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. Then I started sort of writing in conversation with these paintings and other sculptures and artworks.
I think that’s the beauty of art and nature. If you actually start talking to these things, just like if you start talking to people that might seem different from you, things start opening, the aperture widens, and that’s how my mind works, and that’s kind of how this book feels. There’s a little bit of everything in here because I like looking at things, reading things, meeting trees, meeting art, and they all end up being a part of my life experience in my art too.
I wondered about the environmental politics in this collection. How much it seems that, especially now with AI data centers, we’re taking the earth for granted. What role did that play for you as you were writing?
While I was writing this collection, I was also traveling a lot. I wrote a whole bunch of poems related to my visit to Alaska. I was so struck by how we are stewards of this earth. We are guests, and it’s our job to actually be good stewards to what we have. It occurs to me every single day how we are all absolutely awful stewards of this earth.
I went to [the redwood trees in Eureka, California], and there was not a single car in the parking lot. I walked amongst these massive trees that had been here for so long, by myself. I realized I’m just sort of energy, like my time here is so short. These trees are really going to be here long after my time, anyone’s time, and that it’s our role to respect them and to kneel before them.
In the poem “The Bird Cage,” you write about the tension surrounding immigration, which reminded me of a similar conversation in your 2021 memoir, Dear Memory. That feels especially urgent right now.
Ever since we’ve been alive, and especially recently in this administration, every day, there’s so much conflict and there’s so much anger.
I think so much about how my parents came [to the US] during a time period where people like them were welcomed. I was just pulling out some of my parents’ archives, and my mother sponsored all of her relatives to come here after she came here as a technical person during the 60s.
Once she got here, she filled out these forms to sponsor all of her siblings, and it was so easy and welcoming. Some of my uncles and aunts were approved to come here in like five days after filling out this form. It seemed so different than it is now. I just don’t understand where that hatred comes from because I think about my own parents and how they did so much in this country and experienced so much, but also gave a lot back and how I’m a direct result of that.
There’s nothing wrong with people coming here and wanting to experience this beautiful place. When I wrote [“The Bird Cage”], I thought about how some people have to leave countries they’re born in, like my parents. Other people, like me, have to leave countries they’ve never seen. And others have to install their own countries; they have nothing, I’m the latter.
So, I was thinking about how I’m so grateful to be here and to have been born in this country and to live here, but in order for me to live here, I’ve had to leave countries that I’ll never know. Which is like a weird thing to think about, because this is my country, but I don’t ever feel like it’s really my country.
I think many people of color are interested in hearing different perspectives of America, and want to see more representation. How does it feel to think about this book in the context of the 250th anniversary of the US?
Since I was a very young child, I’ve been so confused as to why the history that we were presented in school and in the media was always one thing. I didn’t understand why so many things weren’t talked about. As I became older, I started learning more and more about my own history, about all the marginalized people in this country, and how there are so many incredible stories that weren’t being told and still aren’t being told.
It’s such a short history now that you’re mentioning it. Our country is so short and we’ve done so much damage in such a short time, which is quite frightening. But being an optimist by nature, it’s never too late to change things. As a person with a historian kind of background, the only way we can move forward is to learn about the past. So, I’m interested in the past and stories from the past, and it’s our obligation to try and tell those stories as much as we can.
In the center of the collection, there’s a long poem about the violent expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California in 1885. I know you also tackled this topic in your 2026 children’s book of the same name, Eureka. Why has this specific moment in history stuck with you so much?
It struck me once I learned about it. It struck me how few people knew about it, including myself. My parents were not from the part of China that a lot of these Chinese people were from, but obviously, I’m a Chinese person, and I felt completely struck and horrified by what I read and what I learned. The more I read, the more I learned, the more I realized that there were actually a lot of people in Eureka, California that were working to keep this history alive and to tell these stories.
Before I wrote this long poem, I wanted to go find these people. I wrote a children’s book [about the expulsion] 10 years ago. In typical publishing, no one was really interested in that story. It just kept on bothering me and so I wanted to keep learning about it. Ten years later, I went up to Eureka, California and met all these people that were trying to keep the story alive. So I wanted to do my part, and so I wrote this long poem that explores these themes and also explores my time when I was up there. I think when I wrote this adult poem, I didn’t know that the children’s book was going to be published, so the timing just kind of worked that way.
In the long poem, you write, “Who has the rights to imagination? Who has the rights to illumination? What if history must travel through us?” I think that those sorts of questions illuminate these ideas of what a lot of marginalized people feel in America about who owns history, and who can tell history.
My parents aren’t from this area, which is in the southern part of China, where these Chinese people came from. My mother was from a different region of China and spoke a different dialect. My father was Taiwanese.
So I thought a lot about, should I even tell this story, do I have the right to tell this story, and how do I do it in a way that feels respectful, and that honors these people and honors the differences between myself and those people who are no longer here.
Because they have ancestors who are still here, who maybe aren’t writers or artists. If you’re going to speak in another’s voice that’s not your own, how do you do that with the utmost care and respect?
So even though I know other people would say, “Oh, she’s a Chinese person, of course, she has the right to speak about these things,” I am much more nuanced than that as all marginalized people are. We know the nuances and the subtle differences between all of the people that other people clump in one category, and I wanted to be very careful thinking about those things.
It’s really interesting what you do with grief and this acceptance of death, and how that makes us recontextualize history and time. I was also thinking about the themes of motherhood and raising children and how that sort of affects our idea of time too. When you’re talking about grieving your parents and then raising these children who will one day leave to live their own lives, how does it feel to put that out there and have your daughters engage with it?
It goes back to some of the environmental things we were talking about earlier, like “What does it mean to move toward leaving the earth and help bring the next generations? Raise them and help grow them in ways that they could be good stewards to this earth, both environmentally, historically.”
I think about that all the time. Every day, I’m thinking about that and what can I do, as more of a senior person, with a lot of life experience, to sort of help the next generation who are going to be here much longer than I will. My own children are now like older teenagers, one is 19, and the other is 17. They’re young adults and every day, I think about what I could say to them, or how I could show them through my actions, or the things I do to sort of help them become better citizens of this earth, in this country, in this world.
I think these are things we all should be doing, no matter how old we are and where we come from. It’s a job of ours.
How do you not pass down racism and hate and misogyny and consumerism and capitalism? How do you actually help the next generation be aware of their own complicity, and how do you do that as one human being, whether you’re a parent or not? I think that’s the big question for us as adults, to be honest with you.
I think it’s our responsibility to be communal and to build community and to pass along whatever knowledge, wisdom, ideas, offerings that we might have. That to me is so important as a human being, but especially important as an artist. Today it’s like, “please read,” like just getting younger people to read, to think more deeply in the age of AI, where everything is being stripped down and simplified. To know we want complexity, we want nuance; those are the things that I feel like I’m fighting for now.