In Taiwan, though so much had changed, my mother became a person with a topographic history, a person set into the scene in which she believed she belonged. In my childhood, I never saw that in her: In forty years of life in Canada, she had never rooted to the place and got lost easily. On her commutes in rush-hour traffic, she did not stray from her prescribed path. But on the beach I realized that she’d carried something of the island in her the entire time, molecularly, absorbed the way water swells beneath the skin.