【About the Book】

 

Why did Yu-Hsuan Wu, as a new mother, choose to travel across country after country with her child? What spiritual awakenings did she and her son experience in Taiwan’s Indigenous communities and in educational settings across Europe and the Americas? What rare and irreplaceable forms of exploration did her child undergo? Can parents truly stay close to a child’s inner world—honoring their moment-to-moment shifts and emotional rhythms—and genuinely listen to their needs? What does it mean to engage in equal dialogue with a child? What can a parent give?

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Poet Yu-Hsuan Wu began a nomadic life with her three-year-old son, Chuan. They first lived alongside the Amis people by the Xiuguluan River, learning traditional chants, brewing millet wine, foraging wild vegetables, and participating in sacred rituals. From there, they journeyed through democratic schools in the United States, Peru, Germany, Bulgaria, and Montenegro; they created work during an artist residency in a medieval French town and studied Sufi whirling in Turkey. When they ran out of money, they bartered work for lodging, slept in classrooms, and hitchhiked to keep going.

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Carrying My Homeland with Me is Yu-Hsuan Wu’s photographic and written chronicle of five years of travel (2020–2024). It captures her and her son’s daily conversations and functions as an alternative parenting manifesto. For her, the most beautiful part of wandering is not the scenery but her son’s questions. Just as democratic schools believe that a child’s curiosity is the key to unlocking the world, she believes that as long as there is a wish in the heart, learning will happen naturally. Along the way, Chuan watched his mother saw wood for a Belgian family, write a protest letter for an American gallerist, photograph her student—drag queen Nymphia Wind—in Las Vegas, and prepare a Christmas Eve dinner for unhoused people. Yu-Hsuan Wu’s everyday practice of kindness, courage, and creativity became an invisible education for her son.

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“I don’t want to treat travel as an exception,” Wu says. “I want to live within the exception—and continue traveling with nonchalance.” She and her child looked upon the world, and in returning to Taiwan, continued carrying their homeland with them—walking each road into their hearts, remembering its curves, the rhythm between body and earth, and the sparks that arise when people meet. In travel, her child came to know the beauty of nature, the depths of love, and the boundless potential of life—becoming someone free, passionate, and joyful. And Yu-Hsuan Wu, too, unveiled new facets of herself to the world.

 

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【Author’s Note】

 

When I was pregnant, I timidly wished: I hoped my child would make me afraid. Disobedient, defiant, unpredictable, uncontrollable, indifferent to me. Or, in other words, I hoped my child would be full of wildness—one who listens to their own heart, fearlessly walks into the unknown, experiences uncertainty alone, and becomes a mother to the world. 

 

When a person embraces their fate with complete honesty, they become a mother to the world—one who does not reject the deepest struggles.

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The deepest struggles are often tied to the deepest desires. When my child was three, cancer cells were found in my right breast. Before that, he had nursed from that breast. Everything I gave him—was it poisoned? There was no time to worry about him. I hid myself. Afraid of dying, I left our home in Taitung and hid in the mountain village of Treasure Hill. I couldn’t bear to stay in the everyday. I didn’t want to accumulate more memories. A little more beauty would be too cruel. If death was going to take me, I would take myself away first.

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I panicked. It turns out having nothing can happen in an instant. No matter how much I struggled, how much I wished—it all became meaningless. Soon after, the doctor removed the cancer cells and said it was okay, they hadn’t spread. But the awareness of death had already spread. Surviving that, I had no more struggles, no more desires. I took my husband and child and began to travel—living every second in the pounding rhythm of my heart, dancing and playing, becoming children of the world together.

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【Selected Works】

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“Tonight, I want some of Lopi’s spicy onions!” Whenever he misses the riverside classroom, Chuan shouts this line.

 

On an early summer evening, we were slow-cooking chicken in Lopi’s freshly harvested rice field. Worried we might go hungry, she swiftly chopped a few onions, peeled them petal by petal, tossed them into a handleless aluminum pot, sprinkled some mustard pepper salt, and stirred it with her hand a few times. She popped a slice into her mouth—once the taste felt right, she left the entire pot of onion slices for us and turned to gather dried wood and branches, lighting a fire in the wild. From who knows where, she found three large stones, perfectly arranged to support a grill rack over the fire, forming a stable stove. On it, she placed a pot of jindor bamboo shoot soup—also magically produced from nowhere—tossed in some bean pods and a bit of pork for flavor. “Freshly picked bamboo,” she said.

 

A group of children clustered around the pot in silence, snatching slices of raw onion one after another. I asked Chuan, “Isn’t it too spicy for you?” He shot me a glance and quietly finished the fistful of onions in his hand. Lopi, inspecting the scene like she was checking her fields, looked to see if the kids had eaten enough. When the pot was nearly empty, she peeled open a few more onions that bloomed like flowers. The children’s gasps echoed like the fine strands of onion falling, long and light, gently striking the rim of the pot.

 

Magician Lopi’s top hat is an old aluminum pot, from which doves with translucent wings take flight. With one humble, unadorned onion, Lopi creates a dish full of surprise—and the secret is unbelievably simple: she doesn’t subject the onions to any complicated preparation or seasoning. She just serves them raw, using minimal seasoning to draw out their natural sharpness. Like the time she boiled pig’s head for a soup with makino bamboo, she said, “You need a lot of fat to make soup tasty. Pig brain tastes weird, but if you leave it out, the soup tastes weird too.” She’s exploring how to “draw out umami,” just like she stirred a pot of raw onions for us in the twilight field—not to conceal their bite, but to liberate it, restoring the onion to its natural state.

 

Lopi’s magic lies in building a bridge between us and the onions—with the least interference possible, she connects us back to the flavor of nature. Suddenly, I remembered how on the first day of class, she took us down into the gorge, constantly reminding us not to hold the children’s hands—not to disrupt their sense of balance or their instinct to handle risk. To build a bridge between children and nature, we must also intervene as little as possible, guiding them to discover nature’s spiciness and wildness. Our love and fear must not stand between the child and the truth of nature. The stones that cause them to stumble become their first teachers—teaching them to know themselves and the forces of the natural world. The experiences they gain firsthand will accumulate into intuitive judgment, leading them more sensitively, more lucidly, into even greater adventures. At the riverside classroom of the Amis people, I realized that if I don’t let go, nature cannot reach out and teach my child how to reclaim life’s primal force.

 

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【Review & Reflection】

 

“Just as her father once had her, as a child, stand before a cup illuminated by light streaming through a window—observing the varying gradations of shadow it cast—he passed on to her a spaciousness of thought, a tolerant space that embraced all possibilities. Within this space, she could gaze upon her ever-shifting self, shaped by changing light and shadow. Now, she has passed that space on to her own child, hoping he too can remain flexible, and learn to understand this multifaceted world through a lens of layered perspectives.”

 

—Chiu Yi-Ching, “Leaving Familiar Things Once Again, Arriving at a Gentle Strangeness”