This paper is a history of an American family that is not from America at all and has only recently sent two members to the United States. Despite this, or maybe even because of it, my family's experience is very much an example of what makes the United States one of the most unusual societies in the world.
I was born and raised in Taiwan, in a culture whose history is centuries old. I grew up hearing true stories as well as fables from a past that goes back through more than 3,000 years of recorded history. Although Taiwan is now battling to maintain its independence from the mainland, we all share common threads that allowed me to grow up with a genuine sense of connection both to my immediate community and to generations of ancestral ghosts.
The fact that I did grow up in Taiwan, however, also connected me to the rebellious spirit that underlies all of Taiwanese life. We have fought hard for our right to separate from mainland China, a tiny David facing a geographical and populational Goliath that continues to try to bully us into submission.
That this situation should give us an inborn empathy for the United States is therefore not much of a surprise. America's spirit of independence is very much like Taiwan's. The people of both nations share an insistence on autonomy. We have a common passion for self-determination. We both resist utterly the efforts of any other nation to dominate us and force us to bend to its will.
However, Taiwan remains a very Chinese society in many important respects, most significantly in the ways it closes down around too much individuality or separate initiative. Life in Taiwan can be every bit as restrictive in its own way as life on the mainland. The spirit who has tasted national independence can begin to long for individual freedom and not find it in Taiwanese society.
My uncle felt this, and he became the first person in our family to immigrate to the United States to ...