We were in Taiwan over the past week. It was the first time I’d been in Taiwan without my parents, the first time I was forced to speak Taiwanese so often, the first time Abigail had been in Asia. We came to pay respects to my aging Grandpa and to meet the rest of the family. I have, to my knowledge, fourteen aunts and uncles and forty-eight cousins. This is not including spouses or anything. That’s on both sides of the family, but this time, with only a few days, we only met about 30 people, which was quite enough for us. It was, overall, an interesting but exhausting visit.

I’ve been to Taiwan over a dozen times, starting from early childhood. Despite that, however, I’m unfamiliar with seeing Taiwan on my own terms. My parents have always been with me, and my conflicts with them have extended to the entire Taiwanese culture, because they are so quintessentially Taiwanese. The culture highly values academic success, because that leads to social status and material wealth, both of which are quite prized; and it values close family connections — my father’s family all lives in the same area. I’ve been academically successful, but I’ve found it empty of meaning, so I’ve come to disdain academics and material success; and more recently, I’ve been judgmental of the environmental degradation and overpopulation that scars Taiwan, the price they’ve paid for modern industrialization. I’ve thus built up a habit of pushing away from my Taiwanese identity.

Without the charge of my parents’ presence, and with a comfortable companion with whom to relax, however, this time I was able to be more accepting of my surroundings, more open to perceiving and experiencing the way things are in Taiwan.

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