Life in Taiwan and Immigration

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 Chine

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y. However, I like the open, easy way I find here, the informality of America that allows me to choose what to study and how to spend my time and where to go. Perhaps I would find this openness in other places in the world, but I think of it as especially American. In Taiwan, people do not want the mainland Chinese government to tell them what to do and how to live. In America, people do not want anybody to limit them or run their lives. I like this way of living. My family calls or writes to ask how I am doing. They send me news of home. Here, in the circles of Taiwanese immigrants my uncle introduces me to, I exchange my stories of home with other Taiwanese people. We tell each other stories as we have done all our lives, except that now we are telling our stories in a new country, and some of the stories have nothing to do with Taiwan. We find comfort in speaking in our native language; some things are so much easier to say when you use words you grew up with. Already, however, the storytelling itself sounds different to me. It sounds more American. It sounds bigger somehow. This is a much bigger country, after all. My uncle does not come to the community centers as often as he did when he first arrived. His w
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2114
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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