2008 TAA-NNJ Scholarship Recipient -- Jennifer Kao

West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South, Grade 12

Shaved ice, a parasol; a leather couch and a Sims game; scooter-ing in a little park and a 7-11 on a tree-shaded corner; these are my memories of Taiwan. I confess – it isn’t much. After all, the last time I visited was over five years ago. My memories are only the scattered thoughts of a ten-year-old, who only seems to notice the strange little quirks and details, and who can never recall the important things, like how much the bus fare was or whether or not people were friendly and what the fashion was like. Not very helpful when your Taiwanese friends bombard you with their adventures in the mother country.

“Aren’t Taiwanese girls so pretty, Jenn?”
“Uh… sure,” I stammer.
“The buses were so clean and efficient weren’t they?”
“I guess so,” I acquiesce.
“Everything is so cheap there – and high quality! You remember?”
“Er, sort of,” I stutter.

Clearly, my conversations with my friends about Taiwan are rather fruitless. Fortunately, my knowledge of Taiwanese history isn’t quite so bad, thanks to an AP Lang project I did last year. Yet, with all the connection I felt with my research, I might as well have been writing a report on Mars – vaguely related to my existence but rather ambiguous in the specifics. Mjjbgb What I did connect with were stories. My father loved story-telling; and he was good at it. Hardly a month went by where I hadn’t heard another tale of my father’s youthful escapades. If I was lucky, I’d get two or three stories per week, or even per day. There seemed to be no bound to the amount of outrageous situations that Dad found himself in. He stole grapes from his neighbors, snuck out of the house with his brothers to go fishing, trespassed government property to get some bugs from a tree, and once biked so long and hard that when he finally reached his destination he couldn’t pee. When he was a kid, he dug holes in the dirt road in front of his house to play golf with marbles while bikers bounced by, shouting furiously. In school, a teacher caught his entire class having a massive slingshot battle when they were supposed to be napping.

My dad is an amazing storyteller, but my mom has stories of her own. From her, I learned how she used to work in her mother’s print shop with her siblings, how they made rice without rice cookers, how her father would take her entire family on hiking trips through the mountains, and they’d always take in stray dogs from the street. But from her I also heard the more somber stories: how her neighbor disappeared one day and was never seen again; how my uncle was shot in the leg on a certain February 28th; how she had to wait until my dad had been in America for six months before she could follow him. These stories, more than any history textbook, link me to Taiwan’s past.

However, Taiwan is undoubtedly completely transformed from the Taiwan of my mother and father. Taipei’s streets are no longer dirt; most people are relatively well off, and Taiwan now has a reputation for being incredibly sophisticated among Asian countries, among the reasons of which are Taipei 101 and the popularity of Taiwanese music and arts (not to mention its superior computer chips). In any case, my point is that most aspects of Taiwan that my parents recollect are probably drastically changed by now. So then what do I know about being Taiwanese? If I can’t even describe my own country to strangers, how can I consider myself Taiwanese?

The day of TANG reunion was the day that I realized that I was mistaken. TANG was a Taiwanese-American summer camp that I’d attended over the summer, and all of us had had so much fun that we met up for a winter party. Over the two days that we spent together, I came to notice something – we were all wearing Taiwan nation bracelets. None of this had been planned, yet most of us had a green band around our wrists – and most of us hadn’t taken them off a single time since we first bought them. It was then that I realized that being Taiwanese had nothing to do with knowing Taiwanese politics; it had nothing to do with following Taiwanese pop culture or economics; it had nothing to do with acting or dressing like a Taiwanese or even speaking Taiwanese - what mattered was that I came from this mixed-up little country of Chinese, Japanese, Aborigine and Dutch cultures mashed together and that I was proud of it. I’m not afraid to tell a Chinese person to their face that I’m Taiwanese, I’m not afraid to spend ten minutes explaining to someone where Taiwan is, and I wear “I am Taiwanese American” shirts to school all the time. I may not be an expert on all things Taiwanese, but I am proud of my country, just like every other true Taiwanese person. And that is all that counts.