Before I became a Taiwanese citizen I was a waiguoren (外國人), a “foreigner.” Now that I am a citizen, am I still a waiguoren? I was a bit surprised at first, but it makes sense. Waiguoren, like the Hokkien a-tok-á (阿斗仔, “straight nose”), is as much an ethnic marker as it is a statement of one’s nationality. Personally, I prefer to call myself a “new immigrant” in Mandarin (新住民), but it is a bit strange for Taiwanese when I call myself that because the term is mostly associated with foreign brides from Southeast Asia.
I’m clearly a white guy, but my not too distant ancestors were not always “white.” I am the descendent of Jewish immigrants to the United States, and when they first arrived Jews had not yet been accepted as white. That changed after World War II, and Jews are kind-of-white now, although the shouts of “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville served as an ugly reminder that our whiteness remains a provisional (and largely urban) phenomenon. But just as Taiwanese become “Asian” or even “Chinese” when they immigrate to the U.S., I became a generic “American” white guy when I came to Taiwan.
After I became a citizen I thought that maybe I should call myself an American-Taiwanese, mirroring the hyphenated identities of Taiwanese-Americans. But the way multiculturalism works in the two countries is not the same. Taiwanese-Americans, like other Asian Americans, exist in the buffer zone within a bi-racial caste system that is the legacy of slavery. The term “Asian American” was coined at Berkeley in the sixties, and was inspired by the Black Power Movement. Over time, however, this kind of radical pan-Asianism has given way to a more fractured landscape of culturally and nationally specific identities. In choosing whether to call themselves Asian-, Chinese- or Taiwanese-Americans, many young people still find themselves face to face with the legacy of the Kuomintang’s (KMT) state-sponsored ethnonationalism.
