by Annie Lin

I didn’t learn to knit from my grandmother, even though she was a knitter.

She spent almost every summer in the backyard of our house in suburban Southern California, perhaps because plane tickets out of Taiwan were cheaper then or perhaps because it was a way to escape the humidity of Taipei in July. When she wasn’t weeding the garden or laundering our clothes with a bar of slippery brown soap, she was sitting in a lawn chair next to a plastic bag of green or gray yarn and knitting on long bamboo needles for my grandfather, who usually sat next to her. He would grumble to her about how scratchy the sweaters were, but he also never fail to wear them around the house.

Sometimes I picked up tiny red loops of yarn from the carpet and wondered why these mysterious bits were scattered throughout the house. Later I would realize that these were homemade stitch markers, which my grandmother had fashioned out of a contrasting color of yarn.

Knitting was something that I constantly saw my grandmother do, but it was never something that I considered trying. I could spend hours sewing dresses for my Barbie Doll or baking tiny chocolate cakes in the Easy Bake Oven, but it never occurred to me that I might be able to turn yarn into tiny acrylic doll sweaters or potholders.

Many years later, I was reeling from the heartache of a broken engagement when a friend asked me a surprising question: would I like to learn to knit? I said yes, and she spent an evening patiently guiding me through those first rows of garter stitch. She took me to our local yarn store (ImagiKnit in San Francisco), where I bought a circular needle and a ball of alpaca that was pink and forgivingly pliant. She sent me home with a battered copy of Stitch N Bitch Nation, and after many nights of trial and error, I found myself knitting ceaselessly every night, as if I wanted to cushion every surface, as if I wanted to make myself a soft place to land.

I wanted to talk to my grandmother about knitting, even though I had not seen or even talked to her in nearly a decade. Years ago, my parents had made a bold decision to leave Taiwan and start over in the United States. It was obvious that geography would keep them from seeing their friends and families, but I wondered sometimes if they had any idea of how much cultural and language barriers would further widen the gulf. I had never written a letter to my grandmother before, as I could not write in Chinese. I did not even have her home address or phone number. When my grandmother had cancelled her flight to the United States for the wedding, which of course had been called off, I told my parents that I wanted to visit her in Taiwan.

This was how I ended up waiting nervously outside a rail station in central Taipei. At first, I didn’t recognize the woman who limped toward me with an unfamiliar cane. Her eyes had turned blue with old age, but she gave me a wide grin and pointed to her scarf, which I immediately recognized. It was an Oriole lace shawl, the very first I had ever knitted and that I had asked my mother to mail to her.

The arthritis kept her from walking as well as she used to, but nevertheless she was the one who navigated us from train to shuttle to bus to taxi to bus as we made her way out of the city. The arthritis also kept her from knitting, so she told me that she wanted to give me her needles and her entire stash. Later, at her request, I would carry home a brand new suitcase that barely held all of the yarn: hanks of space-dyed Chinese wool, fine balls of mohair she had bought in Japan, and the rough brown wool from the sweater she had knitted for my grandfather and then washed, unraveled and re-skeined when he died.

On the train, she watched me attempt to unravel ball of yarn and asked me what I was knitting. I told her that I was making a scarf, but that I had managed to tangle one of my last skeins of yarn into hopeless knots. “Give it to me,” she said.

The skyscrapers quietly slipped past us through the window as she worked the tangled knots of yarn with her fingers and told me about how she had learned to knit in school, about how she used to make all of her own clothes, and what it was like to grow up during the war. Our journey on public transit took us from Taipei to the outskirts of the county, and the skyscrapers were eventually replaced by betelnut stands and fields of banana trees that grew in the shadow of electronics factories.

As our train pulled slowly past the famed Grand Hotel, the massive pagoda that stands at the edge of the city, my grandmother handed the yarn back to me, wound in a perfect center-pull ball.

Annie is an entertainment attorney based in San Francisco and a former touring singer-songwriter whose records can surprisingly still be found on iTunes and Spotify. When she’s not knitting or digging through crates of 78s, she helps her mom with the food blog Taiwanese Cooking.

Growing up in the Taiwanese American community, I learned as a child the importance of understanding how history and politics shape and define our community. We become well versed in geopolitics across the span of several centuries, including comparative cases of identity formation and nationhood. We learn the story of how groups of diverse peoples living on an island, called Ilha Formosa by Portuguese sailors on a Spanish ship, became caught between the warring visions of ambitious and powerful neighbors and far-flung interests. We learn not to be constrained by those events and processes; rather, once we become informed of what came before, we as a community engage in the act of construction—as cultural and political artists—in the determination of our unique Taiwanese American identity. In that sense, just as our identity is influenced by history, our identity is also a construction, which once made, becomes history.

Now, as a mother, I also want my son to understand history and politics so that he can find empowerment in it, rather than be defined by it. I find that, for myself, understanding family history was the critical entrée into the complexity, which has defined the Taiwanese American community. My grandfather was in his teens when the Japanese colonial administration exited Taiwan at the end of World War II, making way for the Nationalist Chinese engaged in a losing civil war on the Chinese mainland. The son of sharecroppers, my a-kong longed for a peaceful future after Japanese colonialism. The ruthlessness of the new political regime dashed his optimism. He, along with several of his closest friends, participated in rallies across Taiwan in February and March 1947, when tens and thousands of frustrated men and women were killed or disappeared under suspicious circumstances. In the 1950s and 1960s, my dynamic and charismatic grandfather organized fellow farmers and spent time behind bars for speaking out on behalf of them as a bureaucrat in the farmers association, an institution which was left behind by the Japanese that the Kuomintang government quickly co-opted. In history books, the Kuomintang presided over what became known as the “Taiwan miracle,” as one of the East Asian Tigers touted for unprecedented economic transformation. My grandfather’s post-war experiences instilled in him a sense of Taiwanese-ness, which was not Japanese or Chinese. This new identification with Taiwan, his homeland, both surprised him and empowered him.

Learning about how the different threads of my grandfather’s life intertwined with the geopolitics of post-war Taiwan inspired me to study history and economics and to become a political scientist. Spending childhood summers running around barefoot in my grandfather’s chicken farm and fruit orchard instilled in me a deep appreciation for the island paradise. Growing up in the Taiwanese Presbyterian church (PCT) propelled me to investigate how the church, whose Scottish missionaries first went to Taiwan in the second half of the 19th century, transformed into an indigenous church. The PCT became an instrumental part of vibrant social movements, which pushed to end 40 years of Martial Law in 1987 and galvanized for democratic change leading to Taiwan’s first free presidential election in 1996.

For many people, food is an induction into one’s cultural and ethnic heritage. This is true for me too. I feast on the diversity of foods, which dominates the Taiwanese consciousness, from indigenous tribal fare and Hakka cuisine to Japanese food and gastronomy from different Chinese regions brought over to Taiwan by the Mainlanders. Aware that music is the gateway and bridge to my son’s heart, I expose him to Taiwanese children’s music and the Mariachi tunes, which originate from the Jalisco region of Mexico, the home state of his paternal grandfather. In addition to indulging in the flavorful cuisine of Puebla, where my husband was born, he travels to Taiwan and Mexico and spends quality time wrapping “bah-zhang” (a.k.a. Taiwanese tamales) with my mother and planting popular Taiwanese greens with my father. As a professor, I know there are many different ways to capture the imagination of my students. I encourage Taiwanese Americans to engage in the work of construction, to contribute to the making of history, by creating individual variations of the Taiwanese American identity.

Roselyn Hsueh is an assistant professor of Political Science at Temple University.

I grew up in San Marino, a small 3-mile radius town that was pretty Asian. No, I mean really Asian: my high school was 75% Asian, and probably 30% Taiwanese. I always knew I was Asian because I looked it and spoke Taiwanese at home, but I didn’t actually know what that meant. So when I went to college at Northwestern University where the Asian population was (only) 20%, I was in for a culture shock.

“Oh my God, white people.”
When I got to Evanston, I was hyper aware of my Asian identity. My first experience was a week-long camping trip where skinny dipping and reading erotica aloud were expected –not your most traditional Asian activities. And when I got to campus, hanging out with my dormmates was also not the most comfortable. It was the little things: They focused a lot on holidays that didn’t mean much to me like Halloween or Valentine’s Day. Their families would even send care packages with Super Bowl decorations which I regarded as fancy future-trash. It seemed like they talked about going out and partying all the time. They were just a bit too intense about rushing frats and sororities.

But it’s not that ALL the white people were doing this (it seemed to be most of them, though). And it’s not like my Asian friends and I didn’t celebrate these holidays or go out or excessively talk about who was joining (read: rushing) which Asian clubs. Everything was just slightly different.

But slight enough to make a difference. Enough for me to trek across campus to hang out with my Asian friends, many of them who were part of the Taiwanese American Students Club (TASC). Enough for me to cope with the “shame” I felt for only hanging out with Asians. When I was with these friends, I was carefree. I was myself. I didn’t have to put on so many filters. I felt relevant. I felt cool, damn it.

Growing through Northwestern’s TASC

Believe it or not, this made me feel cool.

I joined TASC because I was Taiwanese and it was fun, but I stayed because I felt useful. I was teaching others about my heritage by planning Taiwanese cultural events. I was learning how the Northwestern system worked: how to book rooms, how to get funding, how to get the word out. As a sophomore, I was on the executive board so I helped the freshmen out. I was a leader and felt like I was doing something real. Through TASC, I finally found my place. I could finally “do” Northwestern.

Growing through Intercollegiate Taiwanese American Students Association (ITASA)
Even though I was heavily involved with TASC, I still wondered if I was really doing something real. I wanted being Taiwanese to mean more than just night markets and Jay Chou (don’t get me wrong, both are awesome). I started to ask questions: What does being Taiwanese mean to me? What was the history behind Taiwanese culture? Around this time, the movie Formosa Betrayed came out, and this inspired me to delve into my parents’ history. I learned about the 228 Incident and resistance against the Kuo Min Tang (KMT) during the martial law era. I was moved by the undying underdog spirit of so many inspirational Taiwanese and Taiwanese American individuals. I participated in the Formosa Foundation ambassador program and learned how this history carries over into issues today. I got my answers, but I still wanted more; I wanted other people to talk about these “deeper” Taiwanese issues too.

Cue the ITASA conferences. They brought together members from Taiwanese American collegiate groups from across the nation to talk about Taiwanese history and celebrate a common heritage. The ITASA conferences were exactly what I was looking for…and more.

To me, they were magical playgrounds where I felt an instant, inexplicable bond with people. I had no idea why, but I just wanted to be friends with everyone I met. And they wanted to be my friend too (hopefully)! It made no sense, but it was beautiful. Through these encounters at ITASA conferences, I realized that, heck, we really aren’t all that different from each other. ITASA helped me open myself up and understand that when we accept ourselves, we accept others; and when we accept others, we accept ourselves. ITASA made me think outside the box and beyond myself. ITASA opened my eyes to the bigger picture. And because of that, I fell in love with it.

I'm BFFs with everyone here, no lie.

Eventually, during the 2011-2012 academic year, I became ITASA National President. And so, I was actually living up to my nickname: “Queen of Taiwan.”

How offensive. At least get it right. “Queen of Taiwanese America.”

It was while serving as President when I gained most of my self-confidence. I was doing something meaningful by bringing people together, encouraging them to be themselves, and helping them see the bigger picture. I felt like I was doing something real because I was giving others the opportunity to experience the empowering transformation that had moved me. I was doing what was important to me.

Addressing the 2011 ITASA Midwest Conference was one of the scariest moments of my life, but I did it for ITASA. I did it for me.

Growing
As I continue to grow, I find myself asking the same question: was I really doing something real?

What if there’s an even bigger picture? What does it mean to be Asian American? Or just American? Or even a human being? I’m working on that right now.

I’m really not that different. From Northwestern students. From Taiwanese Americans across the country. From Asian Americans. From people.

In the end, WE are really not that different from each other. (Let’s hold hands and be friends?)

But I have to admit, it’s ironic that I didn’t realize all this until I was surrounded by people similar to myself.

So, for those of you out there who are in leadership roles or highly involved in Taiwanese American student organizations, but find yourself being questioned about the value and importance of such an organization, I hope you will find the following useful. I’ve composed this FAQ based off of questions often asked of me when I was active in TASC and ITASA and questions I ask myself. Feel free to use as you see fit. And never forget that it’s your own story about your life experiences that matters most.

The Importance of Taiwanese American Student Organizations: a FAQ

What’s the point of Taiwanese American student associations (TASAs)? Aren’t you just being exclusive by hanging out with other Taiwanese people?
TASAs aren’t purposely trying to be exclusive. TASAs are actually a means for people to connect and really, to just have fun. It’s endearing how excited some people get talking about summers with family in Taiwan, pigging out at night markets or judging which tea shop has the best boba. TASA is a place (though not the only one) where people can feel that connection.
At the same time, they serve as safe places where students can feel understood and welcomed by others beyond the small talk. I like to think that everyone wants to be able to his/her true self with everyone. But when your culture is different from the mainstream, you feel different and uncomfortable, and it’s a lot harder to be yourself.

I have friends where I can be myself. Why do you need a club for that?
People often group themselves together by shared interest or a shared feeling of being different from the norm. This can come in all forms, whether it be personality, career interest or even something like height. Ethnic/racial identity is a large part of many people’s identity, so people often feel different from others because of it. At the same time, ethnic/racial identity can also help people feel the same as others.

Doesn’t having TASAs just allow people to not be comfortable with people outside of TASA?
Yes, the existence of TASAs does make it that much easier for people to stay in a comfortable place but people first need to find a place where they feel comfortable before they can feel comfortable in other settings. Imagine if you never found your closest friends. Imagine a world where you never felt like yourself.

Do TASAs encourage people to get out of their comfort zone?
No and then yes. TASAs are a home for students to find community, gain confidence and develop leadership skills. But ultimately, TASAs are meant to build leaders for the world, not just for TASA.

What’s the point of TASA at a school that’s 60% Asian with a large proportion of Taiwanese Americans?
First of all, it’s important to keep in mind that TASAs vary widely from school to school. It’s true that Asian students in this environment may feel more comfortable with their ethnic/racial identity by default, but students may still be drawn to TASA because of something nuanced about Taiwanese culture, or something completely outside of Taiwanese culture. A simplified example: it’s easy to find non-TASA people to drink bubble tea with, but no one will get stinky tofu with me except for my TASA friends. Or all my TASA friends just happen to like playing Settlers.

I’m frustrated by TASAs because people think I’m like the people in TASAs just because I’m Taiwanese.
That’s totally fine that you’re not like the TASA people, and I’m sorry other people generalize you so. But TASA members aren’t really at fault for being themselves. It’s human nature to simplify even though humans are complex beings, so we should challenge people to think beyond stereotypes about clubs, ethnic groups, and really, everything else.

I’m in TASA and I feel kinda lame for only hanging out with TASA people.
Don’t! If that’s where you feel like you belong, embrace it and be proud of it. At the same time, I also think it’s important to challenge yourself to expand your comfort zone. Wouldn’t it be awesome to be your true self all the time and not just with TASA?

Bottom line: TASAs are similar to frats/sororities, community service groups, informal families or any other form of social group. They’re all based on a form of “culture.”

I am deeply, deeply Midwestern.

I often forget how much of an Ohioan I am until, of course, I leave Ohio. Then, wherever I go, it becomes painfully obvious that I am, indeed, from the Midwest, the Rust Belt, the Corn Belt. Not everyone knows what this implies, but as with any stereotype, the word comes with a myriad of associated traits. UrbanDictionary says that Midwesterners are:

considered a different breed. the good: they’re nice outgoing people with morals. the bad: they’re nice outgoing people with morals.

This is one of the more flattering associations. Along with being considered homey, tacky, and stupid by much of the rest of the country, Midwesterners get asked questions like “Do you live on a farm?” almost anytime they visit the coasts. No, I’m not a farmer, and where I come from is suburban and where I live is a major urban center. Sure, I love to play cornhole. So sue me. But I think being a Midwestern Taiwanese American, or perhaps more broadly, a Taiwanese American who is from a predominately white community/city/state/region, warrants some more critical thought.

I’m looking to say farewell to good ole’ Columbus town. Not because I hate it, in fact, I love Columbus. I’ve been here all my life, and it’s time I left my comfort zone… because I am incredibly comfortable here. I want to travel, to get lost, and find my way again. So I applied for a job in San Francisco. That one action, pressing send to a cold, unfeeling email address, drove me to really consider potentially moving over two thousand miles away from the city where I grew up.

But along with most others who are considering moving from a place they’ve lived their entire life, I know in my heart that if I moved to San Francisco I would struggle immensely. Perhaps, not for the reasons you might be thinking. The predominating apprehension I have in moving to California is more or less about my identity as an Asian American. How does a someone who grew up in a predominately white place, like Ohio, deal with suddenly being somewhere where faces like mine are numerous? Suddenly, my place in the world would be different.

When I have been in California, the air didn’t smell the same, and racial relations between the white and Asian populations seem completely foreign to me. Being Asian has entirely different connotations. I almost enjoy the challenges of being a minority, yet many of those challenges don’t exist (at least in the same form), in places where Asians and Asian Americans are a dime a dozen and have been so for generations. Asians had “become white.” (Zhou). Being Asian is being normal. WHAT.

I, like many Taiwanese Americans, grew up where being Asian was different. Really different. I think you know what kind of experiences I’m referring to. But that kind of upbringing made me stronger, it made me proud. I started to feel like looking and being different was a positive distinction, and I could make it so. However, this confidence often runs into this wall. This wall called real life. This tension of advantage/disadvantage has pushed and pulled me in opposing directions until it found outlet in the Asian American community. The various parts of Asian America I have been able to taste have been of wildly different flavors from one side of the country to the other.

In Ohio, I feel like I’m always fighting for my place, for my right to my position. For the rights of those who look like me. If I moved to sunny California, I may be more combative than I should be, more vigilant than I need to be. It reminds me of a scene from Dark Knight Rises, at the beginning of the movie Gordon is described as a war hero in peacetime, and thus irrelevant. I feel like that’s what I’d be outside the Midwest. Obsolete and unnecessary.

And there is a certain guilt that comes with leaving an area where there is so much to be done. Columbus is a place where the Asian American cause is still very malleable. I can, and have (in a small way) been a part of it. But there are more lessons to learn for me, ones that I can’t learn here. Something tells me my relationship with Columbus does not end here.

I know that the Midwest has made me who I am, and I may not be Lieutenant Gordon but I can do my part to do good no matter where I am. Gotham is a place that could do with some change, but it is also a place to be celebrated. And that’s exactly how I feel about good ole’ Columbus, Ohio.

Photo by Young and Lo

My grandmother brews smells in the kitchen long before I learn that olfaction is the sense most loaded with memories. Thighbones filled with creamy marrow bubbling in beef stew; young bamboo stems boiled, cooled on ice cubes and dipped in sesame oil; braised three-layered-pork; preserved eggs and soybeans stir-fried with short hot peppers that go straight to the insides of your forehead and rouse a cacophony of sneezes. Hers are recipes thick with nostalgia, dripping sauces and spices preserved from Mainland China where she left sixty years ago, a home she feeds to us with chopsticks.

My grandmother was seventeen when she left China, a girl belonging to stories dug up like pebbles from the past and tossed occasionally into my consciousness by my mother’s hands. I imagine her standing at a crowded train station in the summer of 1949, her one-year-old son in her arms. Communism consumes China in one last gulp as she waits for a patriotic husband to decide whether or not to forget his motherland and escape to Taiwan. She had told him earlier that day that she was leaving, with or without him, and when I hear this story I wonder how confident she had felt, standing alone on the platform, that he would show up. Did she cry or laugh when he finally did? What could have been a tragic tale of abandon is now just a funny story my mother tells, the story of a strong woman whose stubbornness forced my grandfather to bring our family safely out of Communist China and into Taiwan, the island I call my home.

Taiwan is a sweet-potato shaped island whose history of identities is abbreviated into a dot on most maps. In elementary school, teachers teach us that Portuguese sailors passing by in the 16th century were so impressed by our golden coasts and green hills that they named us Ilha Formosa, a beautiful island. This western christening pleases us because it gives us the only name we agree on. Beauty doesn’t care whether its delicate shorelines contain a province or a country, we say. Our identity is our gifts from nature, documented by the ancient admiration of outsiders.

But second-graders are skeptical. We think of empty boba-tea cups and cigarette butts on beaches bleeding into the ocean where our mothers wouldn’t let us swim because the water looked dirty. We see shallow-rooted betel-nut trees growing on green hills, soil loosening under summer typhoons, mud tumbling downhill. We hear debates about national identity and integrity, proponents of either side challenging the other’s love for their country. We stare at the green island on the pages of our social studies textbooks and whisper wonderingly, Formosa, squinting to remember what it looked like five hundred years ago. It is hard to love your country when you don’t really know what it is.

On Wikipedia, there are a total of seven pages about Taiwan under seven different names. There are also several articles consisting of rather long and heated debates on whether or not a given combination of these pages should be merged. Apparently, the distinction is that “Taiwan” is an island, “Republic of China” is a political state, “Taiwan Province” is an administrative division, “Taiwan Area” is a geopolitical area, “Republic of Taiwan” is a proposed state (whatever that means), “Taiwan Province, People’s Republic of China” is a theoretical province of the People’s Republic of China (whatever that means), and “Chinese Taipei” is the name that Taiwan (or is it Republic of China?) uses to compete in the Olympics.

In any case, my family first came to one of these places in 1949. After twenty some years of civil war, interrupted by eight years of Japanese invasion and resuming after their defeat, the Nationalist government had been forced to retreat increasingly southward until the only place left to go was the little island across the strait that they had just reclaimed from Japan. On October 1st, Mao established the People’s Republic of China in Beijing; later that month, Chiang Kai Shek transported the Republic of China and two million of its people to Taiwan. I imagine the massive uprooting: loyal Nationalist members who firmly believed the Mainland would be reclaimed, intellectuals who brought larger families because they suspected it would not, teenage soldiers who did not know enough to believe or suspect at all. Husbands sending wives and children. Sons leaving mothers. Daughters bidding sweethearts goodbye.

My grandparents from both sides were among those millions rushing from homes to trains rushing to boats, to harbors, to land. Stories are born and lost in that chaos, and among them were tiny bits of my parents whose stories carry tiny bits of me. I would have liked to say that I have tried to reclaim those stories just as Chiang Kai Shek tried to reclaim the Middle Kingdom. But the truth is that before a certain age you think the only stories that have anything to do with you are the stories you create, and it is not until you start losing them that you realize the only stories you own are those that created you.

I think about the seventeen-year-old girl at the train station whenever I make dumplings. I remember spending Saturday afternoons in the kitchen with my grandparents, helping my grandfather roll long cylinders of dough while my grandmother complained that he worked too slowly. He chuckled and repeated the proverb, “slow work makes fine work,” and my grandmother smiled. The smell of dough rose with sixty years of marriage, ordinary and sweet, and I breathed it all in, thinking of their journey over the Taiwan Straight, the home they built together meal by meal. I watched my grandmother peel a piece of skin off the counter, place a lump of meat at the center, and arrange it into a ball with her chopsticks. She folded the skin over the meat with skillful fingers and tucked the corners in neatly, pinching all around the edges, a home wrapped around flesh, safely sealed.

When I make dumplings with my mother at home, we use store-bought and machine-made dumpling skins, and I can always tell the difference. My mother complains that my grandmother doesn’t believe she can cook. She is the youngest daughter and used to spend afternoons after school watching her mother dice spring onions and press ground pork and potatoes into meatballs, but my grandmother tells her: “More oil, too little salt, don’t let it burn!” I remind her that this is exactly what my mother tells me when we’re cooking at home. “But that’s different,” she says. “You really don’t know how to cook!”

I ask my grandmother to teach me but she says, “What’s the hurry? I couldn’t make fried rice until we came to Taiwan.” This surprises me because somehow I imagined that she came into the world knowing how to cook, how to shred carrots into carrot-shredder-thin strips with a knife, how to pick the sweetest, juiciest fruits in the market, and how to peel the skins off peaches without leaving a single blemish on the flesh. In my surprise I forgot to ask her how, then, did she learn how to cook? Did she buy cookbooks like my friends’ mothers? Did she resort to trial and error like me? Did the seventeen-year-old girl cook happily for her new family, or always with a tear in one eye for the mother she left and the recipes she would never see again?

I have never been to the Mainland, and I have hardly heard my grandparents describe it. When they talk about China they describe people and events, not places. The China I know comes from the poets we read in Chinese class, from the lofty peaks of Tai Mountain where Confucius saw the world in one scope: river, mountain, temple, city.

My favorite poems are about departures. There are plenty of them: soldiers marching toward desolate borders, young scholars leaving countryside homes for positions in the city, friends seeing friends off for miles to postpone the final moment of parting. Millennia of breaths are let out in sighs of poetry written in yearning for a vast and aging motherland, and I envision the land my grandparents left across the strait, a fingertip away on the map. I am unearthing a foreign culture with my own language, digging up characters that lived through the characters they wrote. I wonder if it is these characters, or the roots of my family still buried in the Mainland, that fed the Yangtze River into my veins.

In the kitchen, the women in my family cook dishes seasoned with home and traditions. Accents evolve and you can no longer tell mine from the kids whose families have been in Taiwan for centuries, but recipes are preserved over generations. When I go to my friends’ homes for dinner, the slight variations of cooking styles fit awkwardly in my mouth. Too much sugar, where are the Chinese chives, some sort of spice is missing. I listen to their parents speak to them in the Taiwanese dialect, my friends replying in Mandarin lined with a hybrid Taiwanese slur, and I realize that the tongue inherits a mother’s tastes much more faithfully than it does her language.

My grandma has a famous dish called jio-mien, or ‘pinch noodles.’ Whenever she announces that we’re having jio-mien for dinner, my cousins and I rush to wash our hands and gather in the kitchen expectantly. My aunt dices the carrots, turnips, Chinese onions and prepares the ground pork; my mother boils the ingredients in a steamy stew and adds sauces and seasoning; my grandpa kneads the dough for the noodles in his slow methodological way; my grandma makes sure he does it right; and we the kids get to do the actual pinching.

First we cut the dough into strips. Next, we roll the strips in sesame oil until our hands glisten with the sweet scent and the dough becomes plump cylinders tinged in golden brown. Then comes the fun part. We pinch off small bits of the cylinders with our thumbs and forefingers and toss them in the massive bubbling pot of stew, watching the soup dance and gurgle and the pinches of dough surfacing one by one. The smell of boiling stew and flour loads the entire house with an appetite inherited from a little village in northern China where my grandpa grew up. The noodle pinches are sleek and chewy in the rich stew, and if you savor a spoonful slowly you can detect the faint taste of sesame oil mixed in with the melting carrots and turnips, a fragrance that will stay in the creases of your palms for days.

At a neighborhood potluck, a lady peered at my mother’s dishes and said, “Wai-shen ren are so different!”

For as long as I’d known what it meant, I had identified as a wai-shen ren, or extra-provincial people. Wai-shen ren refers to the millions who had moved to Taiwan after the Chinese civil war as well as all their descendents, while ben-shen ren are those whose ancestors immigrated to Taiwan before World War II. Ben-shen ren are not indigenous Taiwanese people, because they also immigrated to Taiwan from China. The difference is that wai-shen ren had been in Taiwan for three generations while ben-shen ren were there for more than five. To me, being a wai-shen ren means that I don’t understand Taiwanese, that my grandparents speak in lilting accents preserved from their separate provinces, and that the contents of my bento lunch box always look slightly different.

While growing up, I rather enjoyed the distinction. I would proudly raise my hand when our first grade teachers wanted to know which students in the class were wai-shen ren, and gloated when my friends asked to sample my mother’s cooking. In high school, after a whispered but heated discussion about Taiwanese politics with the girl sitting next to me that lasted throughout history class, we were ecstatic to find out that we were both wai-shen ren. Later on as rallies formed to protest against the corrupt president at the time, we would walk to the gatherings together after school but carefully avoid talking about them in front ben-shen ren friends. “They might support the president,” we’d whisper.

For my parents’ generation, however, the implications were much more complicated. They grew up in the transition from Nationalist martial law to democracy, from “Republic of China in Taiwan” to just “Taiwan.” Politics shifted from Chiang Kai Shek’s maxim “Reclaim the Mainland!” to secret rallies and student protests for Taiwanese independence. The Republic of China’s terrain went from a map that encompassed Outer Mongolia to a sweet potato plus a splattering of even tinier islands. Conflicts arose between ben-shen ren and the Nationalist government, which then consisted almost entirely of wai-shen ren’s.

Meanwhile, the government’s land reform laws and major construction projects launched the “Taiwan Miracle,” bringing our economy decades ahead of Communist China. Taiwan became more and more disconnected from the Mainland, a sweet potato drifting away on the Pacific, growing highways and skyscrapers. But the booming economy could not pull together a divided people. The minority wai-shen government was often cruel and unjust during the martial law period, and it bred a suppressed animosity that was finally released with the birth of democracy. The majority ben-shen ren became the new power. “Unification” and “independence” were issues constantly brought up, tossed around fiercely during campaign seasons, manipulated for votes.

By the time the Taiwanese government allowed visits to the Mainland in 1978, the motherland that my grandparents left behind had disappeared among the shambles of Cultural Revolution along with mothers and fathers and siblings. There was nothing left to reclaim. The China that my parents grew up trying to remember through their parents’ stories was a myth, and their temporary shelter in a divided Taiwan had to become a home.

“Ben-shen ren criticize us for not speaking Taiwanese,” my father tells me. “There is a saying in Taiwanese about how we don’t know the language after decades of eating Taiwanese rice and drinking Taiwanese water. And how true! I can’t even really say why that is. We just never learned, and we never taught you. I guess we really don’t belong.”

“We should have bought a house right after we arrived in Taiwan,” My grandmother says. “Instead we drifted around in different places for years. But who knew? Your grandpa was so sure we were going home soon.”

My grandfather, the man who believed in his country and government so much that he was ready to let his wife and son leave without him, passed away four winters ago. A portrait of my grandpa’s mother hangs on the wall in front of his desk. I remember once when I was very young, I climbed up my grandpa’s chair to search for scissors on his desk and saw the portrait straight in the eyes for the first time. I had always known it was there, but never really noticed it until then. The portrait was a very simple sketch of a plain, quiet face with eyes that I imagine resembled my grandpa’s, gray hair tightly combed into a bun, neck and shoulders wrapped in a plain traditional frock. Her face seemed foreign and oddly silent in the clutter of my grandpa’s study. Right below the portrait, written with calligraphy brush and ink, were characters already familiar to my six-year-old mind: “My mother.” I remember quickly climbing down the chair, without the scissors and with a chill lumping in my breastbone. Now I recognize it as the chill you get when you leave something behind.

I was born in 1988 in Clemson, South Carolina. When I was four, my father received his Ph.D but had trouble finding work in the States immediately afterwards. When he got a teaching position in a university in Taiwan, my parents decided to move back, a decision that my father later said he made with some regret. He lamented the opportunities that I would miss without an American education, but was comforted by the fact that I would grow up near my grandparents. Now when we talk about the past, he tells me “It was the right decision.”

When I think of the early years of my life, though, I can now see the sense of compensation with which my parents raised and educated me. Even though I enrolled in local Mandarin-speaking schools and only twice briefly visited the States before college, my parents did everything they could to make sure that I kept up with English: tutors, storybooks, movies with subtitles duct-taped over on the TV screen. My father talks about his careful planning and foresight with pride. Being able to speak English fluently means that I can go anywhere and be anyone, he says. I can make a fortune teaching English in Taiwan, I can go to America and become anything I wanted, I can have kids who grow up inside white-picket fences, away from the little confused island caught between the past and the future. We have been suspended in this in-between area for too long: almost independent but not quite, almost a democracy but not quite, almost belonging but not quite. If you are able to leave, they said, don’t come back.

My parents tell me that they want the world to be open to me like a book, so I read profusely while growing up, mainly in English. “Little Golden Books” before “300 Tang Poems for Children” (a classic children’s must-read), “Pride and Prejudice” before “Dream of the Red Chamber.” Freshman year of high school, I started seriously considering going to college in the States. A stack of SAT prep books grew steadily alongside my Chinese textbooks, and later on acceptance letters arrived from across the Pacific. I was excited but scared, and I tried not to think too hard about departure.

A few weeks before graduation, the weather in Taiwan turns unbearably hot. I walk through the thick soup of humidity after school on a route I had traveled for three years, in summer storm and slow autumn drizzles. The whole city sweats on me, pressing its hot breath against an earlobe, an eyebrow, the inside of my elbow. As sweat trickles along the line of my chin, I think about California. I pass by bookstores and cafes, Chinese medicine shops wafting bittersweet smells of herbs, street vendors, boba tea stores, elaborate 7-11s. As each door opens I breathe in the scent and the cool relief. I gather them deep inside my lungs, I carry them and exhale breaths that had acquired my temperature and memory. The smell of Chinese characters on Chinese pages in Chinese books. The fragrance of tea eggs. The artificial scent of air-conditioned rooms and clearly defined spaces. I walk past them and doors close, cicadas singing.

Now I am in California where grass is yellow in the summer, and people ask me where I’m from.

Taiwan, I say.

“You mean Chinese Taipei, do you?” query international students from the Mainland.

“Oh I get it. Taiwan is not part of China, right?” American students say with a knowing smile.

The air turns slightly humid with their questions and I sweat a little as I politely answer. But it all depends, I want to say, on what you mean by China, and then again on what you mean by Taiwan. We are not part of the People’s Republic of China, simply because my grandparents did not fight the Communists sixty years ago so that sixty years later their grandchildren will readily accept a Communist government. But we are part of some concept of China. Some aspect of China that doesn’t change with shifting politics, slipping economy or threat of war; a China that is the same in wai-shen ren and ben-shen ren because it is not a collection of provinces or governments, but a single idea of belonging that exists even in the fiercest proponents of Taiwanese independence. A massive land and history that fits snugly inside a sweet potato, like good food encapsulating the value of family. Like scents we carry in our palms. Like the characters we write and the characters we love. Like this understanding of this conflict that is so difficult to explain to others who ask, that leaves me nodding and shrugging at the same time. We can never be truly independent from China just as I can never be truly independent from Taiwan, even though we are both drifting away from our roots, slowly forgetting.

“Do you plan to go back to Taiwan after college?” People ask me.

“After grad school?”

“Eventually? At all?”

I come up with different answers every time. No, it depends, probably not, who knows? They are all true.

I think of a famous line from a Taiwanese poet: “The Mainland is my mother, Taiwan is my wife, Hong Kong is a lover, and the West is an affair.”

I think of the Chinese proverb that says a fallen leaf returns to its roots.

Then I imagine a sweet potato. It is its own root, clumsy and odd, but it doesn’t need other roots to ground it. It can grip the earth firmly and then leave, taking a skin of earth with it, shed tiny bits wherever it goes.

I think about the different reasons people leave. Some are forced to, like my grandparents. Some are taken, like my uncles in their mothers’ arms. Some are fortunate enough that they get to, like me.

I am now six years older than my grandmother was when she left China. I crossed the Pacific to a college in the States, and the distance was so much shorter than when she crossed the Taiwan Straight to build a home from scraps and a kitchen. My eyes and mouth water for things that are lost in the process of inheritance. I am the product of memories and recipes wrapped and concealed, hidden away so that only the smooth plump skins are visible, and I still don’t know how much salt to put in the fillings.

Whatever it is that I leave behind, I can only leave it behind because it belonged to me. Roots are tiny beginnings sprouting. I stare at the little root vegetable through an airplane window, growing smaller when I leave, looming larger when I return. The breathless awe of foreign sailors five hundred years ago breaks over me in waves.

History is a series of departures, lives leaving words leaving mouths.

Ilha Formosa, I whisper.

Justine Kao was born in the United States and grew up in Taiwan, where she attended local Mandarin-speaking schools and developed an incorrigible taste for linguistic oddities and sweet potatoes. After high school, she attended Stanford University and studied Symbolic Systems (how the human mind makes sense of language) and Creative Writing (how language can help make sense of the human mind). She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at Stanford, where she continues to explore the roots of language, meaning, and her own existence through research and creative non-fiction.

Roots and Leaves was originally published December 2012 in As/Us Journal. The website is a space to showcase the creative literary expressions and scholarly work of both emerging and established women writers from around the world.

An ode to Stinky Tofu in the voice of Robert Frost…

The Tofu Not Eaten
By Kristina Lin, Artwork by Kelly Lin

Two tofu I was given in my childhood,
And sorry I could not eat them both,
And be a hungry child, long I stood,
And sniffed at one as deep as I could,
Until my nostril to the smell loath;

Then smelled the other, just as tempting,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was fried and wanted tasting,
Though as for that the time passed waiting,
Had cooled them really about the same,

And both that morning equally invite
In sauce no taste buds could ever deny.
Oh, I kept the first for another sight!
Yet knowing how bite leads on to bite,
I doubted if the second I would try.

I shall be telling this in reply
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two tofu given in my childhood, and I—
I took the one fewer people try,
And that has made all the difference:

For now I love eating stinky tofu.

Author’s Note: This was adapted from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” I enjoy reading Robert Frost and was inspired by his work, so I wanted to combine elements of Taiwanese culture with one of my favorite of his poems. Voila!

Are you a fan of Stinky Tofu? Check out our TaiwaneseAmerican.org store for “Stinky Tofu Walks Alone” apparel.

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Once again, my university makes a splash in the Asian blogosphere and is highlighted in the metropolitan newspaper for having overtly racist students. Angry Asian Man, Colorlines, and the Columbus Dispatch all covered a new tumblr called OSU Haters, which highlights outrageous tweets by students of my beloved place of higher education, The Ohio State University, some of them by the afore mentioned OSU Asian twitter account. It seems that my first post about racial encounters in social media was only the beginning.

OSU Haters was started by a former hater who got into some serious trouble because of their insensitivity. Now reformed, he or she created OSU Haters to re-educate those who suffer from the same kind of hate. The blog is a nod to another tumblr account, Hunger Games Tweets, which you should really check out, if you haven’t already.

Take a look at some excerpts by the fine specimens of the human race, as posted by OSU Haters. These guys didn’t even bother with the veil of a fake handle like OSU Asian.

Oh, good.

Let’s ignore the racism for a moment. What’s With Capitalizing The First Letter In Every Single Word? Yet, you can’t be bothered with any punctuation?

If one more person talks to me like I can’t drive, I’m going to parallel park my Jeep up their— I mean…

Because, you know, that’s not illegal or anything. Let’s go back to separate but equal?

Classy, are they not? I think we can all agree that these are deplorable human beings. In response to OSU Haters the Vice President, the President, as well as many other administrators have made comments about how unacceptable these comments are. What I haven’t heard is how things are going to change. Scolding is fine, but I want some teeth in those words. Because people are not getting the picture. One of the tweeters was found and gave a few words to the Dispatch.

“The way I see it is you’re joking around with your friends. … It’s just a bad joke,” said the sophomore, who requested anonymity because he fears retaliation from Ohio State. “I agree that racism shouldn’t be tolerated, but I don’t think this is the right way to go about it.”

Wow…I mean, WOW. This individual has just told us that he think that he has done nothing wrong. “Racism shouldn’t be tolerated”? You mean yours? If I ever meet this person I want to say I’d give them a piece of my mind but I might just be to shocked and have too much steam shooting out of my ears to say a word. Excuse me, sir, your white male privilege is showing.

The fact of the matter is that there is an uptick in racial resentment against Asians at Ohio State, and most of the tweets featured on OSU Hater are about Asians, particularly international students. One of the factors is the rise in the number of international students. Ohio State makes a huge effort, like many other schools, to promote diversity and up their numbers of international students. A growing proportion of them are Chinese students. But the majority of our population is still white. Less than 18% of our students are of color, and 80% of the student body is from Ohio. Potential for tension? You better believe it.

In my first post, I highlighted a racial experience of success. But it ain’t always rainbows and unicorns. I found a tweet on OSU Haters posted by a girl I know.

I wasn’t terribly surprised by it, unfortunately. Along with this tweet were hundreds documenting her underage drinking, but that’s a whole different issue. Anyways, it was only a matter of time before I saw someone I knew on that tumblr, and it might as well be this girl. The sad part is that we went on a service trip together. Oh, the irony. Despite all, I thought this might be a good teaching moment. I wasn’t mad at her, I just wanted her to understand. So I wrote her this little Facebook message.

Hey ______,
You might know this already, there’s a tweet of yours on osuhaters.tumblr.com. I’m not sure you’ve heard about it, but it’s getting a lot of attention so I’d be careful about what you post on twitter. People really are starting to get in trouble for this kind of thing. On a personal note, it’d also be nice if you didn’t think about Asians as such a monolithic group, because we’re not. You may not think it’s a big deal or anything, but the opinions you express actually adversely affect me as an individual, and on an aggregate level, the effect is huge. Help a girl out, and don’t perpetuate the stereotypes.
Peace and love,
Chuey

Normally, I’m not one to ever say “peace and love,” but I thought it might soften the tone, since she tends to say things like that. (I think…maybe I’m assuming things about her, too). Anyways, I sent it and promptly forgot about the whole thing.

Until two weeks later when I was going through my messages and saw that not only had she not replied, but she had unfriended me. Well, that I did not expect considering we got along fine during the service trip we went on together. Perhaps she hates me. Maybe she was so embarrassed she couldn’t even stand to be Facebook friends anymore. It’s possible she thinks that I’d report her to the university. I really have no clue, but speculation isn’t really going to clear things up. I still wonder what she really thought about the whole thing, but I suppose I’ll never know. Sometimes we just have to let it go if the timing isn’t right, or the person isn’t ready. Or if I’m not ready.

So I’m back to square one. But this won’t be the last of me!