I grew up hearing stories about the deaths in Taiwan’s Taroko National Park. I imagined visitors in sunhats and new sneakers, shuffling along trails when suddenly they would hear the deep groan of shifting rock, perhaps a tumble of stones, and look upon barely in time to register the landslide headed their way. The stories of these ill-fated deaths were always accompanied by a contrasting image: idyllic gorge walls that ran five hundred meters deep and plunged into a river of teal that cut through the ancient marble. At four years old, I thought it sounded lovely. But of course, I had never been there; Taroko existed for me only in stories and imagination.
Tales of Taroko were mixed in with the bedtime stories I listened to growing up. The first photo of my parents together is in Taroko National Park, more than a decade before they first arrived in the US. My father is seventeen years old and wears flared jeans and box-framed glasses, while my mother, at twenty, slouches in a magenta button-down that probably sticks to the skin in the suffocating summer heat. Taroko mystified me just as much as the idea of a young, childless version of my parents did, and I began to imagine Taroko as a fairy tale universe: beautiful, twinkling with dust, impossible.
I spent most of my childhood in the suburbs of upstate New York, where the key to getting through awkward conversations was to complain about the weather, where being cool meant wearing shorts during a snowstorm, and where schoolchildren dutifully recited the importance of diversity then laughed at kids with unfamiliar lunches. In first grade, I joined my first Girl Scout troop. We met in the cafeteria afterschool and spent meetings eating packaged cookies, singing songs in our shrill five-year-old voices, and making pledges about upholding character traits that we promptly forgot. In Girl Scouts, I found a sort of camaraderie amongst the less cool kids — the socially awkward, the shy, or, like me, those who always seemed to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. My parents, both of whom had grown up in Taiwan and were perplexed at the notion of raising kids in the US, never quite understood the manic obsession their kids had with appearing white — why we came home asking for PB&J sandwiches sliced down the diagonal or string cheese instead of daikon pickles. In my head, it was rather simple: I wanted to be liked, and kids my age didn’t tend to be that interested in or tolerant of differences. Saturday mornings spent learning Chinese at a local middle school were poor excuses for missing the latest cartoons, and summer vacations devoted to math equations rather than playing in the sun left little but a distaste for math. Throughout elementary school, I was convinced that if I could change my un-Americanness then I’d no longer feel like a perpetual outsider. Girl Scouts became a necessity in my quest, for it was pristinely American, with a slew of laws and sayings and songs that I could follow like a rule book.
Girl Scouts brought me on my first trip to the outdoors. My family was never interested in camping, preferring outings where they could take a leisurely stroll and return to an air-conditioned car. Every other autumn, local Girl Scout troops attended Camporee, a county-wide gathering where girls ranging from five to seventeen congregated at Camp Pinewood in Upstate New York for two days of classic scouting activities — polar bear swims, campfire songs, mess hall meals. We slept in platform tent quarters: four large, canvas pyramids on a raised wooden plank balcony, all nestled in a small clearing that was hugged by golden-red deciduous trees and sharp-scented pines.
I was thrilled with the ritual of it all. Going to the latrine required first arming oneself with a can of Febreeze and an enormous inhale to avoid breathing in the fumes of a toilet stewing in the summer heat. Dinner was an affair where there were songs for sitting down, songs for getting served, songs for licking sauce off your forks in preparation for dessert. And on our stroll back to the platform tents at night, we walked with our eyes fixed to the sky, breathing in the drama of a million pulsing stars that we saw for the first time free of streetlight haze.
Camporee began my love affair with the outdoors. I loved the smells, the seclusion, the ritual, and the permission to believe that we were living off our wits in the great wilderness. More than that, however, I was smitten with the way nature allowed me to feel American. My bulky boots and fleece jacket were more than mere niceties for an evening in the woods; in my mind, they were symbols of an exclusive, very American sort of outdoor savviness, and I basked in the fact that, for the first time, I belonged. Of course, years later in college, as Patagonia jackets became adopted by tech bros and hiking boots turned into a trending autumn accessory, it would become clear that outdoor apparel was anything but special. But back in 2004, college was a decade and two thousand miles away, and all I knew then was that I was hooked on the idea of becoming the quintessential American outdoorswoman.
By the time I reached high school, my Americanness had become a point of immense pride. I went on summertime backpacking trips through the Adirondacks, relishing in freeze-dried dinners and frigid swims. In a school-led mountaineering trip to the Adirondack Mountains, we cliff dived off islands, learned to rock climb on a ragged rock face, and ran up mountains carrying intact watermelons for “character building.” I sat on a knobby stone beach one night nearly a decade after my first Camporee and found myself thinking of my mother. I remembered how she always smelled of clean lotion and how I’d bury my head in her pillow when I was little just to remember what safety smelled like. I thought of how despite loving my mother more than anyone, I always felt a deep anger towards her when I listened to her stumbling broken English in public. I’d watch the faces of strangers with their best looks of feigned patience as she spoke, and I’d promise myself that I would never let anyone look at me that way. On the stone beach that night, I silently thanked her for putting up with years of car rides and cookie sales so I could become literate in the outdoors. So I could become literate in being American.
My startling love of Americanness began to crack the summer before I entered college. I had reluctantly gone on an English teaching program sponsored by the Taiwanese government as part of a deal with my mother: if I didn’t get a full-ride to orchestra camp, I’d go to Taiwan for the first time in fourteen years. I soon found myself in a Taipei overseas center, attending teacher-preparation lessons with 350 other Taiwanese-American kids who adamantly spoke only English and cringed at the “fobbiness” of our counselors. The irony of foreigners calling people in the native country “fobby” went conveniently unnoticed in conversation, and my peers’ reigning superiority of being American suddenly left me intensely ashamed. Ashamed because my own disdain for my parents’ culture was amplified by my peers, where I saw it for the first time in its full hurtful and arrogant glory. Ashamed because the ones who were most brutally honest to my parents about how unwanted their differences were were their own children. It struck me then that the cruelest ambassadors of American superiority were not stereotypically blond haired, blue eyed kids, but those who’d spent their entire lives trying to shed the un-American skin they were born into. Removing this skin was precisely the skill I’d spent my life honing, had in fact cherished as one of my crowning achievements. Now, at 18 years old, I suddenly wanted nothing to do with it.
Throughout college, I found excuses to return to Taiwan: a research grant, a hospital internship. The academic portions of these trips, the parts I would tell acquaintances and write on resumes, were just excuses for me to get a bit closer to a world where my parents’ quirks and mannerisms were the norm. In the dripping summer heat of Kaohsiung, I watched old men shuffling laps on the school track wearing oversized button-down short-sleeved shirts just like my father. I stared at ladies stand around a plastic table on swollen feet, folding dumpling after dumpling, and thought of my mother, who would make dumplings whenever I pined for frozen microwave meals and tell me “You can eat whatever you want once you’re in college.” Ironically, once I finally did get to college, I spent my summers in Taiwan seeking out dumpling stands night after night.
It was during one of these summers that I found myself at Taroko National Park. I was on a trip to Hualien, the small city closest to Taroko, with a Taiwanese friend I’d met a few years before at a Buddhist monastic retreat. My friend was nicknamed “Little Ant” because of her inclination toward strange lunch foods, and we became fast friends due to our mutual willingness to break the silence vow whenever the monastics weren’t looking.
We soon found ourselves on a bus careening around the precarious bends of Taroko, bound for a stop so deep in the mountains that it was on only one bus route a day. Earlier, Little Ant had shown me a photo of our destination: a natural hot spring in the heart of Taroko called Wenshan. I was instantly smitten. The photo showed a river of glittering cerulean water that filled the bottom of a deep river canyon, precisely the kind of wild and secluded place I’d always dreamed of finding in high school.
“Off to hot springs, eh?” asked the gruff bus driver as we stood up to get off at an odd turn in the road. Of course he knew what we were doing; Wenshan had been closed to the public for over a decade, and yet there was no other reason anyone would get off here. The bus stop looked less like a trailhead, and more like the unfortunate side of the road that a fed-up driver might dump his passengers. It was over a mile from the nearest building, surrounded by nothing but winding roads, steep cliff edges, and the occasional bright yellow sign advising visitors not to linger lest they be hit with a landslide.
The path down to Wenshan began as a series of neatly carved steps that moved in a gentle curve hugging the mountain slope, unremarkable except for the threat of falling rocks. We soon came upon an iron fence fitted with a large sign that barred entrance to the remainder of the path. On the left of the gate was a gap through the steel posts that was a clear target for sneaking through. It was an easy duck under one bar and step over another, brainlessly simple except for how precariously close we were close to the edge of the cliff. We slipped quickly through the fence, careful not to think too hard about the unforgiving plunge a two-inch ledge away.
Past the iron fence, the trail devolved in layers. First it was the absence of wooden planks that kept the rectangular integrity of the steps, causing us to bumble and trip through the dusty rock. Then it was the sloppy stretches of mud that forced us to slide from turn to turn. Finally, after crossing a slender, red rope bridge, I found myself face to face with the final wood-plank staircase. The bottom third was shredded away from years of neglect and moisture. Suddenly, I heard my father’s voice in my head in a way I’d heard a thousand times before: “Be careful.”
I hear my father’s voice most clearly in my head when he is saying “Be careful.” It’s always in Mandarin, where ‘careful’ translates literally to ‘have a little heart’, and was said in abundance when my two elder siblings and I were little. Every time we walked down stairs. Every time we crossed the road. Every time as we balanced shakily on our training-wheeled bikes. From my father, it was the closest we ever got to an “I love you,” even though it was he, rather than my mother, who showered our tiny bodies with hugs and kisses. Later in high school, ‘careful’ started to seem to me like an excuse for my parents’ excessive caution, and it fed into my growing resentment of home and the otherness it stood for.
My lip curled into a snide grin as I slid recklessly down the remaining descent of mud and rotted wood steps. How fitting, I thought, that my visit to Taiwan should bring me to the wildest place I’d ever been, when throughout my childhood wilderness had always been a symbol of wanting, more than anything, to be American.
Taroko is nestled in the Zhongyang Mountain Range that cuts through Taiwan’s center, and bears a long, well-known history of deadly landslides. On hiking routes, every fifty meters or so bears a diamond-shaped sign warning of the perils of falling stones illustrated with solid black cartoons that might have been funny if their deadliness wasn’t so real. The signs of landslide danger are everywhere: orange nets cling to overhangs to keep loose stones from falling on the unsuspecting passerby, warning signs dot the landscape, and park monuments pay tribute to engineers who lost their lives when designing Taroko’s roads. Indeed, as I wandered around Taroko, I couldn’t help but wonder why everyone continued to visit when reminders of easy death seemed to linger at every corner.
The history of Wenshan Hot Springs is marred by such reminders. Wenshan was first discovered in the early 20th century by soldiers who were sent to survey the land during the Japanese occupation. It soon became a destination for adventurous young men who would brave the steep inclines for the isolated rushing waters and steaming flow underneath the rocks. Postcards of yellowed paper printed with blurry images of men standing on a just-recognizable Wenshan stone platform date to 1920. Its deep blue water fills black-silt baths, knee deep and so hot that just a few degrees more would leave a person screaming. For many years, the infirmed would make the trek down the gorge to Wenshan for a bath, hoping for an elusive cure. In stages beginning in 2001, park officials transformed Wenshan into a tourist destination. Polished wood staircases replaced the muddy slopes, and a slick wooden changing hut greeted visitors at the end of the path. Artificial stone walls were created to prevent the warm water from mixing with the cold river currents. All this work spun out of the hope that by putting a finished, pristine edge to the natural beauty of Wenshan, its façade of orderliness and safety would appeal to the masses. To this end, they were incredibly successful. Tourists came in swarms. On our way down the mountain, Little Ant recalled a visit to Wenshan she made with her family in 2003, when it was impossible to get anywhere near the water without squeezing and squirming through a pack of sweating bodies.
Then in 2005, the seemingly inevitable happened. A landslide descended upon Wenshan, killing a visitor and injuring many others. The entire path to Wenshan was closed until 2011, when half the hiking trail to Wenshan was reopened, granting hikers legal access from the trailhead to a metal fence about a kilometer from the hot springs. The legality of proceeding to the hot springs lies in a gray zone; no laws explicitly forbid entrance, but the official message is that the area is no longer open to visitors and there is no longer any work done to maintain the stairs or other manmade structures that were put up just a decade ago.
Before the 2005 landslide, most of the visitors to Wenshan were Taiwanese — families with kids or young couples still floating in the clouds. Today, it’s hard to find much up-to-date info about Wenshan on the Mandarin Internet. The old government tourism pages have disappeared, and blogs tend to be more interested in covering the newest food craze in Taipei than an abandoned riverbed in the East. But a quick English Google search turns up a slew of websites that provide instructions for how to get to Wenshan, complete with dazzling photos and messages of mixed accuracy regarding the legality of visiting. After all, in its newfound coarseness, Wenshan fits more perfectly than ever in the ‘diamond in the rough’ trope that the West finds so alluring.
The legal limbo surrounding Wenshan contributes to a rough, hazardous aura that greets visitors who choose to continue down to Wenshan: rotted stairs, thick rusted barbs where safety fences have been pulled out of the rock, broken railings. The payoff for those who do venture down to the canyon bottom is a near-private stretch of river where polished stones line the bed like tumbled gemstones from a museum gift shop, the gray-blue water curving and dipping through dainty waterfalls. A cotton rope descends to the river, where visitors can alternate between steaming water that fills stone-lined tubs and the icy river flow. As I stood soaking in the scene, I was struck with a feeling of unbelievable serenity and safety. Indeed, perhaps this is the deadly spell of Taroko: its ability to wrap visitors into a warm hug with its warm, humid haze and expanse of spellbinding wilderness. Surrounded by this beauty and comfort, it feels impossible that anything could go wrong.
Less than an hour after getting off the bus, Little Ant and I found ourselves on a bare rock bed three meters above the rushing current. Embedded into the ledge were a dozen curiously twisted barbs of metal two inches in diameter and enveloped in thick, powdery rust. They might have been fences in another life, but now bore the marks of being torn out by a careless force, perhaps at the order of park officials when the hot springs closed. The changing rooms were gone, as were the artificial stone walls that once kept the warm water in neatly carved tubs above the river.
I glanced down the meter drop to the river bed, where purple-gray water from recent rains lapped viciously by, then nervously followed Little Ant along the rock edge to a tiny cavern carved out of the mountain wall. It was a little taller than a bedroom and opened to a view of the deliciously sloped gorge walls and icy river. The cavern floor was lined with a layer of fine black silt that formed a meter-wide rim around the water pool. Even in the suffocating, dense heat, it was clear that the water was steaming. My toes curled along the silt at the edge of the too-hot water and I stepped gingerly in, centimeter by centimeter. Little Ant and I stripped off our clothes (because this was what one was supposed to do in a secluded nature hot spring, yes?) and splashed around self-consciously until our skin was an angry shade of red.
As the sun crept steadily overhead, more visitors arrived: an outlandishly beautiful couple from Germany, a trio of Americans in their mid-thirties, a group of Chinese missionaries who complained loudly that the water was prettier in photographs. I couldn’t help but notice that of all the visitors we met, Little Ant remained the only one who was properly Taiwanese. The majority (apart from the Chinese missionaries, of course) were from Western countries. It was to be expected, I grumbled to myself. After all, wasn’t I one of them? Wasn’t I also a Westerner searching for beauty and exoticism in the wild? I suddenly felt protective of Wenshan, as if it was my duty to shield it from becoming yet another thing that the West put its judgment stamp on. As I surveyed the other visitors, it occurred to me that what I had been searching for in all my trips to Taiwan was a way to eliminate my reliance on Western approval. Growing up, I had readily soaked up my peers’ judgments about what was worth valuing: nature exploration was worthwhile; stereotypically Asian activities like tennis were not. British accents were hot; Chinese ones were just embarrassing. I returned year after year to Taiwan to eliminate the polarity of this lens, to try to wash away the biases that had taught me to be disdainful of my own family background. Yet here I found myself, soaking in a stone bath amid the most quintessentially Western-trope wilderness imaginable.
Later, as I sat on a stone perch beneath a tiny river waterfall, I found myself wondering if Wenshan would have felt so special had I not been taught as a child to admire the rushing river and isolated wilderness. Was my pulsing heart an echo of my Girl Scout days, or had it always been a part of me without need of instruction? I thought back to how those vibrating stars had stupefied me when I was nine years old at Camporee, long before I could put into words what Americanness was or why it meant so much to me.
In that moment, it seemed natural that I should find myself at Wenshan, decades after the last ailing bather ventured down its steep path to the alleged healing waters. For here it was in Wenshan that I first discovered the bridge between my parents’ world and my own. As I let the river water run through my open palms, I felt my own childhood finally melding with the country that my parents knew better than anywhere in the world. I tossed the water up in the air and felt the glistening beads shower my sunburned face, my mouth stretched into an uncontrollable grin. For here I was, knee-deep in the waters of the river gorge park that had woven in and out of my childhood dreams, close enough to feel the silty water on my face at last.