Two Trees Make a Forest

Loved this book. Looking at Taiwan through its nature and natural history, as well as the personal history of Lee's family, especially through a letter of her grandfather, this is a fantastic read for anyone interested in Taiwan.
Gorgeously written, and equally good at describing mountains, geography, plants, natural history, language, politics and family.

It's another in a growing work of literary nature writing that I find I'm a sucker for. From The Overstory to Greenwood it's the personal entwined with the natural world and Lee, as an environmental historian, is uniquely poised to tackle this growing genre.

It is the history of Taiwan, a relatively young island at a spry 6-9 million years and barely 90 miles wide, variously occupied by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Chinese. It is the home to thousands of endemic species specific to the island, plants that have yet to be found anywhere else. And here in this lush, damp greenery Lee explores her past after the death of her grandfather. He a pilot with the Flying Tigers during WWII who came to Canada and worked as a janitor at the Chef Boyardee factory in Niagara. Her grandmother from Nanjing who lived through the horrors inflicted there by the Japanese.

The stories never fully cohered for me. While it's a mere sliver of an island and she was never more than an hour or two away from where her grandparents lived, it felt as if she was climbing the Rockies while limply gesturing to her family's past in rural Saskatchewan. I enjoyed the nature writing but I shouldn't want less of her grandparent's history when their lives seem so ripe for storytelling.