Part 1: Citizenship, Belonging, and the Emotional Legacies of Immigration
This interview has also been translated to Mandarin Chinese (Hanzi) and can be viewed here.
Editor’s Introduction: As political crises unfold, they rarely do so in a vacuum—and neither do our responses to them. I have been thinking fervently of how the different reactions to statements like this within our own community illuminate a lack of common ground for understanding. While I do not expect or want everyone to agree on key issues, I do hope we can aspire for earnest discourse, online and offline.
There are so many scholars, activists, and community organizers in my life that I lean on for intellectual and emotional support. I hope that by sharing my conversations with them about identity, heritage, and belonging, I am opening more doors for additional dialogue to follow.
Today, I am grateful to chat with Professor Hsin-I Cheng (Santa Clara University), who studies human communication through historical and sociological lenses.
Her current research focus is on Asian American diasporic communities in their identity negotiations, and relationships between racial minorities in the United States. In 2022), she collaborated with her students to build the Asian & Black Alliance website to promote Black-Asian solidarity. Cheng is a member of the 2023-2025 U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group in the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley.
This conversation is for anyone seeking a framework grounded in curiosity, compassion, and complexity. It may not change your stance—and that’s not the goal—but I offer it as a small step toward mutual understanding and shared responsibility.
Hsin-I, thanks so much for making the time. I was really struck by your recent book, in which you frame your own position as an immigrant from Taiwan whose “U.S. citizenship is owned not by me but through various relationalities established.” Can you unpack what you mean by that? And how do dominant narratives of citizenship fail to account for how it’s actually experienced—especially by immigrants and racialized communities?
Thank you, Leona, for the opportunity to collectively reflect on what I believe to be one of the most pressing questions facing the world, which is belonging: What does it mean? Who gets to belong and why? Whose responsibility is it to create a safe, inclusive environment, particularly for the most vulnerable? And what kind of suffering is there when belonging is made for only a selected few? These questions are pertinent to the Taiwanese, a people whose past and present history is filled with struggles against unjust laws, economic exploitation, and limited autonomy for self-determination.
Derived from Taiwan’s experiences, I developed the concept of “relational citizenship” to challenge the Europe- and US-based approach to citizenship, which emphasizes individual rights and views citizenship as a property-like legality to be individually owned. Instead, I believe citizenship exists in-between, rather than within, persons. Citizenship is realized only through relations built among societal members.
In my 2021 book, I examined the academic term “chain migration” in US mainstream newspapers between 2017 and 2018, and found that the US public discourse frequently framed recent immigrants in a racialized and gendered way. More specifically, their relationality becomes a liability in the neoliberal United States where in a 2018 NPR’s report, more than half of Americans ‘favor [individual] merit over family connections’ when it comes to immigration reform. The term “chain migration” was created in the 1960s to refer to immigrants who came to the US through social relationships. It was popularized by Donald Trump in 2017 after Akayed Ullah, who made an attempted attack in New York City.
Major news such as Fox News and CNN highlighted Ullah’s foreignness. They used the word “benefit” frequently in describing him, a family-sponsored Muslim citizen, as a beneficiary of the US immigration preferences. However, Dylan Roof, who is responsible for the mass shooting in Charleston SC, and a native-born American was described as an individual with a troubling past at home and school—a sentiment easy to relate to and identify with.
This contrast reveals something crucial: Ullah’s relationality was treated as a threat, while Roof’s relationality was invisible or even humanizing. Imagine if news coverage had emphasized that Roof, too, was a “beneficiary”—of the U.S. Constitution, of American society, of white citizenship. Both men committed acts of terror, but only one was made to represent a failure of the system through his connections to others. This is what I mean by “differential relational citizenship”—how the value or danger of your relationships is judged based on your race, origin, or immigration status.
So, when I say my citizenship is not “owned by me,” I mean that it’s never been just about a passport or legal status. It’s shaped by how others perceive, accept, or reject my connections—to my family, my community, even my country of origin.
Bringing that back to our community– in your research, how do the experiences of first-generation Taiwanese immigrants shape their emotional or conceptual definitions of citizenship? What cultural or political histories inform that perspective?
Many first-generation Taiwanese immigrants view citizenship from the legal perspective, which I believe is deeply shaped by their experiences with the long process of jumping through multi-stages of legal hoops. From updating current residency to negotiating for employment sponsorship, this long period of being evaluated and seeking legal permissions creates conditions that immigrants are gradually “disciplined” to comply with regulations.
In other words, newcomers are trained to become self-monitoring (and other-monitoring for that matter). This “training” in the U.S. needs to be connected to the conditions in which many first-generation Taiwanese immigrants grew up. Taiwan’s colonial experiences have only been unraveled, reflected upon, and more deeply engaged in recent years. One of the cultural legacies from the Japanese colonial governing was the value of “law and order,” in the form of Western modernity. When resistance against the colonial rule occurred, the ironclad law enforcement was employed to control and discipline those who challenged the legitimacy of the governance.
Certainly, there are also legacies from the KMT’s 38-years of martial law that remained to be unpacked. Juxtaposing the historical and present experiences, we can understand why many Taiwanese immigrants revere the law. Certainly, this is just one strain of these complex and intertwined histories.
Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that the alternative is lawlessness. Rather, I want to raise the question: Whose laws? For what purpose? And at whose expense? Laws are not created in a vacuum. They reflect social hierarchies, political interests, and historical power dynamics—and they should be interrogated as such.
How might this perspective differ from that of their children, who are born and raised in the United States?
My sense is that many first-generation immigrants had gone through this “disciplinary process” so that they feel they have earned their citizenship, while the 2nd generation was born with it. Whether this view is truthful, this divergence could lead either to assume more legitimacy to address the issue of citizenship and belonging.
For the first generation, the endurance of this process previously described could lead to complicated emotional reactions in the often-heard comment “I had to follow the law and be in-line for so long, others should too” when it comes to citizenship. While this reaction is understandable, it reflects the common phenomenon of “the blind person and the elephant,” in which unknown perspectives and experiences are hidden. We all perceive the world from our own standpoint, which is incomplete. The more comfortable we are in the given environment, the more limited our standpoint is because there is no need to expand our view.
What kinds of emotional responses do you think this sense of “having earned” citizenship can create when newer or “different” immigrants are discussed?
I remember how, growing up in Taipei, I clung to my father’s “Mainlander/waishengren” heritage and downplayed my mother’s “Taiwanese/benshengren” perspective because I never had to learn the marginalized view. At a young age, I subconsciously knew it was “better” to be waisheng ren after hearing about a classmate being fined for breaking the school policy by speaking Taiwanese.
In the present time, when powerful politicians and popular social media consistently distort the “lawlessness” at the US southern border and certain groups of immigrants without tracing the historical development, it is likely to come to the conclusion: “If I could do it, why can’t others?” as if all human conditions are the same and can be addressed by the individual’s action.
This “natural” conclusion can only be rethought when we are willing and given opportunities to stand in other positions.
What kind of conversations do you wish were happening more frequently within immigrant communities about citizenship and justice?
The second generation [of Taiwanese Americans] in many ways are better positioned to have more exposures, given the fact that they grew up bi-culturally, if not bilingually. They are more likely to see differences between people’s situations and experiences, which cannot be easily equated. Growing up in the US, they had never experienced a political system that resembles authoritarianism (until 2025), which demands total compliance to the central government. These Taiwanese Americans are more ready to follow what Dr. King wrote in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that “an unjust law is no law at all.” Unlike the younger me, who did not stand up against my school policy that banned Taiwanese, the second-generation Taiwanese Americans are more willing to speak out even though they themselves are not negatively or directly affected by the unjust law.
These different point views certainly create tensions, inducive in placing quick judgement on each other. At the same time, if determined, they could open doors to potential fruitful conversations that bring different generations closer.
Yes! That’s my hope too– but what conditions make this possible?
[We need] honest conversations with factual information and personalized experiences [about] what it means to be a citizen and who can become citizens throughout US history… with an eye for making those invisible and man-made structures visible. In 2007, I accidentally overstayed my visa after realizing my immigration paper was misplaced. Later I wrote an article called “Temporary Il/legal,” reflecting on that experience of feeling sheerly powerless and in complete fear. Several years later, I received an email from a Latinx young person thanking me for writing the piece, which she identified deeply with. My hope is that we all can hold spaces to share and listen to personal stories in a way that offers insights to render these invisible forces beyond individuals’ control visible. The goal is not about winning the argument. Rather, it is to broaden our perspective and gain more complex understandings of our and each other’s humanity.
Ahh– that’s a really powerful example. Are there more moments that helped form how you saw your role in American society—or your relationship to other marginalized groups?
I want to first thank you for your heartfelt statement about the recent brutality against our neighbors and fellow country people. These days I’ve been thinking about my past experiences. When the September 11th attack occurred, I had just started my doctoral program in a rural area of Ohio as an international student. Soon after, an on-campus symbol of international friendship was vandalized. I remember feeling scared due to not only the hateful act but the already hostile environment toward non-White bodies. A former professor at another university commented “aren’t you glad that you do not wear a turban!” I felt ambivalent about that comment, which was meant to bring me some comfort.
Several years later, the 2007 devastating Virginia Tech mass shooting happened right before my graduation. When the news initially mentioned that the suspect was Asian, I remember feeling tense until a Korean immigrant was identified as the perpetrator. I recall feeling relieved and immediately ashamed of my reaction. At that moment, I realized how tightly we, as immigrants of color who are under constant surveillance, patrol our behaviors and turn our watchful eyes on each other to keep us all “in-line.” I thought about the turban comment and how the line between “us” and “them” can be hardened quickly under fear.
The “us: not-like-them” mentality often permeates in identity-related conversations among Taiwanese Americans. Having a strong collective “us” identity, necessitated through difference, is not inherently an issue. However, problems arise when we maximize the relational distance from the different “Other,” against whom deep distrust is manifested. The recent tactics the Trump’s administration employed to raid and detain both undocumented and documented immigrants in and beyond California eerily resemble the state-induced violence the Taiwanese freedom fighters endured during the 1970s and 1980s.
Back then in Taiwan, the authoritarian Chiangs framed those freedom fighters as unlawful instigators as the “Other,” who MUST be kept under control or eradicated by any means possible. Now the Trump’s administration’s militant and unlawful treatment of its law-abiding citizens and taxpayers, including undocumented immigrants is in many ways similar to what happened in Taiwan. These heavy-handed tactics toward peaceful members of the society include ambushing workers at their employment, allowing law enforcement camouflaged as civilians, having secretive agents making coy arrests, punishing governmental officials who spoke out, misusing national military forces activated without due process, and encouraging citizens to report on each other. Both the KMT and the current Trump administrations promote fear of false claims to distance “us” from “them.” When in reality, the Taiwanese protesters at the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident started as peaceful demonstrators, not criminal rioters. When in reality, researchers from UW-Madison found that undocumented immigrants are not more crime-prone than native-born Americans. I hope those of Taiwanese background would recognize these attacks on democracy as the state apparatus maliciously criminalizes certain citizens and immigrants as the “Other” so that “us” would stay silent about the misuse of national resources to maintain those abuses of power in control.
As Professor Cheng reminds us, citizenship is not just a legal status—it’s an emotional, historical, and deeply relational experience shaped by forces far beyond any individual’s control. For Taiwanese Americans, navigating intergenerational differences around law, identity, and belonging is not always easy—but it’s necessary, especially in moments of political urgency.
In Part 2, we will turn to the model minority myth: how it divides communities of color, obscures structural inequality, and continues to shape how Taiwanese Americans see ourselves—and who we stand with—in the broader fight for justice.
Hsin-I Cheng studies human communication through historical and sociopolitical lenses with methods such as ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviewing, and discourse analyses. Her research and teaching interests focus on how multiple identities intersect and influence human interaction and relationships. Her first book Culturing interface: Identity, communication, and Chinese transnationalism investigates the experiences of Taiwanese and Chinese communities living and working on the U.S.-Mexico border. Her second book Cultivating Membership in Taiwan and Beyond: Relational Citizenship proposes the theory of “relational citizenship,” rooted in the Taiwanese context, to explain the communicative nature of membership and belonging. Her most recent co-edited collection Resistance in the era of nationalisms: (Per)Forming identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong will be published in 2023 by Michigan State University Press. This collection focuses on how people in Taiwan and Hong Kong, two post-colonial and cosmopolitan societies, strive for autonomy over their democratic ways of life. Her work is published in Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Western Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, Language and Intercultural Communication, and Women & Language. Her current research focus is on Asian American diasporic communities in their identity negotiations, and relationships between racial minorities in the United States. She collaborated with her students to build the Asian & Black Alliance website to promote Black-Asian solidarity. Cheng is a member of the 2023-2025 U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group in the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC-Berkeley.
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