I am in a similar position, so I wanted to confirm here that the National Immigration Agency in Taiwan did tell me that it is possible to apply under “居住臺灣地區設有戶籍國民在國外出 生之子 女,年 齡在 二十歲 以 上” (application option AF384). No current household registration is needed for the parent, but under this option my understanding is that the parent needed to have household registration at the time when the child was born overseas.
I must also say that the English translation in the government documents is bad and misleading. I may try to see if there is a way to suggest this gets changed.
Despite this, the people at TECO actually told me I could not apply (the person discussing it with me even asked their supervisor to arrive at this conclusion), so be sure to not get discouraged right away and discuss it with both them and the National Immigration Agency to arrive at the most accurate conclusion. The people at TECO first said I could not apply because I don’t have direct lineal relatives (i.e. mother or grandparents or children or siblings) residing in Taiwan. However, this is of course only one of the options for applying so I had to point that out. They hadn’t asked me which option I was applying under, so I clarified that only one of the options is needed and I was choosing the method of AF384. Then the person told me this does not apply because it refers to nationals with household registration. I had to point out that if we read the full sentence, it says “之子女” and it refers to that national’s child. Then I was told it doesn’t apply to me because my mom has no active household registration (she is deceased). So I had to point out that while I was in Taiwan I went to the National Immigration Agency and asked along with my cousin and we all confirmed that this option refers to a child born abroad to a Taiwan national with household registration who has household registration at the time of birth, regardless of not maintaining it later. This was all a discussion in Chinese and at that point they decided to go ahead and help me with the application process.
One other point to clarify if it’s helpful: I was never asked to provide a reason for applying.
Personally, I don’t want to blame the people at TECO too much, because the law truly is complicated and they might rarely process such cases. However, I want to post this story not to admonish them, but because I think it could be possible that in the past they have told people like me it is impossible to apply, and maybe those people abandoned the process based on what seems to be an inaccurate conclusion. This would be a bad outcome for a government office designed to facilitate the law, so I think it’s important to make sure we check with the relevant government offices thoroughly (i.e. immigration) before making conclusions, even if TECO or any other government office says something conflicting.
Having Chinese language skills helps a lot in these cases also. I think this can sometimes be especially true for multiracial people who might be racially, culturally, or legally misperceived by others.
My application was actually recently submitted and still pending, but I’ll try to post another update to confirm later.
All of that said, this is not a simple process and you need to prepare all kinds of documents which takes a considerable amount of time a decent chunk of cash. If you have deceased relatives or were born in a country other than the one where you reside, it can be even more challenging to get these documents. It’s certainly feasible, and people do it, but for anyone reading be prepared to face some challenges. So while I wasn’t asked for a reason, I think anyone wanting to go through this process would probably want a reason for themselves to subject themselves to this process.