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    Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts
    Unavailable
    Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts
    Unavailable
    Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts
    Ebook231 pages3 hours

    Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts

    By Jessica J. Lee

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    About this ebook

  • A seismically moving work by a bold new voice whose American debut reclaims nature writing, travel writing, memoir, and personal family history for a non-white, anti-colonial perspective
  • While the wild, remote landscapes Lee explores might be distant to the American reader, her reasons for exploring Taiwan for herself are deeply relatable and recognizable; “I do not think it was a unique desire: I know others too, who have lost places or relatives, who have taken comfort in returning, as if exercising a muscle memory passed down through the generations... I found in the hills a longing to remember the things I had not known.” Using her grandparents and her mother's histories as her impetus, Lee encounters and explores the very human reasons why we feel called to wilderness, to nature, and how we are connected to place across distances by empathy, narrative, and imagination.
  • A perfect book for fans of Braiding Sweetgrass, Trace, Underland, or Horizon, for Jenny Odell or Belle Boggs or Amy Leach, Lee's perspective is equally poetic, serious, lyrical, and delightfully meandering narrative nature writing
  • Lee, an environmental historian, explores Taiwan, the island her grandparents emigrated from, offering stories of Taiwan's forests, rare birds, and earthquakes, while also reflecting on forms of displacement across natural and familial worlds; and it’s her juxtaposition of personal, biological, and historical elements that is so profoundly moving
  • The book also carefully and subtlying engages with issues of climate change, again from a non-white, non-Western perspective, broadening the urgency of the conversation
  • There's really lovely exploration of Taiwanese folk tales and literature, anecdotes about spoonbills and milkfish cultivation and a lake which flooded a bamboo forest, stories about cypresses and timber. The book thinks through how mapping the land, and cataloging flora and fauna, are all ways of ordering a complicated world.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatapult
    Release dateAug 4, 2020
    ISBN9781646220014
    Author

    Jessica J. Lee

    Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian. Her first book, Turning: A Swimming Memoir, was published by Virago in 2017 and named among the best books of the year by both Canadian newspaper the National Post and German newspaper Die Zeit. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and completed her dissertation on the history of Hampstead Heath. She was Writerin-Residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin from 2017–2018 and has written for BBC Radio 4, TLS and MUNCHIES, among others. Her second book, Two Trees Make a Forest: A story of memory, migration, and Taiwan, will be published in 2019 by Virago. Jessica lives in Berlin.

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