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Get startedTwo Trees Make a Forest
In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts
Narrator
Nancy Wu
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Length
6 hours 4 minutes
Language
English
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.
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, the Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, and the children's book A Garden Called Home, and coeditor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She is the founding editor of the Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge. She lives in Berlin.
Nancy Wu has done voice-over animation and narrated audiobooks since 2004. A New York theater, TV, and film actor, she has won multiple Library Journal and AudioFile Earphones Awards, and recorded in studios all over the world-from Italy to Switzerland to Thailand. Narrating across genres, she is known for varied character voices and bringing stories vividly to life. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now makes her home in Boulder, Colorado, as an avid yoga practitioner and rock climber. Her television/film credits include the Law & Order franchise, All My Children, the Oscar-nominated film Frozen River, and the Nickelodeon series Three Delivery. She studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City and holds a master's degree in human rights.