Calligraphers write transitional Chinese too. Chinese literature professors do that too. There are poems and literature you just can’t understand when translated into simplified Chinese.
Just about every self-identified Early-immigrant Taiwanese person with a “family genealogy book” would say exactly the same. Both my dad’s side and my mom’s side also claim they’ve been in Taiwan for about 2x generations. What are the odds? XD
That’s what I mean by these “genealogy” being way too generic. If genealogy is such an important thing, how come most people can only trace their line back to the first person who moved to Taiwan, with just a mention of the town or village that said ancestor supposedly came from?
I think most 本省人 will tell you the same story. I wonder if the first ancestor who moved here worship his ancestors too. Perhaps they did, but as time pass by someone just stopped worshiping the ones left in China. Or maybe they were outcasts who’s not allowed to do that anymore. It is interesting when you think of it 
Is this whatever weird language they speak on your home planet? 
The most logical answer is that most of them fabricated their genealogy. The reason why they did it is out of social-economical pressure. Not having one and not having a family Tanghao on the home gate, or shengji on tomb stones indicate you aren’t Chinese and you might get taxed more, get drafted for manual labor or just be discriminated.
Why they had to fabricated the genealogy, instead of just recall their old one is likely because:
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They indeed immigrated from China, but were probably illiterate, and obviously weren’t the inheritor of the family, thus couldn’t bring the original genealogy book with him. By the time his decedents could write, and felt the need to have a genealogy book, they could only trace the line back to the first guy.
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More likely, they weren’t Chinese to begin with.
so you are saying most taiwanese are strictly aboriginal?
surely thats not very logical at all and easily disproved.
Their ancestors were in the main both Chinese and Pingpu people that mixed together, they only recorded the Chinese part . And some of the pingpu just made up Chinese names because they had to . Anyway most of the immigrants to Taiwan were probably living hand to mouth , peasants, fishermen…
What’s the name of those institutes the PRC has set up all over the world to entice people into studying their language and culture? I think they’re called the “Mao Zedong Institutes for Study of the Great Cultural Revolution”.
You can’t understand Shakespeare without reading Elizabethan English, Chaucer without speaking Middle English, Beowulf without speaking Old English, Dante without speaking medieval Italian, Cato without Classical Latin, Plato without Classical Greek etc./s
It’s obviously better to understand the version something was written in, but you can’t learn everything, and anything can be translated, whether into another language or a modern form. Few people read Classical Chinese; can they not understand ?
My family came from what is now Wuhan way back in the 1950s with chaing Kai shek. They lived there for generations back then during world war 2. My dad said they worked in the textile business. Grandfather sneaked out to fight in the war because he was such a patriot. Came back to find everyone bombed to the ground.
Great, that means you are from a Late-immigrant faimly. Does your family have a genealogy book and if so how far does it go back to before going into the name all the famous historical figures with your last name part?
I don’t know because I never got to see it, as these info came from my grandparents. However based on our written genealogy 林蔗許is my great grandfathers ancestor. He had taken his mother’s name somehow. My surname is 傅. It’s very uncommon among ham Chinese so I don’t know if I am in fact fully Han.
Maybe I’m not reading this correctly, but…
Your dad was alive during WW2. Your Grandpa snuck out to fight in WW2. He survived and returned home to find everyone in his family dead? Then how are you here?
my dad was born in China after the war… he was a baby when they came over
Only high status Plains Aboriginal families or families given an odd last name would have the opportunity to discover they were indeed non-Han.
This family made up their Zhuji as Zhaoan, Fujian. A very popular place for these generic forged Zhuji. Had it not been for their odd last name, 墜, they wouldn’t even wonder about their “Han-ness”.
http://210.240.125.35/citing/citing_content.asp?id=1634
A Qing dynasty ancestor of this family was a scholar, but he was flanked without his tests being read. The reviewer said his last name 蟹 made it clear that he isn’t Han, so he eventually got the entire family renamed to 解.
這里最罕姓：居民逾半平埔族 木柵里多罕見姓氏 ｜ 蘋果新聞網 ｜ 蘋果日報
For every Plains Aboriginal family given an odd last name, many more were given last names such as 買, 陳,林, 戴 or other common Han last name.
thats not what i asked though. i’ve read there were aboriginals who adopted chinese names and culture to integrate. but that doesn’t equal most taiwanese people.
i could also buy that the fujian settlers who got aboriginal wives made them adopt chinese culture. the same thing still goes on today with the south east asian wives!
You are projecting today’s culture onto the past. Most Plains Aboriginals were matriarchal societies. Most early immigrants, especially if they came here 200 years ago, married into Pingpu tribal families, instead of Pingpu women marrying into Han families.
It’s a different case. I was talking about word play using Chinese characters. Since simplified Chinese uses another character or even just eliminate the whole word, the literature would be meaningless with a different character. Chinese is very different from languages that use a spelling system.
Actually it’s not just pingpu that use a Han Chinese family name. In the past foreign immigrants in Mainland China also took chinese names. And the emperors also gave out family names. You couldnt Really say no when an emperor said he wanted to change your name. Sometimes people change their family names to hide from the authority or for religious reason. My uncles family has this saying 活廖死張 (not sure about which Zhang, though). When they’re alive their family name is 廖, when they get buried the name engraved on their tombs will say 張. Don’t really know their 堂號 thought. Now I’m curious what they write on 牌位.
And sometimes family names just got messed up at the census.
So yeah genealogy isn’t always reliable. I always suspect that my moms side has some hui DNA in their genes, since they look very unlike traditional Taiwanese. She gets mad when people say it thought. Says she’s pure Taiwanese 
Just googled 活廖死張 has different 堂號. 清河堂 for 張, 武威堂 for 廖 and 清武堂 for 活廖死張, all related.