What’s Holding up the World: Jessica J. Lee’s #Dispersals and Other Writing

Just a few pages into Jessica J. Lee’s Dispersals, I was wholly hooked (the mention of “belonging” in the subtitle got me part way there).

One of those reading experiences where you feel as though you are connecting not-so-much with a book but with a way of seeing, a way of looking.

As when she first describes the milfoil in the water (which recalls her first book, Turning: A Year in the Water) but, then—

“It slumped into a mess of green when I placed it on dry land, but when I submerged it again the milfoil unfurled, delicate and fine. I pulled piles up from the riverbed, and we added them to our fire. But I couldn’t help admiring its beauty: I longed to see it in its native range, where it grew in place, where I could meet the milfoil without thinking mostly of its harm.”

Her language is simple and direct, scenes uncomplicated, but if you’re in the mood to stare out the window between sentences, you’ve plenty to ponder. How do we flourish in one element and languish in another? When is something enough and when is it too much? What supports growth, what halts it? And how is all of that true (and not) for everything around us?

Mangoes and Mothers

She examines what’s overlooked, like border plants on waterways— “a blur of brown and green at the edge of the water” but “essential” for protecting nesting areas of vulnerable species. Or what can be seen differently, like the concise and curious history of mangoes across the centuries and their relationship to colonization, which ends with a phone call to her mother.

Jessica J. Lee writes about her family in her second book, Two Trees Make a Forest, her mother and her family from Taiwan and her father and his family from Wales, and her own upbringing in Canada. In Dispersals, she includes just enough memoir writing to situate her experience; she invites me to lean into her personal story, but the focus remains on how it relates to the subjects that draw her closer. It’s a delicate balance in creative non-fiction, one she manages consistently and successfully.

The Presence and Absence of Marks & Spencer Biscuits 

The chapter on tea considers her experiences with matrilineal and patrilineal grandparents—the different ways tea is served and shared and enjoyed in different households and cultures and how “workings of empire are not wholly in the past and cannot entirely be undone.” Which underscores an idea in which Dispersals is steeped: “Knowledges and histories shift depending on who’s doing the storytelling.”

The echoes throughout the essays in Dispersals offer stability to readers, the sense of a broader searching for understanding, but the pieces also feel distinct—the kind you can read distinctly, over a period of time. If the bulk of your reading is fiction, these pieces could herald or root your reading day. You could, say, enjoy one with a cup of tea.

’m drawn to the specifics that interest Lee (like Hewett Cottrell Watson’s flora classification based on Cambridge botanist John Henslow’s work—“native, denizen, colonist, alien or incognita (meaning the plant’s status was unknown)”—which raises such fascinating questions about inclusion and value and belonging. And to patterns of curiosity, like the women a professor draws to Lee’s attention: “the seaweed sorority”, the nineteenth-century women who studied algae. And, also, to the writers she reads, including Michael Pollan, Robin Kimmerer, the Brontës, L.M. Montgomery, and Clarissa Wei “How America Killed Soy Milk.”

In the Centre

In Turning, I recognise from Dispersals the value she places on the dense stands of trees, “short stories in the landscape”, the sunlight in “bright stripes through the green and orange” evoking the “citrus smell of warm pine”, the moss on stones, and how she locates her own self in the natural world:

“Swimming a steady breast-stroke to the lake’s centre, I would turn on to my back and spread my arms wide, blue sky stretching tree-top to tree-top, an entire world spinning with me at its centre. I didn’t know any people in the city, but I found in the middle of the lake a small, self-centred security, like a pin stuck into a map.”

She shares her mother’s memory of swimming in Taiwan, vacationing with her parents in the 1960s, “losing herself in the trifles of the tideline” in Two Trees Make a Forest. How do we find ourselves, how do we lose ourselves? How do we return to ourselves?

Algae, Ferns, and Flowers

Lee’s view of Taiwan reflects her worldview: “Elevated highways spiraled, ensnaring the scooters that pollinated the thoroughfares with fumes. Tiled walls were caked with algae, and on every old building the signs of nature’s tenacity showed themselves: ferns growing from trick-thick ledges, flowers springing skyward from the joints of old awnings. Tucked into a river basin with leaf-laden slopes on all sides, the city center was flat and uniform.”

(Aside: I recently watched S. Leo Chang’s short documentary film Island In Between, on his relationship with Taiwan and the U.S. and China too: it fits here with talk of borders and belonging. Very interesting. I’m still thinking about those sounds moving across the water.)

Rooting

Lee writes about how we can find stability on a steep slope:

“Where humans have cleared the land for timber or mined the mountains for gravel, the slopes will flow freely. But in places and in time, their devastation is allayed by trees: the root structures of the forests help stitch the mountains back together. The earth and forest are concomitant things, the trees in need of the right altitude and soil, the ground holding itself together in a web of roots.”

She writes about how we can root ourselves when it seems like everything’s slipping away.

She reminds us that what we don’t see is sometimes what’s holding up the world.

Curious? Dispersals is new this week from Penguin Random House, Catapult Books in the U.S. and Hamish Hamilton in Canada.