Can you be Chinese and Taiwanese at the same time?

Hearts in Taiwan

About 32% of people in Taiwan identify as both Taiwanese and Chinese, while diaspora from Taiwan in America tend to identify as solely one or the other. We talk about blending Chinese, Taiwanese, and American identity with Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu. Michelle and Albert moved back to their heritage country mid-career and have been sharing their Asian American observations and introspections about living in Taiwan in their weekly newsletter, A Broad and Ample Road.

Featuring Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu:

• Remembering Michelle’s grandmother in A Broad and Ample Road
• Reflecting on Albert’s mother in A Broad and Ample Road
• Is “Asian-American” a viable category? in A Broad and Ample Road
• Breaking Bad review by Albert Wu and Michelle Kuo in the Los Angeles Review of Books, their first collaboration
• Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo (陪你讀下去 in Taiwan)
• Michelle Kuo: @kuokuomich on Twitter and Instagram
• Albert Wu: @albertowu on Twitter

About Michelle: Michelle Kuo is a visiting professor in the law program at National Taiwan University. She has worked with Teach for America, the Criminal Justice Institute, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Centro Legal de la Raza, the Prison University Project at San Quentin, RAICES, and the Stanford Three Strikes Project. She has started a nonprofit, Dialogue & Transformation, which works to create dialogue among formerly incarcerated people across the world.

About Albert: Albert Wu is a global historian, focusing particularly on the transnational connections between Germany and China, the history of religion, and the history of medicine. He is currently an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. After studying history at Columbia University, he has taught at the American University of Paris, UC Berkeley (where he earned his PhD), and the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.
Vocab:
外省人 waishengren - Family from mainland China who moved to Taiwan to escape Communism in the late 1940s
本省人 benshengren - Family who was already in Taiwan when waishengren came

Other resources mentioned:

• Changes in the Taiwanese/Chinese identity of Taiwanese as Tracked in Surveys by the Election Study Center, NCCU (1992-2021)
• The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah
• I've Got the Light of Freedom by Charles M. Payne

Connect:

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