Of the challenges presented by traveling abroad, I’ve found that classic question of identity is still every bit a relevant and interesting. For example, the little cultural things I didn’t realize that I took for granted but are part of the way that I act: are these habits and viewpoints what make me who I “am”? Does it matter that they change while I live somewhere else? Where is the line between the “little” things, (like how I greet people or whether I flush toilet paper), that don’t matter and the “big” things? What counts as “big” anyway?
Of course, a question that seems most unavoidable now that I live in a different country: do I consider myself “American” as a big part of my identity? And what about race?
In Taiwan and China, these two questions actually strongly connected: something that I have come to appreciate only after spending time here. In the Chinese language there is a term that has come to refer to culturally “Chinese”: 中華 zhonghua and a 華人 huaren is “a Chinese person/people”. Embedded in this concept are two important points: the feeling that once a 華人, always a 華人; and that you can’t become a 華人 if you weren’t to start out with. Thus, this interpretation of “Chinese” refers to a concept that transcends political boundaries. It also depends on ethnicity: it is impossible to be “Chinese” if you aren’t ethnically Asian. Therefore, based on culturally “Chinese” and officially Taiwanese (as according to the government), are four clear categories for a person in Taiwan :
- 華人 and Taiwanese
- 華人 and a citizen of a different country (someone who immigrated or their family immigrated to a different country)
- Non-華人 and a citizen of a different country (much of the rest of the world)
- Non-華人 and Taiwanese (very, very rare)
When it comes to basic interactions, the initial way that you are treated will depend on how you fall into these categories – or what category someone thinks that you fall into. Pretty much every non-Asian who has studied Chinese and gone to China/Taiwan (therefore #3 in the above list) has stories about how surprised some people were that they spoke Chinese. And for those who are of Chinese descent but from other countries (#2), they usually have stories of being mistaken for a local (#1). Of course, there’s the classic example of a pair of foreigners traveling together, and all locals assuming that the Asian-looking one (#2) will be able to speak better Chinese when this may not actually be the case. A rarer, but still seemingly a shared situation is that of people of non-Asian descent who move to Taiwan/China and consider themselves (legally or otherwise) to be Taiwanese/Chinese (#4), yet face the inability to be accepted as culturally “Chinese” as determined by the 華人 standards.
Friday night, I was invited over to my friends’ house for a small gathering. As we hung out and traded stories, I noticed that we represented all of these different categories. I think that the stories were basically variations on things that we’d all heard before: the white guy confusing waiters when he was the one reading the menu and ordering food for his Asian-American friends who couldn’t speak or read anything; the assumptions that my California-raised Asian-American friends are locals; the white girl born and raised in Gaoxiong who sometimes cannot convince people that she is “Taiwanese”… Even if they weren’t “new”, it was still fun to share the stories because these were our stories. Such stories put the faces of people that we knew in these situations and then truly knew that they happen.
In the midst of this, however, I noticed that I still fall into a fifth category that is less-well defined. My father was born in Taiwan, and though he now is an American citizen and considers himself quite American he is probably unanimously considered a 華人. But my mother is a white American. Racial-mixing throws a wrench in this division of categories. Can a mixed-race person be a 華人? Probably depends on whom you talk to. Probably depends on where the mixed-race person was born and raised. Can people accept them as Taiwanese? Again, it probably all depends.
I think the way people treat me is hard to predict because of the uncertainty of the mixed-race category, especially because I think my appearance and my Chinese level are befittingly somewhere in an ambiguous middle ground. I think I receive all treatments: sometimes as a total foreigner; sometimes I think people are more friendly towards me because they consider my interest in Taiwan as a cultural homecoming ; and sometimes (although this is pretty rare, and doesn’t hold for long interactions) I think people don’t stop to consider me as anything other than just another Taiwanese person.
I found myself in this situation in the States as well – that there is a broad range of interpretation how to treat me because I sometimes defy simple categorization. But I also found it generally not all that important. As far as I was concerned, my parents’ history and my race were never that important to me when it comes to how I want other people to see me. I would prefer for people to see me as the things that I do and my personality and my personal history, not my family background. As a kid, I didn’t even realize that people would do other than this. Though I’ve since realized that this isn’t really the way things work in America, I’ve still continued to believe that race and country of origin shouldn’t matter…
The more that I have thought about this, the more it sounds downright like the “American dream” to me. And because I believe in this, then I guess do consider myself American as an important factor of my identity. This is not something that I would have identified as an “American” concept until I left the States and realized how the rules for being “Chinese” is so different from being “American” – which doesn’t require specific ethnic or cultural backgrounds.
And now for some unrelated pictures:
+1 +1 +!