Book Club Recap: Two Trees Make a Forest
Book Club Meeting Date: October 31, 2021
Book: 'Two Trees Make a Forest' by Jessica J. Lee
I was particularly moved to appreciate Jessica J. Lee’s book even more after our book club meeting today. Like many of the members I too struggled with the level of detail Lee applied to describing the environment. Our conversation moved everything into place. I thought I’d share a brief summary of our discussion:
Lee’s exploration of identity, belonging, family heritage & being a child of the diaspora & the idea of home
We started our discussion by watching Elif Shafak's video on identity, 'Where are you Really From?' in which she challenges the idea of a single one-word identity (e.g. Turkish) arguing that we have a multiplicity of identities.
In the book we see Lee struggling with her identity. On page 108 she writes, "this is not a place I could simply learn, and it is not mine anyway...I speak in broken tones, making half sense to everyone I meet in Taiwan. My worlds exist in halves."
In the end she makes peace with being from many places-as we concluded at the Book Club. She explains in the book, "I often found myself with too many names, too many homes, and no fixed sense of which order to arrange them in. A use of just one was an erasure of another" (Page 174).
Identity tied to the land or the environments in which we grew
We talked about how the way we do and see things is often tied to the places that we spend our formative years. We carry those places within us. Allison shared a quote by Lawrence Durrell, "We are the children of our landscape".
Lee paints two vivid pictures of her family's pull to the land that they call home.
On page 33 she describes her mother's response to being at the beach in Taiwan again. "my mother became a person with a topographical 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…But on the beach I realized she’d carried something of the island the entire time, molecularly, absorbed the way water swells beneath the skin."
On page 167-169 we read her grandfather's own words as he describes the pull he felt to the land as he flew from Shanghai to Beijing and back. "I had an indescribably strange feeling. There was a point in flight when it would occur. I suspected for a long time that it was our old family homestead."
Our additional takeaways
We talked about our heightened understanding of, and desire to explore even more deeply, Taiwan's complicated history. It was fun reading about food which we determined is also part of identity. We touched on the common immigrant story like Gong coming from being a navy pilot and instructor, to mopping floors in a factory in Canada.
It was great to read a book that moved us past the negative media coverage of Taiwan to seeing the nuances of the Island and its people. Most of us struggled a little with the heavy focus on nature although we felt that a second read might be beneficial. All in all it was a good read and a starting point to expanding our knowledge of Taiwan.
Taking it further (resources)
1. The First Sino-Japanese War documentary:
i. Part 1: https://youtu.be/4JMNwmcNKdA
ii. Part 2: https://youtu.be/OouaMGt_6I4
2. The Beauty of Taiwan documentary: https://youtu.be/mQku6EY8rv4
3. The 228 Incident/massacre of 1926 that Lee mentions: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/28/for-decades-no-one-spoke-of-taiwans-hidden-massacre-a-new-generation-is-breaking-the-silence/
4. Elif Shafak whose video we watched, has written several books three of which are available at our bookstore if anyone would like to explore her work:
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange Land