Picked up this book as part of the August '26 Taiwanese American Book Club hosted by taiwaneseamerican.org and what a surprising treat it was.

I feel like a broken record for saying this, but I have long tired of the "typical caught in between two worlds" narrative that Asian (Americans) folks in Western diasporas have in their writing. The author of this book takes that concept, yet interrogates deeper (which is rare especially in East Asian American memoirs). After reading this book, I am contemplating the following: What does it mean for plants to literally uproot and supplant themselves elsewhere whether by evolutionary choice and/or human intervention? How does that metaphorically translate to the forced and/or chosen migration of humans across land, sea and air?

I found myself highlighting so much of this book with new facts and information. It's been quite the journey to learn about the history of Taiwan from key "political" events and my own family's stories, but to see and read about the coexistence of these events alongside geographical moments (largescale earthquakes, typhoons, shifts in water levels/quality, endangered animals, carbon monoxide levels due to factories and/or war, etc) has brought me to an even deeper understanding and reckoning with the "Taiwanese" identity. It's one thing to refer to a place or destination as one's "homeland", it's another to continuously honor and use the land to better understand one's self, one's culture, one's history.

A lot of reviews on other websites say this book is "slow" and "boring" - and to that, I question how much of Westernization + white supremacy has implicitly and explicitly altered their views of the world. I felt riveted to learn about key details about Taiwan's fauna and the varying existences during pre-colonial times, during repeated colonization of numerous nation states, and even current day. Through the detailed descriptions of bodies of water and mountain ranges, as well as acknowledging key historical moments that led to the current geopolitical climate of Taiwan, this book used nature to remind us that every living organism has been and continues to be instrisically tied together. I felt very reminded of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer as the author balanced personal experiences, family memories, ancestral practices, and acknowledging the ways the land and nature was providing her answers in ways her family could not. Overall, I would definitely recommend this "Asian American identity reckoning" over a large majority of other "Asian American stories" on the market.

Notable Quotes

"Our versions of the truth so often dwell in the language we choose, but the words we use have consequences: they signify allegiances, shared histories, harms and losses."

"They wade in landscapes to which humans cannot go: many of the birds find a home in the de facto nature reserve of the demilitarized zone of the Korean peninsula, breeding in the summers in the coastal flats made habitable by a lack of human enroachment."

"Literature has since become a means of asserting the island's distinct cultural identity, in direct contention with its difficult colonial past. Rejecting the notion of Taiwanese literature as mere "frontier" writing, authors in a new traiditon pursued their autonomy as part of their wriging. In efforts to de-sinicize the island's identity, the Japanese colonial period was a point from which to argue that the island's cultural heritage diverged from China's."

"Taiwanese and Japanese languages were forced out of daily use, and once more Taiwan faced a rewriting of history: its legacies now belonged to China, to a motherland across the straight to which no one could even go, but to which they were told they would be rightfully restored."

"The Wushe Rebellion marked a last stand of Indigenous resistance to colonial rule. A group of Seediq people, led by their chief, Mona Rudao, ambushed and killed more than 130 Japanese officials... The military then resorted to heavy atillery and aerial bombardment with gas bombs to quash the uprising, said to be the first use of chemical warefare in Asia. Decades later, the uprising would be propogandized by Chinese Nationalists seeking the tale of Taiwanese opposition to Japanese rule... But Wushe's history is a telling case of resistance amid centuries of erasure of the island's indigenous communities under both Japanese and Chinese regimes."

"Botanical texts can teach us just as much. Historic floras interest me in part because lists of old plants and their semblance of order reveal a continuity beetween past scientific cultures and our present understandings of nature. Meaning is held in who named a species and how they came across it."

I read this book while concurrently listening to the audiobook and I was pleasantly surprised; I normally don't enjoy when audiobook narrators dramatically change their voices when being another gender and/or age, but it worked out for this story.

Based on the first 3 or so chapters, I think I was expecting this book to get creepier and more mysterious. At times the "messages" of the plot were very blatant and other times the plot seemed to throw seemingly random events in just for the sake of progressing the story, even if it made little sense with the contextual flow.

Regardless, it was fun to hear and read the series of events that unfolded as the main character explored the mystery of the town, Clementine the jellyfish, and her own grief. My emotions were definitely getting swayed as I felt annoyance at the varying personalities and actions of all the side characters and main character; yet, that was when I realized the book did what it was supposed to do... humanize fictional characters and animals to where I (as the reader) felt invested.

Pulling from one of my forum posts:

"Often, grief makes us want to freeze time, stay in one place (physically mentally emotionally)... Afraid that if we move on, the change will be scarier than holding onto what we know/knew. I was getting pretty frustrated at a lot of the main and side characters brash and sometimes nonsense thought processes, but then I got to this point in the book: “I see that was selfish now. I see that grief makes a person selfish.” This reminded me that grief can manifest in so many ways. People are imperfect and healing isn’t linear and perhaps there is a degree of selfishness that is inherently in each person and/or species that seeks ways to adapt, even at the expense of others."

Aside from the ~ feelings ~ this book invoked, I am now also well equipped with a plethora of fun facts and knowledge about jellyfish (the author really did extensive research of her own too). 🤓🪼