Author Jessica J. Lee went to Taiwan in 2017 to write her second book, Two Trees Make a Forest. While she was there, she lived in a tenement apartment from the 1960s, and spent time retracing the steps to her family’s old haunts and venturing into the Central Mountain Range.Ricardo A. Rivas
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese environmental historian and author of three books, including Two Trees Make a Forest, which won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction in 2020.
Looking out from the green peak of Qixingshan – Seven Stars Mountain – you can, in theory, see in all directions: to Taipei’s bustling streets and skyscrapers in the south, northeast toward the sea and Japan, and west toward the Taiwan Strait and China. There is a placard near the top of the trail labelling all the things you might notice if the weather were good. But Qixingshan is a volcano in a part of the country prone to fog; I have never seen the view on a clear day.
When I went to Taiwan in 2017 to write my second book, Two Trees Make a Forest, I had the idea that the land might offer me some metaphor for understanding my own – and my family’s – cultural identity. My foggy hike put those goals into perspective: No single viewpoint would help me understand what it was to be a part of the Taiwanese diaspora. Instead, I needed to get comfortable with ambiguity.
As Taiwan heads toward its next election, I am watching the ways Taiwanese stories are told in the West, which are so often through the lens of China. I have read articles explaining each candidate’s views on Taiwanese independence or, conversely, on reunification with China. I have read accounts of the ways trade and military spending are key points to follow. I have read about how this election will determine the future of cross-Strait relations.
While these takes are important, Taiwanese coverage of the election paints a very different picture.
For those actually voting, the key issues are wages, housing prices and social services – in short, Taiwan’s economic development. They’re entirely relatable, everyday, human concerns. Wages remain comparatively low compared with housing prices, meaning there is dwindling appeal for young people to stay in Taiwan and build their lives. And as in Canada, both access to child care and care for a growing elderly population are top of mind for many voters. These issues are flattened in the stories we hear in the West about Taiwan, which is too often defined solely against the shadow of China.
I learned firsthand from my own childhood the risks of telling such a narrative. My grandparents were both born in China and fled to Taiwan between 1947 and 1949 as part of the Kuomintang’s government and air force. There, my grandparents became part of the group that is now known as the Waishengren – part of the million-strong Chinese-born citizens from outside the province who came to dominate Taiwanese political and cultural life in the decades after their arrival in the 1940s. My mother grew up in Taipei amidst the martial law imposed by the Kuomintang until the late-1980s – a childhood complete with its own pro-Nationalist propaganda and strict censorship of communist ideas. When she and her parents emigrated to Canada, their views on Taiwan and China came with them: in Ontario in the 1990s, I learned that we were Chinese, but from Taiwan, the true China. It was a simple story, of heroes and villains and the island caught in between.
When I finally visited Taiwan in adulthood, seeking a fuller narrative, I understood the danger of conflating all of Taiwan’s identity with the conflict with China. Here were 23 million people whose diversity, desires, and histories could hardly be encapsulated by the framing of Taiwan as a geopolitical chess piece. The vibrancy of languages spoken revealed centuries of repeated colonization: Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka, Japanese, Amis and a range of other Indigenous languages are still spoken today. The presence of multiple Indigenous peoples and cultures, as well as waves of migration – from southern China between the 17th century onward, and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, among others – meant that culture in Taiwan developed distinctly from neighbouring regions in China. Reducing its history to just the past 80 years – and the time my family lived there – erased the lived experience of so many of these people.
So I sought out the depths of the stories I didn’t know. While I was in Taiwan, I lived in a tenement apartment from the 1960s, retracing the steps to my family’s old haunts while carving out my own, including weekends spent venturing into the Central Mountain Range, exploring East Asia’s highest peaks on trails carved out in the early 20th century by Japanese foresters and police. I stayed in cabins hosted by Indigenous Seediq trail guides, and met activists who’d agitated against nuclear power in the region in the wake of Fukushima. I got to know curators documenting Taiwan’s rich literary history and its links to the region’s conservation movement, which was vital to regenerating the landscape; by the 1990s, the rivers had been declared dead.
A few years later, in Magong on Penghu – an archipelago of islands in the middle of the Taiwan Strait, a military zone during martial law but now a thriving fisheries and holiday hub – I met local artists and campaigners working in solidarity with pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, many of whom were offered safe harbour in Taiwan. I ate in restaurants where the cuisines were shaped not just by Chinese incomers in the 20th century, but by Japanese occupation, the influence of Dutch colonization, and deeply rooted Indigenous stewardship of the land as well. In just a short time, I came to know a Taiwan far richer than any I’d encountered in childhood stories: a land with multiple generations of colonizers and incomers, all with differing cultural ties.
Understanding Taiwan as a site of repeated colonization helped me understand not just my Taiwanese identity, but my Canadian one, too. I realized how much the stories we tell – about ourselves, and about others – matter.
In the years since, I’ve found community among others in the Taiwanese diaspora, many of whom have worked to reclaim the word “Taiwanese” after childhoods in which we were called, or called ourselves, Chinese, often because it was easier than explaining the truth. Following decades of tensions between different cultural groups in Taiwan and the legacies of martial law, Taiwanese identity feels more capacious than ever, perhaps because so many of us – both in Taiwan and abroad – keenly feel a need to distinguish our histories from that of a regime that would otherwise subsume us.
Articulating these experiences feels more important than ever: I think of novelists K-Ming Chang and Melissa Fu, who’ve turned to history and mythology to help understand what it means to be Taiwanese abroad. Some – like American-educated Emily Y. Wu and Brian Hioe – have turned to journalism and podcasting to tell fuller stories about the country for younger demographics. Food writers Kathy Erway and Clarissa Wei have written books about Taiwanese cuisine that are as much an exploration of food as they are a forging of shared and personal identity.
In the introduction to her impeccably researched book, Made in Taiwan (co-authored with Taiwanese chef Ivy Chen), Ms. Wei writes that it is vital to distinguish Taiwan’s food culture from that of China – in part because it’s factually accurate to do so on an island that has seen no fewer than five colonizing powers since the 17th century, and in part because food is a key means to foment and assert a community’s identity before it’s too late. She, like many young Taiwanese Americans I’ve met, moved back to Taiwan in recent years, firmly embedding herself in the homeland her parents had left.
So as the election closes in, I have one hope for the stories that are told about Taiwan: that they are fuller and richer, and that they capture the nuance of what it might mean to be a person going about daily life in a country so often reduced to its conflict with a larger neighbour and its defence by a Western superpower. Each time international reporting frames Taiwan’s political life in terms of its relationship to China or the U.S., I think back to recent polls: those that repeatedly indicate a desire for maintaining the status quo, out of a sense that Taiwan is already functionally independent, even if it is not outwardly declaring that independence. I think of the 2023 study that shows, decade by decade, a shift in how people in Taiwan describe themselves: While in the 1990s some may have called themselves both Chinese and Taiwanese, or simply as Chinese, this number has decreased. The majority now uses a single, rallying term: Taiwanese.
As so many of us renegotiate our identities through art, food and media, we are finding new language to describe ourselves as we simultaneously articulate a version of Taiwan as we know it. It is a personal task as much as it is a high-stakes political one: What would it mean to reframe Taiwanese cultural identity with a fuller timeline, a richer history than simply the conflict with China?
That’s a story worth hearing.