RUNNING IN THE FAMILY
In the past, my trips to Taiwan have been a bouquet of mixed feelings. I like seeing family again. I’m very close to some of them. I love visiting my aunt’s shop on Datong Road in Tainan. I walk into my father’s house in Tainan, and I’m five years old again and sitting around the television eating corncobs from the 7/11 around the corner. I smile at Lulu and Nana, the two beagles one of my cousins (on my mother’s side – this is a Very Important Distinction in Chinese) raises.
But sometimes, I feel awkward to see family again. The pointed looks of, why don’t you speak more Chinese? The raised eyebrows when I decline to eat something because it looks terribly strange from my American eyes. The smiles of, don’t you remember me? And, look, these are your nieces and nephews! And, so much has changed since you were last here – the place you thought you were visiting no longer exists.
But that is the nature of going back to Taiwan. I like to think of home as a place that evolves as I do. But when I go back to my roots, I find that the place has evolved in strange and different ways, and every time I go back to Taiwan, I find a different country. Perhaps that’s because each time I’ve come back, I’ve been a different Adrienne Ou.
I remember being a toddler, and being fawned over relatives. I’m told to call people I don’t know by names of familiarity. My uncle’s pet peacock simultaneously awes and terrifies me. I refuse to eat the vast majority of dishes placed in front of me.
My parents take me to Taiwan frequently as a child – I’ll remember Chinese more quickly and thoroughly that way, apparently. I’m five years old, left in Taiwan for the entire summer under the aegis of my grandmother. I don’t understand much of what’s going on, and I don’t make any real friends. My uncle and aunt get married that summer, which was a surprise to me when I’m told to carry the train of the wedding dress a few minutes before my aunt is scheduled to walk down the aisle. I had a hard time doing two things: making friends, and trying foods. It’s terribly unfamiliar for a young child, and it’s terrifying.
I go back to Taiwan again when I’m thirteen, and my dad is ill at this time. He’s gone through the majority of his chemotherapy and radiation therapy. I’ve been estranged from my parents for a couple years. Teenage angst and my parents’ absence from my daily life have made it difficult for us to bridge the distance between the two of us. I refuse to take my Chinese studies seriously as an act of rebellion; I don’t enjoy spending Sunday mornings studying a language I have no passion for and I could care less that my parents are disappointed in me. I can barely communicate with my relatives. It makes me the subject of good-natured ribs, which makes me resent my dual heritage more. I just want to be American – this place is not my home.
I take Chinese as my foreign language in high school. Fore the first time in my life, my ability in Chinese is not just a bullet point in the brief story in my life. Rather, it’s a source of pride as eight years of Chinese aid me in mastering grammar rules I’d forgotten and new vocabulary. China is ascending the global stage at this point, having wowed everyone in the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony. It is not a bad thing to declare myself as Asian-American at this point.
Another four years pass and I’m sixteen this time. My grandmother is quite ill after having taken bad fall down the stairs. She’s in hospice care, and I distinctly understand that this is the last time I’ll see her alive. I think about her, and the way she moved to the United States when I was a toddler to help take care of me. She was nearing seventy years of age, and still learned English, so she could teach me the alphabet. Such was the nature of her dedication to me. I am fascinated by Taiwan, but I am also discomfited by its difference from America. I miss having a large bedroom, and having a spacious bathtub. The food is still strange. I am not yet fluent in Chinese, and understanding my relatives is a touch-and-go process. I still think, this is an interesting place, but it is not home.
I graduate from high school. I go to Europe for the first time in my life. I go back again the next summer and study abroad in Cambridge; I stay in small hostels in London, Paris, and Amsterdam that make me understand the luxury of having a home. After five years away from Taiwan and East Asia, I go back at the end of August 2015. I am now twenty-one, and miles away from childhood immaturity and adolescent sulkiness.
This trip to Taiwan was different: my family and I went on a tour around Taiwan, and I explored Taipei, Sun Moon Lake, and Kenting National Park for the first time in my life. There is a difference between trying to love a place because you're supposed to, and discovering a place by yourself and learning to love a place for your own reasons. I had never been allowed to do so before with the luxury of an adult mentality. For the first time ever, I found myself missing Taiwan before I ever left.
It is a difficult thing for me to love something exactly the way it is. I like improvement, and I always think about how something can be better. I think of the many ways in which the U.S. government is flawed, and I concern myself with cross-Strait politics and the way that they could be improved for the betterment of all. But this past summer, I learned how to love two very different places, both of which I call home, and to appreciate both places for what they are and what they aren't. Such is the nature of learning to love my roots - all of them.