Vol 04: A pre-read for my Taiwanese American therapist
Oversharing some personal angst and a peek behind the scenes of Taiwanese American community organizing (what to do with the ROC dilemma?) Plus, an upcoming keynote address!
Hi there! Happy October!
I’m often asked why second-generation (American-born) Taiwanese Americans don’t intuitively gravitate towards Taiwanese overseas organizations, also known as 台灣同鄉會 tongxianghui (tông-hiong-huē in Taiwanese), and while some have tasked me with changing this trend, through my newsletter I can only hope to explain why that might be and how we can better build intergenerational empathy.
There are simple answers that ring true for most of my peers: if you have a strained relationship with your parents, you are probably not interested in gathering with fifty of their friends. If you are not fluent in Mandarin or Taiwanese, the language barrier may feel impenetrable. You may find our elder-activists riveting in abstract, but exhausting in person. You may find their politics limited or incompatible with your own (particularly if you are a leftist! I see you! You are not alone!) You may simply have other interests, hobbies, and modalities through which to achieve a rich and fulfilling life.
The frank reality is simply that many don’t have the time or interest, and that the circumstances that gave rise to these kinds of organizations have become rather obsolete, or at least irrelevant to a new generation with a distinct suite of needs and networks; who can, to a degree, easily claim a mainstream Taiwanese [American] identity that would have been fraught with tension a decade or two ago.
As I’ve told my elders again and again: the second generation have their/our own ways of being and building. Your legacy is complete even if it cannot be continued in the exact way you imagine.
But theirs is the work that raised me, that continues to sustain and challenge me. Working alongside them is how I prove to my living ancestors that they are important to me, that while I cannot uncritically inherit all of their beliefs I will not let them bypass my careful consideration.
I am proud to anchor to a lineage of grassroots dangwai yappers who problematize as praxis; who embody a ferocious idealism, holding out for the complete abolition of the Republic of China even as Taiwan’s democratically elected leaders have shouldered the calculated burden of pragmatism… even as their own children wrap ROC flags around their shoulders to demonstrate “Taiwanese” pride (👀👀👀).
I am proud of how I show up, though I worry that if I am often so solitary in this pursuit perhaps it is because I am doing something unimportant or worthless. I try not to consider myself exceptional, only exceptionally privileged to have so many role models and mentors. I fear disappointing them; I also, candidly, fear their irrelevance and my own.
Trying to serve all kinds of Taiwanese Americans — to be everything to everyone, especially the self-obsessed and uncurious— has severely burned me out, and the truth is I’m still trying to negotiate my individual principles/boundaries with my broader aspirations to be a generous, gracious community organizer. If you’re reading this, I am grateful that we have found each other somehow and that what moves me can somehow move you, too. Thank you for being here and making me feel seen on my own terms.
Glad I got all that off my chest! Anyways—
Lately I’ve found Joan S. H. Wang’s research In The Name of Legitimacy: Taiwan and Overseas Chinese during the Cold War Era1 especially therapeutic as it intellectualizes some of the tension I’ve experienced in my last few years of community organizing (those who read my Instagram stories may have heard me refer to this abstractly as a “grassroots v. government tension”). This is that same tension that undergirds our stubborn boycotts (against ROC “National Day” celebrations, for example), our symbolic boundaries, our unwillingness to unify 團結, or even demonstrate a semblance of cooperation, with other overseas “Taiwanese” organizations.
A quick interlude on the “Republic of China” — no text outlines this dilemma for the Taiwanese people more clearly than the recently published, already-groundbreaking Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order by Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison. Here’s an excerpt that I hope invites you to devour the whole book, as I did:
“The ROC is often described as Taiwan’s ‘official name,’ a shorthand that obscures just how, when, and why, the histories of two places came to intersect, and what it might mean for them to diverge. No one living in Taiwan at midcentury had a choice to accept or reject becoming part of the ROC. […] As a result of democratization, and the right of Taiwanese people to express their identities and political opinions that it brought, the ROC has become a hybrid state identity, with ‘Taiwan’ sometimes appended to it after a comma or in a parenthetical; or used in place of “the ROC” entirely. Through this historical process, Taiwanese people have come to live simultaneously in overlapping spaces and realities: Taiwan, the Republic of China (ROC), ROC Taiwan, and ROC (Taiwan). Today, it is not ROC authoritarian imposing an ROC identity onto Taiwan but a new force— the rise of the People’s Republic of China— that prevents the people of Taiwan from choosing to shed the ROC identity altogether or to declare a new Taiwanese nation.”2
Revolutionary Taiwan is compelling and urgent; meticulously researched and laid out. It reverberates with the lucid lyricism and formidable intellect I admire in and associate with co-author Catherine Chou. I cannot wait for everyone to read it.
But back to us and our peculiarities! Overseas Taiwanese are particularly salient because we embody a global influence that could not or cannot be legitimized through formal institutions or diplomatic relationships. Until very recently, we were the ones surreptitiously hosting high-level Taiwanese politicians in minor hotel conference halls (or our living rooms) when they could not otherwise be received by state leaders.
(Simultaneously, even our formal institutions operate under clandestine guiding principles - we have “representatives” and not ambassadors; our embassies are “offices” or “institutes.” Each has a script and the expectation that they do not deviate.)
For its part, the immigrant time capsule intensifies demarcations between who different groups choose to receive, and whether they choose to acknowledge each other at all. Some dangwai activists of the mid-70-80s who emigrated before Taiwan’s evolution to a multiparty democracy remain hostile to representatives of the state, whom they see as inevitable descendants of the ROC’s one-party dictatorship. Take the OCAC, for example, whose best work results in none of its constituents being happy.
I’ve erstwhile joked that my community practices transitional justice in our low-budget, big-brained set design choices. TAFNC’s biggest events are often hosted at OCAC facilities, where overseas Taiwanese community organizations can share space without sharing basic political principles. This is the incongruence we grapple with: how do we participate within a legacy we dispute? How do we cover the portraits of Sun Yat Sen? (Answer: a balloon arch!) Do we confront these institutions as inextricably linked to their dictatorial origins, or do we embrace them as they’ve democratized and embraced progressive values? (Can “the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house?”)
The OCAC has been rebranded three times in my own lifetime, reflecting Taiwan’s desiniziation/Sinicization political pendulum (the English acronym, however, has remained consistent, as has our devotion to cost-saving principles. No need to reprint t-shirts!)
Established in 1926 in Guangdong as the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission, the council was updated to the Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission under the Democratic Progressive Party, allegedly briefly reverted to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission under President Ma, and ultimately rebranded as the Overseas Community Affairs Council, which it remains today. Two of its ministers are of note: Chang Fu-Mei, the first DPP official to be appointed to this role in 2000, and Hsu Chia-Ching, who was appointed in 2023. Chang was the longest-serving female cabinet member, with a tenure lasting eight years. In addition to being NATWA girlies, they are, to my memory, the only two OCAC ministers to be received by my pro-independence elders, though many of them have visited the Bay Area overseas Taiwanese community.
Simply put, the task of the supposedly nonpartisan contemporary OCAC is an impossible one. Like the Republic of China and the Kuomintang party, it is suspended within its own contradictions. Like me, it is spread thin, trying to serve everyone despite is fundamental incapacity to do so. Unlike me, it is worthy of critique (whereas I am deserving only of gentle compassion 😗).
To illustrate: how should we make sense of the institution that once facilitated infrastructures of KMT surveillance3 on Taiwanese migrants in the United States now co-sponsoring a Dr. Chen Wen-Chen Memorial event (or even, at one point, sending representatives to attend as guests)? What would transitional justice scholars have to say about that? (For our part as grassroots organizers, the dilemma is this: if these institutions are funded by Taiwanese taxpayers across the political spectrum, shouldn’t they serve activities across the political spectrum? Would our boycotts only exclude us from an ecosystem that is only all too happy to render us and our histories absent? Again, we find ourselves running back to Audre Lorde: can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house?)
How did we get here? During the Cold War, the reinforcement of an overseas Chinese identity established critical momentum for the ROC (Republic of China) government to articulate its legitimacy. (Beyond the Jewish diaspora, I don’t know whether other groups have strategized or leveraged their overseas communities so effectively or deliberately but it’s on my to-do list to find out— LMK if any leads!). As the KMT began to lose diplomatic allies, they both doubled down on these efforts and saw new challenges imposed by emigrants sympathetic to the Taiwanese Independence Movement (enter us!).
Wang and other scholars characterize the OCAC’s efforts (as seen in programs like compatriot student volunteer programs, “Love Boat,” FASCA, etc.) as “hegemonic, patriotic rituals… instruments by which an official entity attempts to solidify its power.” Wielding enormous soft power, the ROC - through OCAC - attempts to regulate the memories and narratives of overseas Taiwanese, delivering a coherent “Taiwanese” heritage, complete with a set of talking points, brochures, and cutesy motifs, that at once insists upon a legitimate Chinese identity and appropriates Indigenous aesthetics to perform a distinct Taiwanese culture.
If you’ve participated in these “compatriot programs,” you, too, are complicit (safe space! So am I!) and I hope this newsletter edition invites you to contextualize that experience in Taiwan’s broader, ongoing struggle for transitional justice.
Research has shown, however, that these programs, while “successful in creating social opportunities among participants… were only moderately [influential] in affecting the transnational ethnic and cultural identities of the younger generation. It was even less successful in mobilizing the youth to engage in direct political activism for [the Republic of China’s] benefit.” Good news: I think we generally proved ourselves of little use to ROC propaganda. Bad news: I don’t know if partying and making friends is the most effective return on Taiwanese taxpayer funds.
The pattern continues and is perhaps intensified in Taiwanese American programs, where the political intention has diluted over time, resulting in organizations - both state-sponsored, like those of OCAC, and grassroots - that are socially meaningful but without the intended depth of ethnic and cultural identity formation. I’m not suggesting that this is a failure of these programs, only that propaganda of any kind (including mine, sigh) can only go so far.
In Revolutionary Taiwan, Chou and Harrison write that “a coherent national Taiwanese story cannot be told in terms that will be understood within the international system, according to which Taiwan has no territory or history, neither having entered nor left this system under its name.” This is a complex reality that cannot be distilled into a happy hour, a summer camp, or a student conference (but shall I try anyways? 🫶 )
These are the hard questions that complicate Taiwanese American community organizing. Beyond the plight of intergenerational logistics (Zeffy? Google Forms? A mailed paper form?) and the multilingual meetings and the complicated design principles, we can never quite evade the absurdity of organizing around an identity that “does not correspond to a recognized nation-state.” How do we wrestle our efforts to build meaningful community from the mechanisms that would exploit these in the name of an incongruous, unresolved nationalism?
But the hard questions elicit the interesting work: to make meaning of a quality that is “historically chosen, declared rather than assumed; not simply born but inculcated” (Chou and Harrison).
This is the commitment I have made: to embrace, with curiosity and as much intellectual rigor as I can, the idiosyncrasies of Taiwan because they are so visibly embodied in the idiosyncrasies of the people I love and care for.
I know I need to learn to be more patient, to correct my own myopia, to keep the door open. I suspect, too, that I am standing upon an ephemeral cause.
But for now — I am grateful to be here, to serve, to do my part.
Thank you for reading. ❤️
What I’m reading lately:
Is Taiwan the motherland of China? - Chieh-Ting Yeh (Ketagalan Media, originally published on Taiwan News)
Feeling Asian American: Racial Flexibility Between Assimilation and Oppression - Wen Liu (University of Illinois Press)
Faraway: A Novel - Lo Yi-Chin, translated by Jeremy Tiang
I’m grateful to share that I’ll be keynoting an upcoming virtual symposium hosted by George Washington University’s Taiwan Education & Research Program (TERP); my remarks should be early in the lineup (starting at 10AM PT) and will be followed by panels of creatives and scholars I’ve long admired. In particular, Felicia Liang and Isabelle Engler were both recent features on TaiwaneseAmerican.org, Christine Lin authored seminal research on Taiwanese Presbyterian Churches and the Pro-Independence Movement (which I’ve been revisiting a lot lately for my novel), and Eric Tsai is a dear friend who’s tirelessly worked towards the accessibility and visibility of Taiwanese stories for Taiwanese Americans.
If interested, please RSVP here: https://terp.elliott.gwu.edu/category/upcoming-events/
About the event:
Join us for a thought-provoking virtual symposium that explores Taiwanese and Taiwanese American identities through the multidisciplinary lens of the arts. Featuring a special keynote address and three dynamic panels, this event will highlight how the arts foster critical and reflexive discourse on identity formation, preservation, and evolution within the Taiwanese American community.
Kicking off the symposium is a welcome keynote address by writer, speaker, and Taiwanese American community organizer Leona Chen, in which she will chart the formation of a distinctly Taiwanese American space, culture, and identity, as well as share her reflections from “growing up Taiwanese American” and her observations on its increasing legibility throughout the last decade. The first panel will examine documentary film as a powerful medium to tell the stories and experiences of Taiwan. The second focuses on the role of visual arts and music in expressing the intersections of Taiwanese, American, and diasporic identities. The final roundtable will dive into how Taiwanese American stories are being documented, articulated, and preserved for future generations. This symposium invites scholars, artists, students, and the public to reflect on how art transcends borders and how communities far and wide can engage with these vital stories.
Wang, Joan S. H. “In the Name of Legitimacy: Taiwan and Overseas Chinese during the Cold War Era.” China Review, vol. 11, no. 2, 2011, pp. 65–90. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23462345. Accessed 13 Oct. 2024.
Chou, Catherine Lila, and Mark Harrison. Revolutionary Taiwan. Cambria Press, 3 Sept. 2024.
Cheng, W. (2023). Island X: Taiwanese student migrants, campus spies, and Cold War activism. University of Washington Press.