Why you can’t tell who the immigrants are just by looking at them

For all its established isolationist history and anecdotal evidence of aversion to anything “foreign”, Japanese culture has long been very embracing of those who returned from foreign lands. Whereas international airports everywhere sport “welcome” signs in a variety of languages (including the ‘native’ language), only in Japan does the Japanese line say “お帰りなさい” (okaerinasai) which translates most accurately to “welcome home”. It’s different from simply “welcome” because that, in Japanese, is “ようこそ” (yōkoso).

It’s a language idiosyncrasy, to be sure: whenever someone leaves a space/group, he’ll say “いってきます!” (ittekimasu = I’m gonna go), and the proper response is “いってらっしゃい!” (itterashai = off you go). Likewise, whenever someone returns to a space/group, he’ll say “ただいまー” (tadaima = I’m back), and the appropriate response is “お帰りなさい” (okaerinasai = welcome back/home). …

Why older Taiwanese people have such an affinity for Japanese culture

Ever wonder why old Taiwanese people pick Japanese songs at karaoke (shouldn’t they be picking Chinese songs)? Or perfectly line up their shoes with toes facing out? How about a general affinity for Japanese culture, and their inability to speak Mandarin despite being from Taiwan?

That’s because they’re more Japanese than Chinese, and they should be, if they were born and spent formative years in Taiwan before 1945 — when Taiwan was a Japanese colony and ethnically Taiwanese people were fully immersed in a culture that produced “good Japanese citizens.” All my grandparents were raised in Japanese language and culture, and though they spoke Taiwanese all their lives, would have nostalgia sharply marked by Japanese folk songs and other customs learned in childhood. …

How Christianity Killed Democracy In Taiwan… Then Resurrected It (For Now)

Religion isn’t a one-way street, especially in culture wars

There is no doubt that human life on the island now known as Taiwan began with the existence of indigenous tribes. There is continued research (and disagreement) on whether those tribes were Polynesian in origin and made their way to Taiwan, or whether they started out in Taiwan and spread to the Polynesian islands. Recorded history began when the European powers, during their Golden Age of Discovery, found their way to this little island and began “colonizing” the territory. …

Comparing cultural differences is easy, try looking for what’s similar

In my mid-20s, I spent a few months on a ship with about 200 crew members from around 40 countries. Or something like that. The numbers are fuzzy to me, but I remember the capacity/record highs were more like 300+ passengers and up to 60 countries. Many people who go to live in that multicultural environment are doing so for the first time in their lives, and often quite proud of living in “basically the UN”. Even if they don’t start with that pride, many many other people who encounter them are enthralled with the idea and shower them with praise. It’s funny how the brain soaks up commendation and puffs up a shinier identity. …

We need to rethink how to define ‘fluency’

“Your first language, from an education standpoint, is the first language you started learning. That’s why it’s your best language,” she confidently stated, leaving no room for ambiguity. She continued, “And that’s why kids who are learning English as a second language go to ELL, English Language Learner, classes until they’re proficient enough to function without those support classes, and then they can continue learning in English like any other person whose first language is English.”

I have a huge problem with that definition, which I will spend the next thousand words deconstructing. It’s not that I disagree with her experience (because given her monolingual background, of course that is all there is to it). I disagree with the implications of such a simplistic explanation. She, by the way, being an individual who was born and raised in the same country and culture as her parents, as well as functioning in only one language and culture throughout her life (including her own education as well as in her career, which is as a schoolteacher). …

Not All ‘Millennials’ Are Millennials

Why generational labels should include geography, not only chronology

In a Facebook group for historic preservationists, I once posted this article:

It’s a small Taiwanese-American Christian world after all

Does “Six Degrees of Separation” (the movie) or “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” still ring any bells for anyone? Or is that a pre-millennial thing? For anyone who needs an intro or a refresher, it’s the concept that everyone is connected to everyone else by no more than six steps. For example, I have never met so-and-so, but we’re connected because that person is my friend’s brother’s college roommate’s cousin. That was four degrees. Since the advent of Facebook, those steps have probably decreased even more pronouncedly.

So it stands to reason that in a community that is already relatively small to begin with, those six degrees would guarantee everybody is even more closely connected to each other. One person I can think of is Jeremy Lin, a Taiwanese-American Christian athlete. Every one of those descriptors just narrows down the possibilities even further, and in my Christian American school community in Taiwan, Jeremy Lin is like the unicorn that everyone’s trying to catch. It’s really an anti-miracle that he hasn’t visited the school already, and here’s why, in a series of…

Why some TCKs think they’re never good enough

Every time I apply for a job, I face a certain level of anxiety related to not being good enough. I’m interested in just about everything (which makes my life simultaneously exciting and stressful), but I’ve never gone about mastering those skills in traditional learning environments — which is a fancy way to say, I taught myself a lot of things I’m now good at. It wasn’t out of choice, but necessity, that I developed my skills because I was a Third Culture Kid and my language(s) and countries/cultures never conveniently matched.

My family background in a walnut-shell: My grandparents were all of Han Chinese descent. They were born and raised in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, which means they received Japanese education but spoke Hokkien (a southern China dialect) at home with their parents. Before World War II, my maternal grandparents took a boat to settle in “mainland Japan”, and so my mother was born and raised in Kobe as a second-generation TCK/immigrant kid — but in her worldview she was simply the child of Taiwanese immigrants in Japan, and they were all effectively second-class because they were never granted citizenship. My paternal grandparents, on the other hand, stayed in Taiwan, but before my father was born the government changed from colonial Japanese to military occupant Chinese (the army that was kicked out by Communist China). That’s how my father was born and raised in the same city as his parents, but the first in his family to receive a Chinese Mandarin education because he effectively grew up in a different country. His worldview was that he had Japanese-speaking parents (with whom he spoke Taiwanese), and he’d be beaten at his Mandarin school if he spoke Taiwanese. …