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Stella Dong

Writers from China's diaspora

What's the difference between being Taiwanese and  a  mainland Chinese in the US?

An anecdote from Brenda Lin's book of non-fiction essays, Wealth Ribbon:  Taiwan Bound, America  Bound, may shed some light.

'During my last year of college, I shared a townhouse with three other women. One of them, Anna, had been born in Shanghai, and her family had moved to New York when she was 12. Another one  of our housemates, Melissa, had  been born in Queens after her parents had emigrated from Taiwan to New York during Taiwan's brain drain. At home, Melissa's parents spoke to her in Taiwanese. Often, she and I would mix in a few Taiwanese phrases with our English.  Once, Anna overheard us and stomped angrily towards us.

''Look,' she said sternly, pushing her face close to mine. She stuck out her thumb. 'This is mainland China.' She bent her thumb down and now raised her little pinky, wriggling it around, and said in a mocking, high voice, 'And this is Taiwan.' She looked back and forth between me and Melissa, opening her eyes wide. 'We are going to swallow you up. You hear? Swallow. You. Up.''

The strain that exists between  the Taiwanese and mainlanders - even among   the young -  relates to the importance of family in forming attitudes, says Lin. 'The issue  is more complex than mere politics. It's about family and history, nationality and Chinese solidarity. The family culture you come from pushes you forward and pulls you back. You want to be everything  your family and your early environment were not, but at the same time, you're always nostalgic for the people, language and customs you remember as a child.'

Born in California to  Taiwanese parents, Lin was whisked off to Taiwan at four. She attended an American school and spent each  summer in the US with her grandparents. At 18, she left Taiwan to attend Vassar College in  Poughkeepsie, New York. Except for a stint studying Russian literature in St Petersburg, and trips to  Taiwan and  the mainland,  the 28-year-old writer has  lived in the US ever since.

Wealth Ribbon took shape  as a manuscript when Lin  was enrolled in Columbia University's Masters of Fine Arts in Writing programme, but she traces its origins back to her first trip to China, seven years ago. 'I'd just graduated from college and had planned on writing travel pieces while I was in China. But the more I wrote, the more I saw that what was interesting wasn't so much what I saw, but how my sense of identity was  affected  by the experience,' Lin says.

She'd hoped that being in China would 'bring me closer to my Chineseness'. As she writes in Wealth Ribbon: 'I had blindly assumed that the root  of my identity was Chinese,  and not Taiwanese, because China was so much larger  than Taiwan, its history is  so much longer - because Chineseness seemed to precede Taiwaneseness. But I had been wrong. Instead, I came away with the sense of being the more Taiwanese, all the more American, and only a little

bit Chinese.'

Lin says: 'Of course, China has changed so much since  I took that trip.  And a lot of  the self-consciousness I felt  at the time about being Taiwanese had to do with my own fears and misconceptions about people's attitudes  towards Taiwan.'

One of the biggest changes  is the growing movement of Taiwanese to  the mainland.  Many  of her childhood friends have chosen to work in Shanghai  rather than Taipei, she says.

Lin continues to hone  her writing, working from an apartment overlooking   Manhattan's neoclassical General Post Office.  She says part of her  creative survival kit  is her writing group, Seven Degrees, in which she and six other writers  meet regularly to critique each other's work.

'We've been meeting for four years now. It helps to be able to share your work with your peers - and having a deadline makes a  difference.'

As for her sense of identity, she confesses she's beginning to sense 'a much more profound connection to my Americanness'. By that, Lin doesn't mean she feels part of mainstream America, but more a sense of partaking of the country's cultural diversity.

'When I visited China, I didn't - or didn't allow myself to - feel a strong connection to my ancestral culture. But here, everybody comes originally from another place. So, I can feel American precisely because I also feel Taiwanese.'



Brenda Lin