Leaving the United States Made Me Feel More Taiwanese American

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“But where are you really from?”  That’s the age-old question so many of us Asian-Americans have received throughout our lives living in the U.S. And while many have various objections to the principle of the question, for me, the real reason that question used to get under my skin was because it was really an identity question: “Which world do you belong to?”  And the answer to that wasn’t nearly as clear as an origin story. This identity crisis is something I’ve struggled…

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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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