Understanding Our Parents Through the Stories They Never Told: A Glimpse Into 1970s Rural Taiwan

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As the year comes to an end, families in the U.S. are probably entering a season filled with gatherings, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and everything in between. I imagine it feels a bit like Lunar New Year in Taiwan. I often wonder: when you get together with your family, do you feel closer to them, or somehow even farther away?  My name is Jane. I’m a Taiwanese born and raised, and throughout my life I walked the classic Taiwanese path: school, cram school, more school, getting punished by…

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Where we come from, who we stand with: A Conversation with Professor Hsin-I Cheng (Part 1/2)

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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…

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Paths and Patterns: experiences in translingualism

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We’ve fallen into a pattern, my new friends. And some of my old friends, in this new context. It’s a new thing, for them, but feels familiar, comfortable, for me. You see, it’s natural for me, because it’s how I grew up. I grew up in the US, in the heart of the Midwest, a daughter of Taiwanese immigrants. Mandarin was my first language, but ceded her position as mother tongue to English early on, in a country where assimilation was survival. My parents, though, my beautifully centered…

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