Taiwanese American Bonnie Jin is one of the most brilliant voices of our generation, lucidly alchemizing identity into strategy as a multilingual union organizer and storyteller. In a conversation for TaiwaneseAmerican.org, we talk about how diasporic experiences can inform a labor movement rooted in empathy and collective care, and the kind of Taiwanese American stories we want to tell – and for whom.
When asked about her Taiwanese American lineage, Bonnie begins with an ancestral origin story tracing a lesser-known intersection of Taiwanese and American history.
Her grandparents had been living on the Dachen Islands, then administered by the Republic of China, when they were suddenly evacuated by the United States navy three days before Chiang Kai-shek allowed the island to fall to the Communists.
She describes watching, as a teenager, black-and-white footage on YouTube of the evacuation, recorded from the perspective of the United States military embarking, as narrated, on a “dangerous mission… [in] the Far East amid Communist threats.”
She remembers searching for her own ancestors among those who were “barefoot in the mud, near freezing cold, [winding] their crooked way into the landing craft,” safeguarded by the “mightiest [naval fleet] assembled since the Incheon Landing during the Korean War.”
She remembers wondering how a sterilized, bureaucratic term like “evacuation” could possibly capture the harrowing range of emotions more closely linked with the incriminating vocabulary of “displacement” and “exile.”
Over dramatic music, the narrator in the footage describes how the “frightened youngsters” were “lifted to safety by eager arms,” lamenting that “the young were the most pathetic victims of the Communist threat.” This image stuck with Bonnie: the white American soldiers picking up children and placing them on ships bound for Taiwan, forever changing the course of their – and her – family history.
Later, her grandparents would reflect on their displacement as inevitable, and on their kinship with Chiang Kai-Shek (whom they referred to as “Lao Jiang”) borne from both their shared province and his rescue of them. “So much of how my grandparents framed the experience was from a perspective of gratitude,” Bonnie muses. “But my impression of it, compounded with viewing the national archives, instead felt like sadness and pain.”
That her interpretation of her grandparents’ history would be such a radical departure from their own memories propelled Bonnie to think more deeply about how a state’s conceptualization of identity impacts everyday people. The romanticized notion of sacrifice imbued in the ROC’s national narrative rubbed against Bonnie’s instincts: Why did her family feel affinity towards a regime that had violently uprooted them? And, once resettled in Taiwan, what was their relationship to an evolving nation that did not know how to fully embrace them? “They struggled in Taiwan,” Bonnie says. “They didn’t speak Mandarin, and they were told, again and again, that they could return home in days, then weeks. Then decades passed, and it never happened. They never got to go back.”
Bonnie braided the deep unfairness of her grandparents’ experiences with her own, growing up here in the United States, navigating the deep inequities of housing and healthcare. “It really made me feel like there’s something about how this world works that doesn’t make sense,” she says. Over time, these feelings crystallized into a profound political consciousness.
In preparing for our conversation, I’d read Bonnie’s previous writing and interviews. What struck me most was the clarity and moral congruence visible throughout the nascent arc of her public life. In a 2021 interview for European Horizons, for example, she offers a stirring call to action to build communities and relationships; to “always find ways to be helpful and use your unique skill set, identity, or experiences to serve your community.”
Bonnie is a stunning example of this aspiration lived well, particularly as she offers her experience and identity as a bridge between the United States and Taiwan– and then does the more difficult work of daily crossing this bridge as an activist and storyteller.
While in high school, she had followed the online discourse of Occupy and in 2015 became a volunteer for the Sanders campaign. “At the same time, as a Taiwanese American, I was really interested in what young people in Taiwan were doing, what their politics and social movements were like,” she says. “And I found that the 2014 Sunflower movement, while not really leftist, still drew a lot of inspiration from Occupy.” She was struck by what these movements had in common, and was drawn to the potential for young people to mobilize and enact change, for their aspirations to embolden each other. “I’m always going to position myself with anybody who is fighting in this shared struggle to make working people’s lives better,” she says. “For Taiwan, especially, I wanted to engage with the nation and the people as more than a romanticized, abstract site of longing; I wanted to understand it as a site of real struggle, where there are a lot of good things but also a lot of things that people are pushing and fighting for.”
Throughout her studies, particularly while at Johns Hopkins University, Bonnie’s sharp moral compass and political curiosity led her to engage with unionization as a direct way to express democracy and disrupt mass feelings of voicelessness and powerlessness. “I started working for [Boston Mayor] Michelle Wu during and after college, first in her City Council office and her Mayoral campaign during college; and then as a member of her Mayoral staff in January 2023.’” she says. “When ‘hot labor summer’ started ramping up, I took that opportunity to uplift medical residents who were trying to unionize… and to insert workers’ rights into every conversation in a moment where billionaires are so prevalent in politics.”
Later, Bonnie found that she could make the most impact by joining the frontlines of the labor movement, and until recently, worked with the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, supporting the national Delta Flight Attendant unionization campaign, the largest private sector, single-unit campaign in the country. In working with the flight attendants, Jin began noticing parallels with Taiwan. “One of the most powerful unions in Taiwan today is the flight attendant union,” she explains. “The 2016 Taoyuan strike really changed the trajectory of what organizing could do.”
She was invigorated by the burgeoning promise of transnational solidarities, and sought to make more apparent the mechanisms and tools of community organizers between the United States and Taiwan. In fact, her thesis had been written on New Bloom, a radical media collective in Taiwan organizing between Taiwan and the international community. “Although situated within Taiwan,” Bonnie describes, “its members also have extensive experience outside of Taiwan, enabling New Bloom’s advocacy to transcend its national context and relate to both transnational civil society advocacy as well as the role of the diaspora in advocating for homeland politics.” Fundamentally underlying both New Bloom and Bonnie’s work is the observation that politics are inextricably personal, and that politically-engaged communities are stronger when they are also sites of profound personal healing. Throughout her fieldwork, she found that she and New Bloom’s members shared an aspiration to articulate Taiwan’s narrative as a communal autobiography, written by the Taiwanese for the Taiwanese and not international salvation; while also dismantling peripheral discourse about Taiwan that has historically undermined the Taiwanese people’s own agency and sovereignty.
When I ask her whether Taiwan’s state-sanctioned branding (for example, via its tourism or overseas and foreign affairs campaigns, hailing buzzwords like “beacon for democracy” ) is a productive one, we lament over our shared belief that no, it is not – though this failure is also fertile ground for collective, interpretative memory to offer another perspective, one that sees its own complexity and incoherence as a kind of dignity.
“When people see Taiwan excluded from international spaces, it resonates with their own experience of invisibility,” she explains. But we can do more than anthropomorphize Taiwan’s isolation in the context of our own marginalization. We can do something about it. We can establish solidarity from below, and participate in global movements that resonate with our values rather than lament our exclusion from traditional global institutions. We can tell a thousand stories, not to tell the world we matter and are worthy of their defense, but because we deserve to be legible to each other.
Our conversation turns lastly to our hopes and dreams for our community, and the kind of progress we might achieve if we believe ourselves to be consequential, and our relationships to be indispensable. “In my work as a union organizer, I think of myself as a gym trainer for activists,” she says. “I ask people what their organizing conversations are like, and then I give them practical advice for taking things to the next step, building up their courage, giving them feedback for growth.” I admit to her that I find this kind of interpersonal work emotionally challenging, and she assures me that this is normal. “It makes sense because there are high emotional and intellectual stakes,” she explains. “Conflict is a part of it because each person will always have something they care about the most. When we prioritize moving forward together, we get more creative and collaborative about accomplishing A and B, instead of fixating on changing minds about whether A or B is more important.”
In a moment where despair is readily available, her hard-won optimism is a balm and prescription. “The most important thing is to build relationships,” she says. “You have to get to know the people you’re in community with before you build with them.” For Taiwanese Americans, sharing a pilgrimage for cultural and historical roots can also build, over time, a political consciousness resilient enough to become emboldened, rather than weakened, by discourse and dissent. At the end of the day, we conclude, a safe, inclusive community is more valuable than a coherent, marketable one; and will give rise to a complex, multi-faceted Taiwanese American identity that is more salient than a convenient one.
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