Maneuvering through the nightmarish midtown Manhattan crowd, tiny droplets of rain are pittering down on my face and my hands are turning numb. The wind chill is below 0 degrees Celsius even though it’s the end of March. I was hoping that the sunflower in my handbag wasn’t squished by now since I intended to pin it in my hair once I reached Times Square.
Squeezing my way through a group of European tourists, I hurried towards the direction of the sea of black-haired people holding sunflowers, a symbol of peaceful protest. They are shouting slogans like minzhu Taiwan (民主台灣, democratic Taiwan).
A blonde woman walking by tells her son to hurry, as she mutters something about “crazy protestors” in a British accent. Across the street, a middle-aged Taiwanese man with a somber smile hands out flyers to passersby. A few people take them, but most brush past him.
In 25 years I had never rooted for any country’s sports team or recited a national anthem. Having lived in 10 countries, I didn’t understand why other people would pin their allegiance to only one place and proudly proclaim, “I am from X country.” I used to sneer at people like that. Yet here I was at a protest in New York against the Taiwanese government’s opaque signing of a cross-strait service trade agreement with China. It was as if being 12,522km away from the place where I once lived, and the thought of everything that was familiar to me being taken away with the stroke of a legislator’s pen, had sparked a sudden quest to find “home.”
STINKY TOFU AND BATHROOM LOCKS
When our plane from Singapore landed at the old Chiang Kai-shek International Airport in January 2000, I looked out at the tarmac at the grayish fog and cried. I cried all the way through the arrival hall and immigration, trailing behind my parents and lugging my backpack filled with stuffed animals. A month previously, I hadn’t even known that Taiwan existed.
Before descending the escalator that led to baggage claim, my dad stopped me. He knelt down to my level and said he knew this was tough, but like all the other moves — Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Singapore — I had to face it with a positive attitude.
“Not many children your age get to live in so many countries.”
I went to Taipei American School, but most of my classmates were Taiwanese-American and spoke Mandarin so I pretended that I understood Mandarin. They played different games at recess, so I pretended I understood their games as well.
When I followed my parents out, I was overwhelmed by the vertical street signs which were all in Chinese, disgusted by the smells of stinky tofu, which made me gag, and confused when flipping through books at bookstores that were bound from right to left instead of left to right. In school, I always got locked inside the bathroom stalls because I couldn’t figure out how to use the strange circular locks. I had to hide in my stall until I was sure no one else was in the bathroom, then crawl out from the gap between the floor and door.
I complained about Taipei in letters to friends in Singapore and Jakarta. I drew pictures of sad gray buildings in Taipei, crying and showed them to my parents to make them feel bad for bringing me here.
One day, I was called into a meeting with the other new students. Our elementary school’s counselor, Mr Aspinwall, wanted us to share our experiences adjusting to life in Taiwan. One of the boys hesitated for a moment, gathered up all of his courage and raised his hand.
“I can’t figure out how to use the locks in the bathroom,” he said. “I have to crawl from underneath to get out!”
All it took was for one brave person to say aloud what was on everyone else’s minds. The kids looked at each other, and slowly, we all chimed in. “Me too!”
For the first time in weeks, I smiled.
‘WHITE GUOREN’
After the bathroom kid spoke out, I met a slew of characters who made for an entertaining seven years — people who spoke their minds, people who wore their hearts on their sleeves and people who were not afraid to criticize. In general, I met a lot of strong-minded characters, the types who would make social movements like the Sunflower movement possible.
Yet it’s the trivial conversations that stick out to me.
“Ni shi nali ren?” (你是哪裡人?Where are you from?) astonished taxi drivers and shop owners ask me when they hear my American-accented Mandarin. When I’m in the mood to entertain, I tell them the truth — I’ve lived in several countries on four continents. When I’m not, I make something up like I’m Hawaiian or Korean because if I say I’m a huaqiao, or overseas Chinese, they’ll think my Mandarin is really bad.
Then question number two inevitably ensues — whether I’m in Taiwan to study Mandarin (which I’ve done) or to teach English (which I vowed never to do).
Another time, while testing my (lack of) knowledge of Chinese idioms, an American friend jokingly told me, “You’re so white, you’re like a white guoren.” He was making a pun on the term waiguoren (外國人), which means “foreigner.”
Despite spending nearly a quarter of my life in Taiwan, I’m reminded by conversations like these that this is not my “home.” Yet every summer since high school graduation (by then, I had figured out how to use the bathroom locks), I still flew back to Taipei with half-made-up excuses to tell my family like internships or thesis research. When actually, all I wanted was to be surrounded by familiar things — vertical street signs in Chinese characters, the stench of stinky tofu and books that flipped from right to left.
There are aspects of life in Taiwan which I’ve embraced, like drinking Taiwan Beer outside 7-Eleven, and others which I’ll never understand, like not being allowed to drink water in the MRT. No one is asking me to choose between being Taiwanese or a waiguoren. But constant remarks which may seem so meaningless to most people, make me wonder why human beings are so obsessed with identifying with a particular place or culture. Why can’t I just be myself, a person who has lived in many countries and who is influenced by those places, but who also likes Taiwan a lot?
Two years ago, I was at Shida Night Market (師大夜市) with a Taiwanese friend eating sticky soup noodles. He looked at me incredulously when I told him I’ve never had this dish, which is apparently a local delicacy.
“Wow,” he said. “You’re really not Taiwanese.”
“Thanks,” I replied sarcastically.
“You’re also not really American, Korean, Malaysian or anything,” he added. “That’s cool.”
GOING HOME
Torrential downpour suddenly erupted in Times Square. Protestors shrieked and opened their umbrellas, as if to protect their precious sunflowers. I headed back to my apartment by Central Park feeling disheartened. The once vibrant yellow petals of my sunflower were covered with dirty brown splotches.
A few days later, I received a Facebook message from Taiwan Voice thanking me for sending photos from the protest. They mentioned that they had received pictures from Sunflower movement rallies in other cities around the world but nothing from New York.
“Thanks for caring about Taiwan,” they said.
I looked at the rest of my dead sunflowers in the vase on my study desk. It was a pitiful sight. Later that day, at this time last year, when the weather had warmed up, I walked to my local flower vendor on 72nd and West End and purchased a fresh batch of sunflowers to put in my home.
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