What is an ABC, an American Born Chinese? Growing up, it was speaking Chinglish. Not having a good grasp of your mother tongue, despite my parents' attempts to put me in a 補習班, an after school program, to teach me Mandarin. Dressing differently than my motherland counterparts -- there's an "air" to ABCs. Always being stuck in the middle: never Chinese enough, never (white) American enough. Always in-between. A straddler. It's not really a unique experience. Many Taiwanese left the country in the 80s and went all over the world. American-born was where I landed, but Canadian-born, Brazilian-born, Australian-born --- I've seen them all.
What does it mean to be Chinese? Do I identify with Mainland China, or do I use Chinese simply to refer to my race? Sigh. Even that's loaded, and takes at least a few minutes to disentangle. I can hear myself telling myself, "Here comes the Taiwan politics" as I take a few breaths to explain. I can see the eyeroll from the party I'm explaining to. The progressive term is American Born Taiwanese, but ABC is the colloquial way to refer to those of ethnic Chinese *origin* born overseas. Ethnic Chinese born in America. American born ethnic Chinese, call it what you want, it's difficult even to use the short version to explain.
What does it mean to be an ABC? Here's my experience with it:
I've lived in Singapore for just over two years, and in that time have found stronger ties to the Asia region. It's something that has come as a surprise to me since I never grew up here. I see a future in this region and its people. I hope these countries flourish in spite of their shortcomings. I feel like I belong here. Where does this feeling come from -- I still dunno.
I've always had an affinity for languages. My cousin told me that when I was young, her parents would ask her why she couldn't learn Chinese like I could. She said sometimes I would fall asleep while stroking Mandarin characters blankly into the air. I learned Spanish for six years in high school, and also picked up some basic Portuguese while studying in Europe. Asia was the furthest thing from my radar growing up, but after having lived here, I feel connected to it. Maybe I always had a feeling towards Asia, but it had just been buried or whitewashed, and it is now only emerging. And, it has emerged through the medium of language.
I grew up in the U.S. Around me, most of the Taiwanese overseas people spoke Mandarin Chinese. We would go to Mandarin Chinese school after our primary school to polish my mothertongue skills. My school was run by Taiwanese people, so we learned the bo-po-mo-fo (注音符號) phonetic spelling of Chinese characters as opposed to the Mainland Chinese Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音). I learned traditional characters, not simplified characters. I had no idea that simplified characters even existed. In this environment, I thought that all Taiwanese people would speak Mandarin. When I went back to Taipei to visit my family, we would converse in Mandarin, and they would sound like I did. They had that 台腔, the unmistakeable Taiwanese accent that had a lightness in tone when it came to any ch- zh- shi- beginning sounds, pronouncing it more like ts- zi- si-. There was no curl in the tongue or heaviness when speaking the language. Forty, 四十四 (si-shi-si), sounded just like 四四四 (si-si-si). This was my idea, and experience of Taiwan.
In Singapore, people were confused by who I was. ABC wasn't as prevalent of a term as it was in Taiwan, given Taiwan's history with migration. I told people I was American. They'd hear me speak in some more watered down, slangy American accent and they'd question its authenticity. In a country where accent politics were so contentious, people thought I was Singaporean but studied abroad to get an American accent. I then started telling people I was "born and raised in America, but family came from Taiwan." They then thought I was Taiwanese, not American. "Oh, it must be nice being near your family in Taiwan then!" Well, no, because my immediate family is in the U.S. It's actually one of the furthest places from here. If you dug a hole from California through to the other side of the earth, I'd wager you'd make it to Singapore given you didn't melt at the core. Some even went so far as to ask me if I had to serve NS (keeping in mind, all Taiwanese male folks have to serve).
I remember a conversation I had once with my colleague, a Singaporean girl. It was probably the third conversation I had with her. She asked me where my family was from and then I said Taiwan. She then says to me, "Oh, your Hokkien must be pretty good, then!" At the time, I knew what Hokkien was, but I didn't really understand its importance in the region. Nor did I understand the deep impact of dialect in these overseas (ethnic) Chinese regions. I told her no, my parents didn't speak it and they never taught it to me. "But, I thought Taiwanese people spoke Hokkien!" she chimed back. Not in my world, it didn't.
This conversation stuck with me, not in a pressing way, but in a way that made me first question what it meant to be Taiwanese. I thought all Taiwanese people spoke Mandarin. At least from my background. But here this Singaporean girl was asking if I spoke Hokkien, and I slowly figured out why. Singapore Chinese are from a migration stream in the south of China that largely either speak Hokkien, Teochew, or Hakka. Since they moved before the Qing Dynasty collapse and during colonial times, they were able to preserve their language before China standardized the Nothern Dialect -- Mandarin Chinese -- to the rest of China. As a result, many old folks here will still gladly converse in dialect as opposed to Mandarin Chinese. With the language campaigns in the 70s and 80s in Singapore, and the desire to wipe out dialect culture, people slowly adapted to using Mandarin Chinese since it was instituted in the education system. Dialects were silenced. In my generation, Singaporean Chinese will have a rudimentary understanding and speaking ability for dialects, but it's not always fluent, and there are varying levels of comprehension. For my colleague to ask if I spoke Hokkien came from her experience in dialect politics in Singapore, and her idea of Taiwan after having lived in Singapore.
So did her idea of Taiwan make me any less Taiwanese? What was Taiwan's place, globally? Growing up, I formed my own paradigms of what it meant to be "from Taiwan." Maybe that definition was too narrow. What did it mean, then, to be Taiwanese -- did I have to speak dialect? I went to the Reddit community to ask the Taiwan subreddit how they defined being Taiwanese. Apparently, the definition has changed based on Taiwan's complicated history.
I've come to learn the distinction between 本省 (Bensheng) and 外省 (Waisheng) people, the former having lived in Taiwan before the 1949 (before the Kuomintang had to flee China since the communists had won, usually also during the Japanese occupation). The latter being people who moved after 1949, who were with the Kuomintang, and were largely Mandarin Chinese speaking. I belonged in the latter group. My grandparents are all from China. My grandmas are from the north, and grandpas from the south. When they fled to Taiwan was as a result of war, they had my parents, both raised first generation 外省 -- waisheng -- and in a place culturally different than where their parents grew up. I started understanding why my mom's dad had this funky, southern, dialect-inspired Mandarin accent, and my grandma a standard, northern Mandarin accent. They were never Taiwanese in the first place, they were China-ese. My mom's dad always considered mainland China his home, and had wished to travel and finally rest there before passing away. He never made it back. I asked my mom why she didn't speak Hokkien and she said in Taipei, after the 50s, they wanted to push Mandarin as the lingua franca of the island (much like as was done in Singapore), and so she only learned Mandarin and rarely engaged with Hokkien speakers, who were concentrated more in the middle and the south of the island. She even recalls a trip she took to Tainan while in high school and being completely unable to communicate with the aunties there since they only spoke dialect. "That was the first time," she said, "that I felt like a foreigner in a place I considered home." She, too, knows what it's like to be a first-generation immigrant.
After hearing about the distinction betweeen Bensheng and Waisheng, I felt considerably less Taiwanese for being Waisheng. It was as if I was a mainland panderer, someone with "tainted roots." Someone who could not really want independence for Taiwan since they had a tie to the mainland. I spoke Mandarin only, and I never spoke dialect, something that was so central to Taiwanese identity before 1949 (largely, people spoke Hokkien and Japanese just due to the early Qing migration to Taiwan from Southern China). What's interesting is my conclusions about being Taiwanese had been drawn out by a fixation on language, and how that played into the identity politics of being Taiwanese. So, language is where I started on beginning to understand my place as an ABC.
I spent the last year and a half learning Mandarin. I don't know where it started. I thought since I was living here I might as well put my time into learning something. I downloaded a textbook and began memorizing characters, and reading miniature essays. What started purely as random spawned into a deep, profound appreciation for the Mandarin language: the characters, the strokes. When I read Confucius I feel the history and profundity in his words, even though I don't understand half of it. It's a feeling of reading poetry in Chinese that feels good; I never felt that with Burns, Dickinson, or other stock poets we learned in American Literature. When I write characters I feel the history of the language unfold from ink to fiber, and I take joy in perfecting the strokes. It's a deep language with symbolic representation. Its beauty can never be translated without sounding too wordy and too flowery, at least when transltaed to English. I thought that if I were to integrate into this region, I would first have to perfect the skill in language. I learned Traditional Chinese, not Simplified Chinese, of course. That was mostly out of pride.
The more I learn the language and the more I use it to engage with people when I come to Taiwan, the deeper love I have for this island. I have access to the people and their stories. I'm no longer the ABC who can't speak Chinese, but rather, still an ABC but one that has studied his Mandarin well, and I am proud of that. I hate passing through the streets of Taiwan using English, it tastes bitter on my tongue when I use it, or fall back on it when I express my thoughts. It feels as weird as speaking English in my American accent in Singapore amidst a sea of Singlish - even though we're both speaking English. I hate using English with my foreign friends even though I know I have to. I feel like an outsider with no street cred when I speak English here. I don't care that people don't recognize the fact that I am American, and I was born and raised in America - a common thought that many ABCs face. They sometimes struggle with the feeling of not being included, or feeling the need to be loud about their American-ness. This largely comes with speaking loudly (why are American accents so loud?) in English on the metro, or in gaggles at the club. I hear an Asian-American accent from afar and it's jarring to my ears, not because it's physically loud but emotionally loud. I share a common history with them, but I feel nothing like them, yet I'm associated with them. But, I have since I've walked on my own path, and somewhat dissociate myself with them. The worst part is I know I can't be. That would mean I deny my upbringing. That would mean negating all the wonderful work that Asian Americans have done for other Asian American 老百姓, common people, like me. And, it would be denying my American education which, despite its shortcomings, has molded me. As much as I want to shed myself of it, it's who I am. I like blending in and passing as a local, but I know who I am, and I know my background, and these will never change. I try to hide them, but as all roots do (hair, trees, you name it) -- they emerge.
It's all still there. My liberalness after growing up in the U.S., the way I approach things, my outlook on life, it's all pretty American. Chinese people will call me a 香蕉人, banana person, appearing yellow but thinking white. But, my American roots have dominated so much a part of my life that I'm trying to give light and nourish my Asian ones. When people ask me where I am from now, I'd gladly say Taiwan for simplicity: the face matches the nationality. I can't be ungrateful for all the U.S. has given to me, and all the sacrifice my grandparents and my parents have made for me to have a life there. There's more time to explain how I feel about my background to those I care about, or those who care to know. But, on the surface, to the old Auntie or Uncle selling me something at the market, people make snap judgments based on how I look, and how I speak. The dynamics of that are difficult for me to navigate. So I try to blend, blend, and blend. On the ground, I try to be another Taiwanese person. I don't always have to stick out or feel special. Maybe, it's the Asian cultural value of blending in as part of a familial or communal unit that is rubbing off on me.
Taiwan's history is changing, and I have a growing nationalism for Taiwan. When Taiwan ruled gay marriage as unconstitutional, I was filled with pride not only because I'm a gay guy but also because I'm a Taiwanese gay guy, albeit never growing up here. When I went to watch the gay dragon boat team row for 端午節 2017 -- Dragon Boat Festival -- I was glad to see gay representation from Taiwanese gay people, doing a historically Chinese activity. There was pride in being a part of something, a nation or culture, which is something I've never felt growing up. When I interact with my Taiwanese compatriots I feel a sense of ease and cultural understanding, as if I belong in the culture and among its people. When an auntie yells at me in Mandarin Chinese, I take it as a badge of honor, that someone feels so comfortable yelling at me in their own language because they think I can actually understand it. The distinction in my mind between Bensheng and Waisheng is slowly vanishing for me the more I understand Taiwan's history. With the rise of China as a superpower, most people tend to associate being Taiwanese as "those who do not like Mainland China." It's a slow re-establishment of the Taiwanese identity that focuses on Taiwan's plight as a small pseudo government island overshadowed by its older, Chinese brother. Both waisheng and bensheng people have contributed to Taiwan's recent growth, and in that, we have a shared brotherhood. As to whether I support independence for Taiwan, I won't address that. I can say though my pride as a Taiwanese person is no different than saying a person from Shanghai is a proud Shanghaiese or person from Beijing is a proud Beijinger. It's a localized pride I have for the physical place and culture from where my family comes.
I'm surprised I found myself loving Taiwan to the degree I do, and mostly through just learning the language. I really like Taiwanese folks. For the few times I've been to China, I also really like Chinese folks. Most of my interactions with them have been enjoyable. Everyone has a unique story that's worth my time. For me, it's not so much about what entails being an ABC, but how I've come to live my life in spite of what being one entails in others' eyes. It's not about feeling too American, un-American, not Chinese enough, or what not, it's how I accept my identity and share it on various depths. Through that acceptance of who I am, I've felt peace, as well as control in how both cultural sides of me to unfold. I'm still learning Mandarin diligently; the process is indefinite. Maybe in the future it'll be me learning a dialect so that I can explore the deeper cultural roots of the overseas Chinese and older Chinese communities. There's always more to learn.
鄧麗君, Teresa Teng, was a great Taiwanese artist who kind of unified overseas Chinese community through her music. There's a sweetness to her voice, and a quintessentially Chinese sound to the music. I used to listen to the stuff passively when my parents sang karaoke, but I've come to rediscover it for myself in the weirdest places in Asia. I'd hear uncles singing these old songs in Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur, both which are cities with heavy overseas Chinese populations in Malaysia. I heard a street performer singing one of her songs in Chinatown, Singapore before I boarded a bus. The singers don't know, but they move me; I've found a token of my childhood a thousand miles away from my actual physical childhood home. I feel an even stronger connection to my country, and my family.
I put on Teresa Teng in the background. I sip green tea and open my textbook and begin practicing my Mandarin characters on paper. All those years of having Taiwan culture embedded into my life without my knowing are slowly coming out of the woodwork. It's emerging with each stroke of my pen, and each swish of my finger as I air-write the characters while looking at the ceiling before bed, just like I used to do when I was young.