On the edge of the island is a city where, because it is not far from the sea, every layer of sediment has a quality of softness like water. In the city is a street named Sunken Moon Street, a wide ring road surrounding the city, forming its edge. When you stand on Sunken Moon Street, on one side is the city, and on the other, the outskirts.
Because the city is so big, the twists and bends of Sunken Moon Street are very subtle, so much so that, if you were to follow it continuously for a day and night, it would seem as though you were walking on a straight path. On the way, you would briefly find yourself strolling along a river; a river named South Stream; the red metal bridge on it, South Bridge.
Ultimately, you would arrive back where you started.
According to every traceable urban planning report, what lies beyond Sunken Moon Street—the outskirts—was never zoned for residential use, as though it had been forgotten. For city-dwellers, Sunken Moon Street is like the border between the civilized and uncivilized; for certain public institutions, reputedly, the outskirts are a secret dumping ground. They seem to think objects and facts, once forsaken, will be forever lost to time like dust in the wind, but in reality—beyond the confines of historical records—residents have quietly sprouted out of thin air, using discarded materials to build their own homes. They have never been forced out or been short on resources since, after all, trash has always been what the city exports in abundance.
My father, who spent his life working at the Department of Household Registration, would say that these outsiders have no identity: they cannot get a driver’s license, go abroad, apply for national healthcare, and with no records in any official system, they are stopped when entering or leaving government agencies. In the eyes of the law, they are almost invisible. Father used to tell me that it is quite dangerous where they live, and so when I was young, he did not let me cross Sunken Moon Street; of course, it was also because people drove so fast there.
Those in the city have identifiable names, nomina protecta. Those on the outskirts do not, nomina invalida. According to my father, city-dwellers and outsiders could be differentiated by their appearance, a morphological classification. That is how I know they must also have an identity, a quality assigned to them the moment they are recognized.
Forgive me for using this sort of language to describe these residents—it is an occupational reflex. I study plant taxonomy at the Forest Research Institute, where my job is essentially to identify species and determine their names. Identification begins with collecting a specimen, then referencing published scholarship, measuring, dissecting, and matching its characteristics to descriptions by the original taxonomist. Much of the scholarship from two or three hundred years ago is difficult to obtain, and once obtained, it might be written in German, Russian, Latin, or some other language. And even if I could read it, for some species their original descriptions are incomplete, so I would need to borrow previously identified specimens from foreign museums to compare.
When it comes to naming, then, we are a most skeptical and miserable bunch. A name is a search term for a whole chain of stories, like a transparent and taut fishing line plunging straight into the deep sea, a fishing line that, if you were determined to pull on it, would dredge up from the seafloor every rock and pebble—splash splash splash! Only by leaving no stone unturned can you feel the weight of a name. On the other hand, if you carelessly refer to a name without having leafed through its past, what those few syllables index would appear so thin, it could be swept away in a breeze. To do this would be like as frivolous as trying to pick up a pond with your bare hands—what you end up catching would only be your own dripping wet fist.
Opening my fist now, I examined the wrinkled note again to confirm I was going the right way—getting lost came so naturally to me—while walking and counting in my head a few sea hibiscus trees that happened to appear on the side of the street.
The note was given to me by the manager at the Institute. Yesterday morning he called the fourth-floor workroom to say that last night I’d had a female visitor, but he couldn’t let her in without an ID, and so she’d left a note. I skimmed it; basically, she had a tu-chuan at home and wanted me to help identify the species, and it even ended in some riddle-like directions:
“bus to shih-liao road, sunken moon street to south bridge, house at 6th sea hibiscus tree (old boat in front)”
Not only was there no name attached, but the tu-chuan also had no connection to my research; it would have been fine to toss it out, but I stuffed the note in my coat pocket. Then the next day at lunch, while waiting for beef noodles across the street, I thought of the past and felt lonely—as if a big piece of translucent kelp clung to my heart. That was when I fished out the note from my pocket, read it again, and decided to keep the appointment.
Having crossed Sunken Moon Street, I studied the note once more before putting it back into the pocket of my washed-out army coat, its green camo print fading into yellow. As I passed the fourth sea hibiscus, I could already see it: the odd fishing boat, ancient-looking, worn all the way down to its wooden skeleton with just a few flakes of paint still hanging on. Over by the boat, a girl was waving at me.
The corrugated-tin shack: from the road, it looked like it had been long abandoned; no, actually, it looked like it had never been inhabited. Creeping over the shack’s window frame were vines of the cowherd morning glory, sneaking out from the edges were weeds: the horse-tooth grass and the red-crown daisy. Trapping half of the wall in its tentacles, its dense branches and thick foliage, was a swallow fig tree, probably planted here two or three years ago by a fig-eating bulbul bird. Stacked on the roof were a dozen old tires, likely there to prevent the roof from being torn off by a typhoon, making it look like the shack had grown a dozen black ears.
The girl, in a black cotton shirt and long indigo skirt, looked to be in her twenties. Her eyes were a deep clear pool: either they had never seen sadness, or they had seen too much and acquired an unusual depth. So captivating and carefree, those eyes—I stared straight into them until it became embarrassing for us both.
“Sorry I made you come all this way,” she said finally, with a sigh. “It’s chaos, I know. I didn’t think you experts would care to come.”
“It’s just that, sometimes I prefer being with plants, so I’m pretty boring,” I said, feeling bashful. “But I’m not cold-hearted, you know.”
“Oh, I meant, I thought you guys only studied extremely rare stuff.”
“Who knows, this tu-chuan of yours could be a rare one.”
She let out a light chuckle. Flustered by her laughter, I glanced around and asked, “So, where’s the tu-chuan?”
“Over there,” she said, gesturing to the door fluidly, like tossing a baseball. I followed her outside.
“Here.” The girl pointed to the tu-chuan. I turned over a leaf, registering its texture between my fingers, and inspected the young leaves, their color and fuzzy trichomes.
This was no good, I needed more information. “Where’s it from?”
“What?” The girl seemed to be caught off guard.
I repeated. “Where is the tu-chuan from?”
“Um, from a mountain, the one up South Stream. But it got here before I was born.”
“Has it ever flowered?”
“No.”
“Could be maladaptation.”
Imitating my gesture, she half-heartedly rubbed the tu-chuan’s leaves, a faraway look in her gaze, and said, “When dad brought it back, he said it bloomed white flowers on the mountain.” Then she added, “That’s what mom said.”
“Can I collect a sample?” She nodded. I used my shears to clip off a small branch and put it in a specimen bag, while telling her that I couldn’t come up with an answer right then and needed a few days. The girl nodded without a word. My mind kept circling back to the odd, dilapidated boat, so before leaving, I finally decided to indulge my curiosity and asked, why was there a fishing boat?
“Because the river used to run here,” the girl said.
For convenience’s sake, the last several years I had been renting an apartment near the Institute instead of living with my parents, a lonely orange cat my only companion, a companion who entertained itself when bored, who made me feel even lonelier. Except for all the books about plants, my place was what you would expect for a thirty-something bachelor: on the floor, several days’ worth of dirty laundry; on the walls, wild bird conservation posters gifted by the Institute; and in the corner, a solid wood Crafter guitar. It was a beautiful mahogany, and occasionally I liked to sniff the sound box for the dry woody smell.
The only window in the room faced the fire-escape alley: the view to the left, a sliver of South Bridge in the distance, and to the right, a dead end. Some nights there would be young couples in the alley—never mind the sewage stench—kissing like no one could see them. It was especially annoying to behold in my lonely moments, even thinking about it now was like a knife to my heart.
Over the next few days at home, I reviewed the literature on tu-chuan. The Latin name for the genus is rhododendron: rhodo-dendron, rose-tree.
There were nineteen recorded species of tu-chuan on the island. Finding a match among the majority of collected specimens, excluding a few alpine species, would not be difficult. And yet, when the girl told me there had once been a river, I already had a gut feeling about the tu-chuan’s identity. But that’s not quite the right way to put it, because I still could not utter its name.
At an age when I couldn’t yet tell my left hand from my right, Sunken Moon Street was still called Sunken Moon Creek, a lower tributary of South Stream, twisting and bending, encircling more than half of the city. In those days, the harbor boasted a flourishing fishing industry with plenty of seasonal catch: goldentail, blackhead seabream, croaker, crab. This went on until South Reservoir was completed in 1987, when water levels in lower South Stream plummeted, after which the government spent a few years straightening the river channel, erasing its bends. Now South Stream flowed straight into the sea. Sunken Moon Creek was filled in and renamed Sunken Moon Street, wide and barren, its pavement sinking a little every few years.
After the reservoir was built, it had an accumulation period so brief—barely a footnote in history—during which the headwaters rose ten plus meters, flooding and forever burying what used to be South Valley, Heron Lake, Cormorant Pond, Misty Grove, Fiery-Cloud Spring, and a tiny coastal village whose name has since been forgotten.
As plant researchers all know, Japanese botanist Udagawa Ken once published a short article in the Japanese Journal of Botany, describing his latest encounter: a species of tu-chuan found at the forest’s edge near the riverbanks in upper South Stream—a new species that Udagawa could not formally name, because he had lost the specimen. When scholars were later revising the Index of Common Names for rhododendron, they wanted to visit the discovery site and verify the tu-chuan in Udagawa’s description, but by then South Reservoir had been completed; the tu-chuan’s habitat, as described by Udagawa, must have sunk in the flood. It has ever since remained a mystery among island botanists whether this tu-chuan had indeed existed.
Days later, I brought my findings to the girl, telling her that this tu-chuan was probably the same species as in the Japanese scholar’s account; it did not yet have a name, and was very likely the last one of its kind in the world.
“Ah... What a shame I have to cut it, then. I just wanted to know what I’m chopping down, that’s all.”
I stared at her, surprised. “Why?”
She said, in a tone that was meant to be comforting, “We’re leaving.”
“Why not keep the tu-chuan here?”
“Mom won’t leave if it stays.”
“Can’t you replant it somewhere? Or take it with you?”
“It can’t be helped,” she said. “The tu-chuan has to die. Mom has to know it’s dead.”
“You can’t stay any longer?”
“I’m sorry, really. It’s time. I have to chop it down.”
The girl went inside the shack and came out holding an axe. She practiced swinging it a few times into the base of the tu-chuan.
“What about your dad?” I asked. The girl froze, looking as if she had been struck.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling ashamed about resorting to a rude question to save the tu-chuan. “But you said, your dad planted it. Can you say more about your dad?”
I posed my question earnestly. The girl seemed to hear this and took a deep breath. Holding up the axe, she examined the iron blade for what felt like a long time, as if she was counting the rust spots and taking inventory. After each spot was catalogued, she put down the axe and peered inside the shack. I saw her gaze meet that of a woman inside, and I felt the quiet sound of a fracturing.
“Will you walk with me to South Bridge?” she said after thinking for a long time.
The lights on South Bridge were coming on. From outside the city to its entrance, one lamp lit up after another like a procession of spirits floating toward the city, holding lanterns as if going to a festival. Kids loved to come out at this time, to catch the moment the bridge lights turned on, so they could feel like they were also participating in an invisible ceremony.
Having caught the beautiful moment of the lights, we both let escape a sigh. It was quite windy on the bridge. I drummed up the courage to put my trench coat around the girl’s shoulders. She seemed a bit embarrassed but still buttoned up the collar, gazing toward the mouth of the river as if searching for something. I leaned against the railing like she did. The occasional car speeding by rustled her long hair.
“Dad was a fisherman,” she said. That was before she was born.
A few decades ago, sea-going brought in a decent income. When the catch was abundant, it took just a few voyages to earn what a worker on land might earn in a year. Once on land, fishermen would linger around hotels near the harbor, fattened up with thousand-yuan bills—in a time of five-yuan noodle bowls—drinking for days from dusk until dawn. At the four-story Rich Heaven Inn, the most well-known establishment of its kind back then, ladies-for-hire could tell a guest’s job from his smell and the shape of his muscles. They had a special longing for fishermen, hoping that the men would, after a night together, carry a piece of them out to the sea. That was the harbor inn where her father and mother met.
They were both people without roots, two empty glass bottles floating in the sea, brought together by an uncaring wave, clinking. Afterward the young man not only bought his own boat but also paid off her debt and bought back her freedom.
After the fishing industry collapsed, every beached fisherman looked like they had used a screwdriver to nail their eyebrows together. Some who could not adjust to the downturn still went drinking every night and burned away their money. Since then the mesh of the fishnet had only grown finer, forcing increasingly younger, smaller fish to face the real modern sea. The mahi-mahi was a kind of fish that used to be mixed with bait and pounded into fish balls, but now they were chopped into chunks and sold as fillets, to be coveted by tourists.
When her father stopped fishing, the old boat was cast aside. Everything that could be sold was taken apart and sold. After that they could only turn to scavenging, picking out from the garbage heap broken rice cookers, broken electric fans, broken radios, broken furniture, broken old bicycles—things that people thought were flotsam but could in fact be repaired and used again. These were collected and taken to the city to be sold every afternoon.
One night, her father ran home excitedly and said he was going out to catch a whale. He tidied up his valuables so swiftly, like he had been prepared and waiting for a chance to leave, even taking her mother’s only gold ring. He had not been out to sea in a long time and heard a rumor about a whale swimming into South Stream. Then he rushed to find his old shipmate, the vagrant Boy Ah-San, ran to the river and sailed out in someone else’s dinghy. At that point the girl also ran up South Bridge to witness her father set out, but she was still too far from the river mouth. As a child she could only wait around, believing that her father would come home after dinner.
Her father never did come back. Her mother tracked down every one of his former friends and found out nothing, no one had even really seen him sail out. The girl said, That’s all that Mom said; she herself did not remember wanting to see Dad off. What she did remember was, that day on the bridge, the entire South Stream was illuminated in a blue light. She didn’t know whether that was a dream because, ever since then, she often dreamed about drifting alone in a blue river.
“In this dream, the whole river was filled with iridescent jellyfish.” The girl spread her arms out toward the river, representing an infinite expansion, and said to me, “Let me ask you, plant expert, could that be possible?”
“You mean jellyfish?” I suddenly remembered, as a kid I had also seen jellyfish on South Bridge.
It began with my best buddy at school running over and grabbing me by hand. “Hurry, hurry! To the bridge! Something big is happening,” he said, a fire in his eyes.
Night fell; we ran to South Bridge. On the street were faces both familiar and strange, walkers fast and slow, all moving in the same direction: there was Mr. Baldy the Mandarin teacher; Fatty Lung the handyman; Ah-Wen the paperboy; the grocer auntie who gave her customers free spring onions; Stinky Ah-Hung, my nemesis at school; the stingy juice-stand uncle who watered down his watermelon juice—everyone, like moths to a flame, gradually flocked to the brightly lit bridge.
Squeezing my way to the railing, I gazed out, enraptured, at what was now slowly drifting in from the river mouth—countless blue flickers of light, ever so faint, forming a crowd below the bridge. I felt like I was in a haze, falling and floating, flowing up a mountain.
Jellyfish! someone said. What are the jellyfish doing? someone asked yet no one replied.
Even in a developed city capable of turning hard metal into cotton candy, when people first saw it—a bloom of glowing jellyfish pouring in, drawn by the city lights at night—still they were stunned speechless, feeling as if their souls had been struck by a blunt force. Spellbound by the unknown, they stood on the bridge in awe, swooning stupidly like a boy after masturbating for the first time, in a moment flooded with possibility and vulnerability. Nervously I thought, maybe school would be closed tomorrow, maybe Mom and Dad would take me out to play tomorrow.
With the grown-ups distracted, I snuck away from the crowd, venturing through a thicket of spiky silvergrass down to the riverbank. I observed them up close—the jellyfish whose name I did not yet know, this fascinating organism with a ring of soft, slender tentacles and jello for a body—and saw on the shore many washed-up jellyfish. Watching their glow slowly dim, I felt, for the first time, a sadness named loss.
That night, the story went, a Yung’s Whale that preyed on jellyfish had followed them into South Stream: the one potential sighting in more than fifty years after Yung’s Whales had been deemed extinct in 1929. Whale researchers from all over reportedly moved within hours to assemble at the harbor and set out in their fancy, well-equipped boat. If the Yung’s Whale had not been sighted that day, the world might have forever forgotten its name. If the girl’s father really did go out to catch it, he might have been one of its last witnesses.
“Maybe we saw each other on the bridge,” I told her.
“Maybe, who knows,” she said, propping up her chin and gazing at the river in total darkness.
“Who knows.”
“Plant expert,” she turned toward me, staring, and asked, “Now that you know my dad’s story, would you still stop me?”
“I don’t know,” I said after thinking. “Now that you know the tu-chuan’s story, would you still cut it down?”
The girl was quiet for a while. In the dark I could not make out her expression but felt a whale circling in agony in the corner of her eye. Feeling guilty, I placed a hand on her shoulder but was afraid to hug her and, after contemplating, let the hand fall.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“We don’t owe each other anything,” she said.
It was getting late. I offered to walk her home, but she declined. I buttoned up the trench coat for her and bid her farewell on the bridge. Alone she headed for the outskirts. I, shivering and sneezing, walked in the freezing wind toward Sunken Moon Street, where I would wait for the last bus into the city.