At the end of the previous article, I left you with a small promise.
After the second classroom trial, I brought my reflections, the children’s feedback, and the origami pieces from the lesson back to my adviser for Rukai language and culture.
Then we made a decision.
This story had grown from the community’s knowledge and experience of the mountain forest. It was time to bring it back to the place where it had begun.
A story should return to the place where it grew
While I was still in Germany, my friend and I met online several times to discuss the book.
When I returned to Taiwan, we sat down together again and revised every image. Were the plants right? Did the surroundings feel familiar? Was the relationship between the people and the forest truthful? We checked one detail after another.
I may have been the person who wrote the story down, but it did not come from my imagination alone.
The method of forest restoration, the plants, the knowledge of the land, and the cultural perspective all came from the experience my friend had gathered over many years. They also came from the relationship between the Rukai people and this mountain forest.
If the story had drawn from this place, it should return something to it.
So we truly did set off into the mountains, to a Rukai community. There, in the home of the traditional leader, we were going to:
Tell. A. Story!
This time, the two languages were Rukai and Chinese
After two earlier classroom trials, I knew the story well.
I knew where to pause for a question, which pictures to let the children examine first, and where a little background knowledge would help. By then, the rhythm had become familiar.
But this event was different.
The two languages were not Chinese and English.
They were Rukai and Chinese.
This time, we were truly telling a Rukai story in the Rukai language.
I was tremendously excited, and I felt deeply honoured.
A friend I had known for many years had trusted me with this story. She had given her time and care to our conversations, then put still more work into writing the story in Rukai.
This was more than translating a Chinese text into another language.
When the story was spoken in Rukai, the forest, the land, and the plants returned to another world of linguistic experience. The children were not only hearing what happened. They were hearing how their own language described a world they knew.
I thought I was going there to tell a story
My friend led the event that day, while I took a supporting role.
We did more than tell the story. We talked with the children and invited them to look closely at the plants growing in the mountains around them.
The plants in the book were no longer just illustrations.
They were part of the children’s surroundings. They grew on the mountain, beside the road, and perhaps in places the children passed every day without having stopped to look closely.
Of course, I had also brought the origami.
I showed the children how to make one mountain fold after another, then one valley fold after another. They turned and pressed the paper beneath their fingers until it became a small, evocative object.
It was not only beautiful. They could play with it too.
After listening to the story, the children studied the plants around them and played with the origami in their hands. I felt that the story had truly come alive. It no longer existed only inside a book. It had stepped into the real world before the children’s eyes.
Yet although I had brought the story and the activity into the mountains, I felt more like a learner that day.
First, I had listened to my friend describe the work of restoring the forest. Later, we revised the story together. Now I had entered the landscape from which the story had come. Only then did I begin to understand how many people in Taiwan are working, each in their own way, to pass their knowledge to the next generation.
Some knowledge is written into books.
Some lives within a language.
And some can only be understood after you walk into the mountains yourself.
The people who support my slightly foolish ideas
Something else moved me after the event.
My family had supported these actions of mine, even when they must have looked a little foolish from the outside.
Imagine it: a newly founded company that does not yet know where its customers will come from decides to invest its time and energy in a picture book like this one.
It does not sound like the most calculating business decision.
But my family did not ask many questions.
Their answer was simple:
We support you all the way.
My husband joined us at the event as well.
He is European and speaks neither Chinese nor Rukai. He could understand very little of the story or the conversations directly.
Still, he told me how warm the atmosphere felt.
When the event ended, I even noticed that his eyes were slightly wet.
He had been deeply moved.
I found that moment wonderfully strange. A person does not need to understand every sentence to sense that a group of people is carefully passing something important to the next generation.
Language carries stories.
But sometimes attention, trust, and emotion can also be heard beyond the limits of language.
The story returned, and the journey was only beginning
And with that, our day of storytelling in the mountains came to an end.
The story had begun in the forest. After many conversations, revisions, and classroom trials, it returned to the community in Rukai and Chinese and was spoken aloud there.
To me, this was more than the completion of an event. It was also more than another classroom test for the picture book.
It felt as though the story had completed a full journey.
It had drawn nourishment from this land, been written into a book, and returned to the same land to be heard by children.
But this was not the end.
Only when a story returns to the place where it grew do we begin to see where it might travel next.
The event had come to a beautiful close.
And it was also only the beginning.