What Does It Mean to Be Taiwanese?

[xp_10K]

Thanks, wix.

Yeah, it’s all pretty confusing to me.

When I was thinking about getting ADSL, a Taiwanese lady whose English was pretty good called up the phone company for me and said that they said I’d have to get a Chinese to sign for me. Not a Taiwanese, a Chinese. That struck me as strange.

Another incident that I found interesting: I was trying to have a conversation with an elderly man in the park one day (I say trying because my Chinese is awful), and he expressed admiration for the Japanese and strong dislike of the KMT, which validated some of the stuff I’ve read on this board. While we were conversing, another elderly man strolled by, and both as he approached and after he was out of earshot, my conversation partner disapprovingly informed me that the strolling gentleman was a member of the KMT.

Complicated situation.

And it gets more complicated. This is an excerpt from a review of the book that Bu Lai En mentioned above, Melissa Brown’s book:

Long-route change happened in southwestern Taiwanese villages where male Han settlers married local aboriginal women during the Qing Dynasty. Their descendents were labeled for generations as aboriginal because, although they adopted most Han cultural customs, they rejected foot binding. When the Japanese government abolished foot binding in 1905, that visible distinction disappeared and they adopted Han identity by default. Only in the 1990s did they reclaim Plains Aboriginal identity, now used in nationalist narratives to assert a non-Chinese identity for Taiwan.

aaanet.org/aes/bkreviews/res … bk_id=3250

I think someone discussed something like this, adoption of Han identity, somewhere on this board.

[Moderator’s note: Discussion continued here]