“Oh, you mean China?” A supposedly witty response that I have heard an innumerable amount of times to the fact that my mother was born on the island of Taiwan. The statement, a cliché attempt of alluding to the widespread belief in the United States that Taiwan will inevitably be destroyed by an invasion from mainland China within the next year or decade, is nothing new to me. While the ignorance of the statement cannot be understated, it is ironically a statement that unintentionally questions my ancestral connections.
One of the first stories that I was told by my mother was how my grandparents narrowly escaped death in their youth. In 1949, my grandparents, who had just married, decided to honeymoon on the island of Taiwan. This was a crucial decision that was motivated by the circumstances in the country at the time. The Second World War had just ended in 1945 with the surrender of the empire of Japan, but peace would not come to China. Nearly immediately after WWII ended, civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Nationalist Party re-erupted, and while the Chinese Nationalist Party began the war with strong advantages, the war quickly turned against their favor. By 1949, Beijing had fallen, and Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party, realizing his party would lose, decided to relocate his government to the island of Taiwan. My grandparents, supporters of the Chinese Nationalist Party, used their honeymoon as a cover to visit Taiwan.
Shortly afterward the Chinese Nationalist Party formed a dictatorship over Taiwan as the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed. My grandparents, without any way of returning to their home in the mainland became two of two million “外省人” (wai4 sheng3 ren2) — translating to “those born outside of the province” — who settled amongst the eight million “本省人” (ben2 sheng3 ren2), those born on the island. My mother was born in the following decade, a time period where the Nationalist dictatorship in Taiwan was treated by the international community as the legitimate government of all of China. In this era of martial law, those of her generation were told that their lives in Taiwan were temporary and that eventually the Nationalist government would reclaim the mainland. That never happened, and in the 1980s my mother immigrated to the United States with my grandparents following her shortly afterwards.
Ultimately, the amalgamation of these inherited circumstances made the idea of national identity quite complicated for me. Even though I was born in the United States, I was born with ties abroad, and discerning which of these ties I identified with most strongly became a source of contention to me. To begin, the way that my family and our history almost gave me the impression that despite our relatively comfortable lives in the United States, we were somehow political refugees. While my family no longer really held any belief that they would return to mainland China, my mother would often still claim our homeland to be in the mainland, never strongly identifying with the label of “Taiwanese.”
Yet, growing up I could not understand why this was the case. Simply put, my family did not have any ties to mainland China that existed outside of their national identifications. We no longer have family in mainland China and Taiwan is the land that now two generations of my family have lived and continue to live on. The term Chinese ties us to our ancestral homeland in the mainland; it similarly ties us to a government which no one in my family has lived under for two generations.
At the same time, the term Taiwanese is not perfect either. Despite my family’s geographic connections to the island, we are still ethnically “Chinese,” and using the term Taiwanese to describe my ethnically Chinese heritage could be considered a form of colonial erasure. Taiwan has a population of indigenous people who have lived in Taiwan for thousands of years. In calling myself Taiwanese, I often find myself feeling as if I am making a claim to a land that ultimately belongs to others. Along with this, I often feel like it is not enough to capture my family’s complicated relationship to the island as the geographical identity obscures my grandparents’ place of origin.
It is for this reason that both the labels of “Chinese” and “Taiwanese” are often inadequate. On one hand, while the term Chinese may capture my ethnicity and the culture that I grew up in, it also ties me with a government and a land that I have very little connection to. On the other hand, it is hard to tell if the term Taiwanese is fully descriptive either. While it is correct that my family currently lives on the island of Taiwan and the term Taiwanese captures the politics and history of my family, the term also in a way erases the existence of the indigenous Taiwanese who are not ethnically Chinese. In all, my personal experiences highlight the influence of place within the formation of identity and how national identity is often insufficient in describing one’s culture or history.
The complicated nature of the terms Taiwanese and Chinese highlights how attributing cultural identities to nation states is ultimately problematic. Nationhood is not equal to culture or ethnicity, and a person’s unique identities exist outside of the states that they are bound to. Altogether, what we consider to be national identities or citizenships are instead ideological and human creations. Culture is something that exists outside of land or borders, with adherents of cultures often finding themselves far from what may be considered their homelands.
