of your region to uncover how power and displacement altered the natural world.
3. Record oral histories from your family and elders to preserve personal migrations and memories before they disappear.
4. Study local flora, fauna, and botanical taxonomy to recognize how native species adapt to isolation and environmental stress.
5. Respect the resilience of ecosystems and human communities by acknowledging the complex political and social histories embedded in the land.

10 Key Ideas

1. Taiwan's volatile geology and rapid elevation changes create immense ecological diversity that mirrors the displacement of mainland refugees.
2. Unsent personal documents and letters left behind by aging relatives serve as unexpected archives of lost historical trauma and personal identity.
3. Cartography and scientific surveys served as explicit instruments of colonial governance and territorial control in Taiwan under both Qing and Japanese administrations.
4. Forest root systems play a critical role in mitigating mountain erosion and stitching fragile landscapes back together on an island prone to severe seismic activity and typhoons.
5. Decisive historical upheavals, wartime aviation, and early botanical cataloging shaped the complex fabric of modern Taiwan and family memory.
6. Your grandfather Gong traveled thousands of miles across China on foot, trained with the Flying Tigers, and flew dangerous missions before being transferred to Taiwan in 1947.
7. Taiwan's rivers experienced severe ecological degradation as a byproduct of rapid twentieth-century industrial growth.
8. Decades of martial law and political suppression intertwined with environmental activism, shifting diaspora identities, and coastal conservation.
9. Displaced by the Chinese Civil War and the loss of Taiwan's international recognition, the author's grandparents immigrated to Canada later in life and were forced to work as cleaners.
10. Geological instability, colonial legacies, and family migration connect deeply through the landscapes you inhabit and study.