Groaning stones, mountain ghosts, and sacred trees
Groaning stones, mountain ghosts, and sacred trees
On Earth justice and folk religion; plus a trip to Indigo, a utopian bookstore in Busan, South Korea and Vanessa Hope's new film Invisible Nation
Last week I touched a tree that was three thousand years old and I felt, for a moment, instant tranquility. I think the people around me felt it, too. “You see this tree and can’t not believe in tree gods,” said Lee Mao-jung, who studies Taiwanese popular religion. Albert and our three-year-old P. and I had tagged along with a group of religious scholars, led by Dr. Chen Yi-yun, to the majestic Alishan mountains, home of primeval cypresses and camphor trees.
The next morning, I saw a famous groaning rock. The story goes like this: in the early 1920s, the timber industry was surging under Japanese rule. Railroads were laid down to ship wood. Every night, railroad workers heard sighs coming from the forest, a mournful, otherworldly sound. Whenever they heard that sound, something unlucky would happen. After searching, they realized the sighs were coming from a large boulder. To quiet the stone, the villagers brought in a Buddhist monk, who carved into the rock the four characters nanwu amitabha, the Buddhist equivalent of “May you rest in peace.”
And the rock ceased to groan.
Stories of unhappy spirits permeate these mountains. Trees were axed, felled, shipped. Rocks were moved from the soil and crushed into small pieces. Japanese workers, many of whom professed animist beliefs, thought spirits were enacting revenge. People in Alishan began to die from a range of mysterious illnesses. White rice inexplicably turned red, the color of the bark of the Taiwan red cypress—the tree I touched.
The loggers summoned a Daoist priest, who constructed a pagoda to honor and comfort the angry tree spirits. (Some killjoy historians argue that the pagoda was just the Japanese government trying to create common cultural symbols across the empire, but nuts to them.) As with the sighing stone, the spirits were appeased and the strange events ceased. The pagoda is now one of the most visited sites in Alishan. Meanwhile, you’ll find the Taiwan red cypress in our former colonizer’s gates, shrines, and temples in Kyoto and Tokyo.
During my first months in Taiwan I thought to myself, with astonishment: There are no secularists here. This impression only deepened as I met scholars, activists, and ordinary temple-goers. What would be called religious in the West is woven into the fabric of daily life here. Everybody practices rituals or knows somebody who does: paper-burning, offerings to ancestors and ghosts, baibai—a kind of prayer, though not exactly equivalent to the Christian sort. And yet few would call their practices religion, at least as I understood the term in the U.S. They wouldn’t insist on the absolute truth of their beliefs, or exclude the practice of other traditions.
Taiwan is the world’s second most religiously diverse country. Daoism, Buddhism, and Shintoism intermingle with indigenous beliefs and diverse folk religions, among them belief in the sea goddess Mazu and Tudigong, the earth god, not to mention the fertility goddess, the study god, the love god. A Hindu temple was recently built. Women wear headscarves openly. Christianity exists in syncretic form: visiting an indigenous church in Pingtung, I was delighted by pews decorated in the tribal colors of the Rukai people, showing figures of Mary and Jesus clothed in gorgeous Rukai robes, complete with lilies in the headdresses.
Meanwhile, Ghost Month, where you make offerings to ghosts and abide loosely by a series of precepts, pervades every sector of society. “The question here isn’t whether you believe in ghosts,” a friend explained to me, “but how intensely.”
Living here has deepened my sense of the many connections between nature and humans, between our past actions and the present world. Before I arrived, I can’t say I was much of a nature person. I don’t like bugs. I hate walking uphill. I’m pretty sure a guy once broke up with me because I complained too much on a hike.
I’ve changed, though. Part of it has to do with living on a small island. Water surrounds you, land is scarce, natural resources are limited. It’s not possible to keep building landfills where you incinerate trash. The government constantly reminds us to conserve water and energy. Taiwanese people have one of the world’s highest recycling rates and lowest rates of daily trash production. (Americans produce more daily waste in the world than any other country besides Denmark.)
Environmental consciousness can be traced to daring grassroots movements that were all the more remarkable because they occurred under martial law. As scholar Paul Jobin has written, mass protests in the 1980s against nuclear waste and pollution due to petrochemical factories were key to delegitimizing the authoritarian state. There’s still more work to be done—look out for a piece we’re writing about plastic!—but environmental action is now woven into everyday life. People bring their own reusable chopsticks and bowls to conferences. Ingenious gardens dot the urban environment. Young people celebrate their graduations by organizing beach cleanups.
In the West, questions about the environment are often framed in the language of rights. An iconic legal paper by Christopher Stone called “Do Trees Have Standing?” was published in 1972 and cited by Justice William Douglas of the U.S. Supreme Court in a dissent that same year. (The American Bar Association replied with a satirical poem ridiculing him: If Justice Douglas had his way / O come not that dreadful day / We’ll be sued by lakes and hills / seeking a redress of ills.)
Sacred trees, moaning stones, and mountain ghosts have been teaching me new ways to think, new frames for living. The indigenous Bunun people believe you must take only what you need; the indigenous Tao, the seafaring inhabitants of Orchid Island, regard the flying fish as their ancestor. Animists believe that stones and trees speak, and folk religions of all kinds treat ancient trees as deities. These traditions, each in their own idiosyncratic way, take seriously the idea that nature has rights—that trees, fish, and stones deserve have the same standing as we do.
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American progressives tend to subdivide into camps; in Taiwan I’ve felt this much less. Seemingly disparate “disciplines” or “specialties” or “passions”— environmental justice, indigenous rights, labor, prison abolition, immigration, religious diversity—interact in exhilaratingly intuitive and tangible ways.
So, in Asia, a story about railways and forests is inevitably a story about colonialism and capital. The Dutch built railroads in Indonesia to expand their sugar empire; the Japanese built railroads in Alishan to ship wood and violently evicted indigenous people from the forests. Migrants from China, as well as Japanese and local Taiwanese, logged and worked the railways. Marginalized people competed for use of the forest, depending on it for their livelihood.
Logging is perilous work. Trees fall on people; hands get severed by careless blades. Even today, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration deems it the most dangerous occupation. In Taiwan, the unpredictable mountainous weather can lead to catastrophe: trains derail, people slip off cliffs. Accidents are caused by mudslides, storms, fog. (Driving in Alishan, we were suddenly slowed down by a mist that obscured everything more than a foot in front of us; a crashing downpour of rain followed. Later, locals laughed when we asked if that was considered a lot of rain.)
Since the KMT arrived, more than 344,000 hectares of forest land have been razed—an area about 1.5 times that of Yosemite National Park. More than forty-four million cubic meters of trees have been cut down.1 Alishan alone lost hundreds of thousands of Taiwan red cypresses. The government finally began conservation efforts and banned cutting down trees in 1991.
Once wood is considered private property, taking it becomes a criminal offense. A young Karl Marx described with methodical fury how peasants were arrested for “stealing” firewood. Their families had lived off the land for generations; now they were deemed petty thieves. “Just as it is not fitting for the rich to lay claim to alms distributed in the street,” Marx wrote, “so also in regard to these alms of nature.”
Today tree poachers in Taiwan are incarcerated for violating national conservation acts. There’s some irony here: these laws are well-intentioned, but the poachers are usually poor migrant workers recruited to do somebody else’s dirty work. I found hope in learning how the Bunun dealt with a poacher who stole from a seven hundred-year-old camphor tree on their land : instead of sending him to prison, they used restorative justice. To show his remorse, the poacher killed a wild boar, shared the meat, and apologized. Bunun elders used this as a chance to educate the youth about their natural resources.
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Justice Douglas’s dissent in 1972 was bold, brilliant, and way ahead of its time. In that case, Sierra Club v. Morton, the U.S. Forest Service granted Disney the right to develop a $35 million ski resort in the gorgeous Mineral Valley, nestled in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, not far from Sequoia National Park. The Sierra Club, an environmental nonprofit, sued to stop construction, but the Supreme Court found that the Club lacked “standing”—meaning its nature-loving members hadn’t shown that they were injured. Finding a resort “displeasing or distasteful,” as the Court put it, wasn’t enough.
Douglas disagreed. He believed in a simple solution: “objects about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozer… ought to be able to sue for their own preservation.” The valley being bulldozed, he said, should be able to sue; the real name of this lawsuit should be Mineral Valley v. Morton, not Sierra Club v. Morton. (Roger Morton was the Secretary of the Interior, which oversees the Forest Service.) Douglas continued:
Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality. [T]he ordinary corporation is a “person” for purposes of the adjudicatory processes… So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes and estuaries. The river is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes—fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, deer, elk, bear and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it for its sight, sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.
It’s no coincidence, legal scholar Samantha Franks observes, that indigenous people have been among the first to uphold the rights of the environment. In the U.S., a band from the Chippewa Nation recognized the rights of manoomin, or wild rice, in order to stop an oil pipeline. In New Zealand, legislators recognized a river as a legal person, establishing the Maori as its guardian. In Australia, the Victorian Parliament recognized the Yarra River as a living entity. Since then, activists have successfully put an end to the dumping of plastics in it.
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Our last stop in Alishan was the Hungry Ghost festival, one of Taiwan’s most extensive rituals. Everybody in the village takes part in some way. More than a hundred tables overflowed with offerings to the ghosts, from cooked meals—dumplings, stewed bamboo, fried rice, noodles, all kinds of mountain vegetables—to beer, Doritos, and instant noodles. Raw meat was also offered to animal spirits. People poured water and lit sticks of incense one by one, so the ghosts could take their time eating.
Most likely noticing that we were just standing around taking videos, a guy from the temple put us to work, and pretty soon Albert, no-longer-baby P., and I were practicing a ritual written off as superstitious by so many Western observers: untying bundles of paper money—thick paper with gold and pink squares—and throwing it into buckets. Men then dumped the paper into a fire in one of five enormous iron canisters. If it rained, we were told, it was a sign the ghosts were sated.
An hour later, it rained. We put on our hoods and went to the woods for a last walk. Our shoes got muddy, and I worried P. would slip on the wet stones. Then Albert pointed to a giant tree with a hollow and said to her, “Totoro lives here!”
Totoro is the cuddly, round-bellied, acorn-eating animal spirit of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film My Neighbor Totoro. His image is ubiquitous in Taiwan and particularly beloved in our household. It’s hard to think of another artist who has done more than Miyazaki to bring animist ideas to Western mainstream culture. In that film, Totoro lives inside a giant camphor tree. He and the children he meets bow to it together, a kind of sun salutation to make the trees sprout and grow.
“Totoro here? Where Totoro?” P. said.
“Right there.”
She peered into the tree, looking for the spirit.
A book-loving utopian community in South Korea
We went for the first time to Korea, to the port city of Busan, and fell in love with the good people at Indigo Books. They teach youth humanities courses and cooking classes, organize youth forums, publish books, build libraries, and run a vegetarian restaurant. I visited a Saturday morning class, where one eight-year-old told me about fast fashion and another piped in with details about worker conditions in Bangladesh. They were very cool kids.
Indigo had invited me to talk about my book Reading with Patrick, which came out in Korean this year. I met teachers, librarians, school staff, and students. “Kids have no time to think,” a longtime librarian told me. “I wish they could feel closer to earth, to nature, to where they live.” They shared the challenges of a brutal-test taking culture, where twenty-four-hour study cafes are common and teachers are regularly harassed by parents. In recent years, three teachers have committed suicide, while a prosecutor was appointed minister of education. Just this past week, a 23 year-old elementary school teacher committed suicide, and thousands of teachers staged a massive walkout to protest her death.
“We at Indigo Sowon envision a day in the foreseeable future when libraries and small bookstores take the place of the cram schools and training schools that are seen in nearly every neighborhood, when the young people of Korea can rush into these libraries and small bookstores after school to read whatever books they want and have debates under the shade of trees,” says founder Aram Hur. “There are many people who consider themselves cultured and refined but who have utterly ignored the poor and socially isolated regions of their country.”
Aram and her team have sought to create a community that asks ethical questions about how to live and what to value. If you’re ever in Busan, check out their bookstore and have a meal at vegetarian restaurant, Ecotopia. They’re Davids fighting a Goliath. They’ll inspire you.
Vanessa Hope’s new film: Invisible Nation
Congratulations to filmmaker Vanessa Hope! She’s made a wonderful film, Invisible Nation, which documents the election of Tsai Ing-wen, the first female president of Taiwan. Most thrillingly, she’s had some unprecedented access to President Tsai. Her film will be shown at the Woodstock Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, and the Seattle International Film Festival. Please check out the film if you’ll be in those areas!
Book Club: Demon Copperhead
Thanks to everyone who came to our discussion of Melissa Fu’s Peach Blossom Spring. Fu’s novel opened up a space to share family histories and explore silences between generations. Our next book club is Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. It will take place Friday, September 29th at 6:30 PM EST (Saturday, Sept 30th at 6:30 AM Taiwan time). For October, we'll read Han Kang's Greek Lessons, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won. And in November we’ll read Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind, translated by Max Lane, the first in a tetralogy called The Buru Quartet. If you’d like to
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These official statistics are definitely undercounted: they don’t encompass illegal logging or deforestation done under the Japanese colonial government. If we took a timber truck ten meters long with a load of fifteen cubic meters, the total length of the trucks could be as long as thirty thousand kilometers—enough to circumnavigate Taiwan dozens of times.
Wonderful essay. Thank you
I just finished Demon Copperhead and found it so engrossing.