A review by alouette
Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan's Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Family's Past by Jessica J. Lee

informative inspiring reflective relaxing slow-paced

5.0

 Mountains could be rattled all too quickly, their timelines fractured in mere moments.

change is happening endlessly, and few nonfiction books can capture it as well as this one. Lee takes readers on a journey through Taiwanese history with them, of discovery and beauty and reverence for the past while accepting that it may one day become unreachable, too far behind us in time. she connects places to people, showing rather than telling the way those places become overlaid with a million new fingerprints, sometimes smudged to being unrecognizable but beautiful in a new way. as a third generation immigrant and settler, living on stolen land but finding my heritage almost beyond reach, this book does a damn good job of exploring how it feels to live between worlds by embracing the anthropocentricism of nature. nature is the foundation of life, so we need to find meaning in it to find meaning for our own existence since we are products of it 

 Nature stitches a seam between our anthropogenic divides.

 i think my favourite scene is when Lee gets to the top of one trail alongside another child of immigrants and can't see any of the view through the fog. she contemplates how much we need the view from the mountaintop against how much we need the beauty of everything that obscures it. 

 What we believe to be culture is only ever a fragment of natural world that we have sectioned off, enclosed, pearl-like, for posterity.

and it makes such perfect sense, this book. it's like ideas click into place and experiences i couldn't ever describe are captured perfectly in everything, from the forest trails Lee describes to her grandparents' incomplete recollections of the past. the book mourns the loss of old memories while coming to the understanding that new memories will be made, that there will be new possibilities for knowing.

 Trees can span all our stories... the forest stands despite us.
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