At home among the foreign yet familiar

In 1980, a single, twentysomething Taiwanese woman packed up her life in two suitcases and turned her eyes toward the gleaming opportunities in America, translated to Meiguo or “beautiful country” in Chinese. Making the well-trodden journey of other Taiwanese immigrants before her, she crossed the Pacific Ocean and landed in Cleveland to pursue her master’s degree in piano performance. It was there she first tasted deviled eggs, first heard about Jesus Christ, and first met the Taiwanese grad student who would become her husband.

They started a family, moved to Los Angeles, and planted deep roots, mixing old traditions with new ones. On Thanksgiving night, the dining room table would be laden with stuffed turkey as well as myriad ingredients for Chinese hot pot. Carolers from their Chinese immigrant church would stop by on Christmas Eve to sing “O Holy Night” before digging into steaming bowls of rice porridge with pork and preserved egg. Relatives soon joined them in the United States, and decades passed as America became home.

Thirty-five years later, their daughter, a single, twentysomething, Taiwanese-American woman, packed up her life in two suitcases and turned her eyes back toward the island of Taiwan, formerly known as Ilha Formosa, or “beautiful island,” by the Portuguese. I boarded a plane headed toward the tropical island off the southeast coast of China and landed in the bustling city of Taipei to pursue my dream of becoming an overseas reporter.

It’s now been 10 months since I arrived on the island—10 months of loneliness and growth and discovery and great joy. It’s been a time of discovering what it means to be a transplant in a new (yet familiar) culture, how to retrain my brain and tongue to communicate in a new language, and what exactly it takes to make a place a home. And in September, I took a further step to complete the circle. I enrolled in an intensive Chinese-language course at my mother’s alma mater, National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), the top teaching university on the island.

Every weekday for three hours, I learn how to shape Chinese characters in a classroom across the street from where my mother once sat learning English vocabulary and grammar. My five classmates are huaren like me, meaning they grew up in other countries such as Indonesia, Japan, and Australia, but at least one of their parents is from Taiwan. Like me, most have heard and spoken Chinese since birth but have minimal reading ability and even less writing ability. That’s understandable, considering the written Chinese language consists of more than 50,000 unique characters. Most educated Chinese people know about 8,000, while it takes knowing 2,000 to 3,000 characters to read a Chinese newspaper.

Things have changed from the time my mother was a student at NTNU. The surrounding neighborhood now includes coffee shops with exposed pipes and burnished espresso machines, co-working spaces for business start-ups, and mediocre Mexican restaurants (whose clientele is nearly all foreigners). The university itself has shrunk in size as the fertility rate in Taiwan drops to 1.12 children born per woman of childbearing age, the third lowest in the world. Not only are there now fewer 18-year-olds on the island to attend college, but the entire teaching profession is also in jeopardy as elementary schools across the island start emptying out. On the subway, passengers gawk and snap photos with their smartphones of the rare, round-faced baby.

Yet, some things stay the same. Even as I walk past a shiny new Starbucks or a Korean clothing store, I often stumble upon covered alleys filled with fruit stands run by old women sitting on overturned crates, gossiping loudly in Taiwanese. In every nook and cranny, entrepreneurial sellers set up shop, selling pungent “stinky tofu,” sweet sausage on skewers, and small cakes filled with red bean or custard filling. These are all the foods my mother grew up eating, the ones she missed most after moving to America.

Since moving here, I’ve gotten to know the different churches and ministries in Taipei, ones my mother never knew because she was not yet a Christian when she lived here. I’m seeing firsthand what God is doing in the city, on the island, in this region, and I’m hoping to write about it and share it with the world. It’s only through God’s perfect will that preparation for this work started 35 years ago with a Taiwanese girl with a dream.