What I Inherited and What I Gave My Children
How a complicated family history shaped my identity—and how raising American children helped me find peace with it
It's always hard to explain identity to my children, because I haven't quite figured it out myself.
Of course, identity could me a lot of things. But today, I wanted to write about culture and family background.
I was born in Taiwan to a Chinese father who fled to the island during the 1949 Chinese civil war and a Taiwanese mother who was raised in the post-Japanese colonial era.
When I was little, my father always talked about "going back" to China. I never understood why. I didn't know why I should go "back" to a place I'd never been, not to mention my father had actually fled from China on a refugee boat at age three and barely had any memory of the country himself.
Meanwhile, my mother never talked about her identity, her childhood, or the Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule. The only thing she ever said to me was that her family didn't really identify themselves as "Taiwanese," because the Japanese had stripped that identity away long ago. With Kuomintang taking Taiwan back—or taking it over, depending on whom you ask; that's another matter of intense political and historical debate—in 1945, she thought we were now "some kind of Chinese," maybe "Taiwan-born Chinese."
So I was supposed to be both Chinese and Taiwanese. But the ever-rising tension between China and Taiwan, and the obvious animosity between the two groups of people on the island, made it hard for me to believe that I could be both.
The sense of being a perpetual outsider lasted for years and reached its peak in my early twenties, when I was back in my home island of Taiwan after living in America for three years for school. It was a sunny afternoon, and I was being kicked out of a cab by a driver who though I spoke Taiwanese with a Chinese accent.
In a 2007 blog post I wrote for NPR's intern blog, I documented the shocking experience that forever changed my idea about identity. I wrote, "I don't feel Chinese or Taiwanese and I certainly will never be American either."
Since then, I've lived in America for nearly twenty years. I've built my life and my family here, and I'm now raising two American children. I certainly feel American now. I can't fully explain the feeling—I guess adoption and identity are complicated.
After becoming a mother, I watched my children grow up in a safe home, feel deeply secure in their school and community, make friends, and enjoy their everyday lives. They don't have the perpetual outsider feeling I carried growing up. Both of them feel 100% American and embrace their heritage by identifying themselves as "Asian American," without ever thinking about the need to untangle the complex, painful geopolitics of East Asian history that shaped my childhood experience.
Nothing comforts a mother more than watching her children grow up happy and healthy. On one hand, I'm proud of giving them a stable home in America. I feel I have broken a generational cycle of displacement and protected my children from a specific weight of my family history. I'm happy to call myself American now.
On the other hand, my childhood experience still matters. The fact that my children don't feel like outsiders doesn't erase the reality of how hard it was for me. I feel like a vital bridge between my parent's painful past, my own complicated childhood, and my children's bright, secure future.
At the end of the summer, I took my kids along on my research trip to Los Angeles, visiting historical destinations that were especially meaningful to the Asian American community. I told them it wasn't our family's history—we didn't immigrate to American until the 2000s—but it was nice to learn what people who came before us had experienced.
We grabbed lunch at Grand Central Market. My kids asked if I was Chinese American or Taiwanese American.
"I guess I'm like Din Tai Fung," I said. "You know, Din Tai Fung is called a Taiwanese restaurant in America because it started in Taiwan, but is considered a Shanghai restaurant in Taiwan becuase the menu honors mainland Chinese traditions."
And they loved it.
**This is a cross post from Medium.
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