Eucalyptus trees have been scattered across California since the 1850s, when they were brought over by Australians flocking to the Gold Rush. The trees are now considered invasive, and their bark contributes to wildfire risk. But even so, they’re a staple of the area, their scent and stature intrinsic to the California coast.

In 2023, author and poet Victoria Chang watched as the massive eucalyptus tree across the street from her home in Los Angeles was cut down. As the men lopped off the tree’s limbs, Chang realized she hadn’t spent much time really looking at it. She reflected that the tree had probably taken years to grow and was so easily cut down in just a few days. Chang felt compelled to write poems about this feeling that would later evolve into her latest poetry collection, which asks what it means to be human in the face of nature.

With the same name as Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s painting series, Chang’s new book Tree of Knowledge is a meditation on abstract art, mortality, language, home, and history. Chang writes in both absolutes and inquiries she artfully taps into what it means to be human while parsing through both personal and collective histories.

At the core of the collection is the long poem, “Eureka” which examines the violent expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California. On February 6, 1885, about 300 Chinese residents were ordered by a committee of 15 men to leave their homes within 48 hours after a white city council member was killed by a stray bullet from a shootout near Chinatown. Through the poem, history collapses, we’re both in the present and past. We, as readers observe Chang try to process the atrocities Chinese Americans faced as they were forced onto two steamboats and shipped to San Francisco amid threats of hanging. We see this processing throughout the collection in the images of Chinese Americans working in canneries around the Eureka area that have red thread stitched through them.

In our conversation, Chang discussed the earth’s memory, the experience of first generation Americans, and motherhood. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The collection has so many genres of history wrapped in it. There’s a personal history, collective history, and art history. In the book, you also talk about how art and writing are acts of archival. Could you speak more to that sort of collective history that you’re highlighting?

I’m interested in all sorts of things. I love visual art. I love to make art. I love to go to any museum or gallery or just anything to look at. For me, I started noticing there’s so much artwork that had these gorgeous trees in them. And once I started noticing that I couldn’t unnotice it.

That’s something I love about being human, is once someone points something out to you, once you start seeing something, you start seeing it everywhere. I think that is maybe partially, a key to empathy. Once you start seeing people, different kinds of people, you really start humanizing them in ways that are not a form of othering or objectifying in terms of people as objects.

So once I started seeing trees and artwork, I started seeing it everywhere.........

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