WINTER RAIN in Taiwan’s mountains seems to hang in the air, getting into every seam of my clothes. The weather was warm when I left the city, but two thousand meters up, in the cloud forests near Alishan, I am shaking with cold.
I was told the trail would be fairly easy. A worthwhile distraction from my grief over my grandfather’s death. I’d spent the autumn tracing his past in Taiwan, restlessly trying to close the gap left by my family’s migration to Canada and my own moves throughout Europe. In hiking, I found a way of connecting not just with
