Two Trees Make a Forest

In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts

By: Jessica J. Lee

Narrated by: Nancy Wu

An exhilarating, anti-colonial reclamation of nature writing and memoir, rooted in the forests and flatlands of Taiwan

A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew.

Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities.

Two Trees Make a Forest is a genre-shattering book encompassing history, travel, nature, and memoir, an extraordinary narrative showing how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories.

Finalist for the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize

Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature

One of The Guardian's Best Books of the Year

©2020 Jessica J. Lee (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Critic reviews

“Two Trees Make a Forest is a finely faceted meditation on memory, love, landscape - and finding a home in language. Its short, shining sections tilt yearningly toward one another; in form as well as content, this is a beautiful book about the distance between people and between places, and the means of their bridging.” (Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland)

“A poignant and beautifully written account of family, time, and place.” (Library Journal)

“[A] luminescent exploration of family and landscape in Taiwan . . . a powerful, beautifully written account of the connections between people and the places they call home.” (The Times Literary Supplement)

This book feels made for me

As a half-Taiwanese half-white American, this book cradled all of the parts of me that ache and long to be connected to my mother’s and grandmother’s land, Taiwan. As someone who is studying ecology, the added descriptions of natural beauty, flora, and fauna, were also extremely interesting. I read another review of this book that talked very negatively about the narrative pace and structure, but that was definitely a purposeful choice by the author. She navigates Taiwan while referencing her grandfather’s letters that he wrote while losing his memory and cognition. I thought this book was incredible, and it has thoroughly convinced me to plan a trip with my entire family back to our homeland.

OK

Ok interesting and informative but disjointed. Need 9 more words only five now. Done done.

Extremely grateful

I am so grateful for this personal account that also weaves in the histories of the geology and the natural world that is the island of Taiwan. She also shows how the human history of Taiwan has affected her family so profoundly. The ten thousand things that lead to a single life, or even a single moment. This is a beautiful account that enriched my life in ways I suspect I’ll discover in unexpected ways for quite some time to come.

Potential reader be warned, this book may cause drowsiness

The author clearly put her soul into writing this book. I have to give her that. She really did her best to capture her feelings and experiences in her writing.

BUT, this was the most boring book I have ever read. I dabble in everything. From sci-fi to romance, from autobiographies to leadership and ethics, from war novels to teen fantasy, I’ve read countless books of all types. I’m proud of the breadth of my reading and rarely find a book that doesn’t at least have some appeal.

I bought this book because of a personal interest in Taiwan. I don’t want or need to read any more colonial history or war memories about Taiwan. I wanted to read something that was more personal and more in tune with the cultural and historical perspectives than the otherwise common books on Taiwan. This was that.

To be fair, she gave me exactly what I was looking for, kind of. To be more than fair, no one wants fifteen chapters of you telling us about how the mountains and random plants call your name and about how you went hiking even though you are in poor physical condition. It’s beyond uninteresting. Why am I getting pages and pages of text about how scientists are missing gaps in random flora genealogies in the middle of a poorly recounted war story about your grandfather that sounds like someone recounting a dream, and not a vivid dream, one of those weird dreams that you want to tell people about but realize half way through that nothing you are saying makes sense so you shouldn’t have started.

I really truly feel for the author. Her experience going “home” to Taiwan must have been really something to her. She certainly gets that point across well. That said, goodness gracious, this book was not written for me.

If you have parents or grandparents that immigrated from taiwan, this book may appeal to you.

If you are just looking to get to know more about taiwan from this book, let me save you the time and summarize this book for you:

Basically, the author’s parents moved from Taiwan to Canada and she felt called to travel there and to recount her experience in this book. She saw mountains and some animals and really likes to explain, in detail, science stuff about plants and animals which is completely unrelated to the story. There is pollution and it’s making the plants and animals die. Democracy and protests are helping. War bad, old people die, people have regrets and long for what they don’t have. The end.

If zero stars was an option, I’d still give it one star for her effort, but not for the story

Lack of a real story

I found it quite boring. I have no interest in botany. Difficult to understand at times.