Katherine Chen

Dr. Moon-Ho Jung

AAS 101: Introduction to Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies

9 June 2023

Reflections of a Taiwanese-American Immigrant Story

In this essay, I interviewed my dad about his life experiences in order to better understand

how historical forces shaped his immigration story and life in the US. The three main chapters I

decided to divide his story into are 1) his childhood in Taiwan under Chiang Kai-Shek and the

Kuomintang dictatorship, 2) his immigration to the US in 1983 to pursue graduate school in

Computer Science and the eventual immigration of his parents, and 3) his journey navigating the

US in terms of identity and political understanding. My dad’s life story navigates the racial and

colonial paths the US empire established and is representative of many Taiwanese-American

immigration stories in which their decision to immigrate and stay in the US are reflective of US

foreign policy.

To start off, my dad was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1956. In 1949, His family had fled

from Qingdao, Shandong Province, China to Taipei during the Civil War in China that lasted

from 1927 to 1949 between the Chinese Communist Party (中華人民共和國) and the

Kuomintang-led (KMT) Republic of China (中華民國). My dad’s mother was a housewife and

his father worked for the government bureau under the Kuomintang concerning Veteran Affairs

and Employment. His job was to connect ex-professional veterans to existing

government-subsidized jobs for veterans in manufacturing or other sectors. My dad grew up with

four other siblings: three brothers and one sister and was the youngest. My dad lived among

other immigrants that had moved to Taiwan from China during the Chinese Civil War. Because
he had to test into high school (high school placement was not based on the neighborhood you

lived in but instead on your scores), my dad also grew up around students from different places

in Taiwan, including classmates whose families had immigrated to Taiwan from China centuries

ago from Fujian and Guangdong provinces.1 Growing up, my dad said that money was tight, but

because his father’s job included meetings and dinners with factory supervisors, their families

would receive gifts in the form of smoked meats and mooncakes, which helped sustain them. My

dad attended college in Taichung, Feng Chia University (逢甲大學) and majored in Economics.

Zooming out to the broader political relations between the US and Taiwan, many

multinational corporations began to export manufacturing businesses to Asian countries like

South Korea and Taiwan in the 1970’s and 80’s, especially in the garment industry (Jung, May

16, 2023). This decentralized means of mass production meant that multinational corporations

could avoid accountability and easily be shielded from exploitation lawsuits through layers of

contractors and sub-contractors. According to my dad, the main reason he decided to go to

graduate school in the US was because there were no good jobs in Taiwan at the time, and the

only decent jobs available required a lot of connections. He said the jobs that were available

were manufacturing jobs to make clothing, but they were very low-paying and employed mainly

1
Important tangential information: Taiwan’s demographics are extremely complex. Indigenous Taiwanese
people have populated the island for over 6,000 years and include many distinct tribes, cultures, and
languages. The Austronesian language family — which spans across Taiwan, Southeast Asia, the Pacific
Islands/Hawaii, New Zealand and Madagascar — originated in Taiwan. In 1624, the Dutch colonized
Taiwanese Indigenous peoples, importing forced Chinese labor from parts of Southern China. Dutch
colonization was overthrown by Zheng Chenggong and Taiwanese Aboriginal people. Taiwan also
experienced colonization/cultural imperialism from the Qing Dynasty in China and increased Sinicization
from 1683 to 1895. Japanese colonization over Taiwan lasted from 1895-1945, enacting brutally effective
practices adopted from Western colonization in order to genocide/culturally genocide Indigenous
Taiwanese people. From 1949-1987 before Taiwan fully democratized in the early 1990’s, the KMT
dictatorship continued suppression of Indigenous Taiwanese people and Taiwanese Chinese political
opposition to the KMT in a brutal regime known as the White Terror. Today, Taiwan is reportedly
majority Han Chinese. There remain many overlapping histories between Chinese immigration to Taiwan
and Indigenous peoples, as well as immigration from other parts of Asia. All this to say that the identity of
“Taiwanese” is an extremely nuanced one.
women and not men. My dad said these women factory workers were called 女工 (female

workers) that had only received around a middle school or high school before beginning these

laborious manufacturing jobs. My dad told me that he remembered many department stores like

JCPenney, Montgomery War, and more would purchase clothing orders from Taiwan, and

US-brand TVs and radios would do manufacturing in Taiwan as well.

The lack of high paying job prospects in Taiwan (and many other parts of Asia) sharply

contrasted with the lure of high paying jobs in the US. This imbalance is caused by US extractive

economies of labor and knowledge, formed along racial and colonial paths established by the US

empire in Asia, in which the US encourages immigration seen as useful and desirable. The 1965

Immigration Act or Hart-Celler Act set up a new immigration system that set a ceiling of

290,000 annual visas, limiting annual emigration from one country to 20,000 (Choy, p.82). The

Act also prioritized visas for immediate family members of US citizens and workers. The

preference system for quota visas included a 10 percent allocation for “members of the

professions and scientists and artists of exceptional ability” and 10 percent for “skilled and

unskilled workers in occupations for which labor is in short supply” (Jung, May 16, 2023).

After the Immigration Act of 1965 was passed, the 20,000 citizen per country

immigration quota included both Taiwan and Mainland China. Because very little immigration

under Communist China was happening during this time, the number of Taiwan-born individuals

naturalized as US citizens each year fell between around a few thousand to ten thousand.2 US

initially recognized the Kuomintang government (Republic of China) in Taiwan as the legitimate

government of China during the 1960’s, but after the US started recognizing Mainland China’s

2
Chen, Aspen, and Sam Robbins. ““Going to America”: An overview on Taiwanese Migration to the US.” Taiwan
Insight, 15 June 2021,
https://taiwaninsight.org/2021/06/15/going-to-america-an-overview-on-taiwanese-migration-to-the-us/. Accessed 9
June 2023.
government (People’s Republic of China) in 1979, Taiwanese Americans lobbied for US

Congress to allocate 20,000 separate slots for Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.3

It was this political context that influenced my dad to pursue graduate school in

Engineering after having majored in Economics in his undergraduate degree in Taiwan. After my

dad finished his two year mandatory military service in Taiwan and found little to no job

prospects in Taiwan, he decided to switch a career entirely to Computer Science, because he

knew how coveted STEM jobs were in the US. His goal was to look for a job with highest

demand in the US, as he was not planning on returning to Taiwan for work. In 1983, he moved to

Albuquerque, New Mexico to attend graduate school at the University of New Mexico (UNM)

majoring in Computer Science. He was able to enter the US through the student F1 visa after

being accepted into graduate school.

The first wave of Taiwanese immigration during the 1960’s and 1970’s were mostly

graduate students, as the US was actively recruiting highly educated and skilled talent during the

Cold War. Many of these immigrants sponsored their family members after they settled and

naturalized in the US through long-term employment.4

This is how my grandparents were able to move to the US. They were sponsored by my

dad’s eldest brother (who is 12 years older). My uncle applied immigration status for my

grandparents in 1981 after having moved to the US in 1971 as a PhD student at the University of

Missouri studying Biology. My uncle got a research job in Los Alamos, New Mexico at a

national laboratory under the Department of Energy that was managed by UC Berkeley. That job

sponsored his green-card, so he could apply to be naturalized 5 years later and eventually

3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
sponsor my grandparents. My dad actually decided to apply to the University of New Mexico

because his brother was already living in New Mexico.

My dad graduated from UNM in 1986 and got a job in New Hampshire working in

December of that year working for DEC (a company in the computer industry that is no longer in

business). My dad lived in New Hampshire for 3 and 1/2 years before moving to California in

April 1990 for his second job at Sun Microsystems. In 1998, my dad and mom got married and

moved into a house in Sunnyvale where my twin and I grew up before moving to Cupertino in

2010. Nearly a third or roughly 6.7 million Asian Americans live in California (Choy, p. 92). My

dad moved to California because he knew a lot of other Chinese people would be living there

after not having basically any access to community living in New Hampshire.

According to research done by Ascend Foundation, a nonprofit organization, analysis of

the technology leadership pipeline in the Bay Area from 2007 to 2015 showed that “Asians were

the largest cohort of professionals but the least likely among all races to become managers and

executives” (Choy, p. 91). This is one of the stereotypes that feeds into the Model Minority

Myth, the belief that Asian Americans are hard working, easily assimilable, and apolitical, and is

used to uphold anti-Black racism in the US by using the “Asian American success story” to

undermine attempts to address economic inequality faced by Black Americans (Jung, May 30,

2023). I’ve talked to my dad about his perception of racism in America, and because the main

form of racism he experienced in the US was rudeness and condescension, my dad was not very

aware of Asian American political identity, the Model Minority Myth, and anti-Blackness until

we started talking more explicitly about politics as I learned more throughout high school and

college. He had heard about the murder of Vincent Chin, having moved to New Mexico just a

year after it happened, but chalked it up racism on an individual level and was less aware of the
systemic ways in which racism and white supremacy impact the structures we interact with and

the systems that influence us, include systems of racial and colonial pathways that brought him

to the US in the first place. After years of talking with my dad about racial and economic

politics, he is now much more aware of systemic racism and how it transforms our lives and the

systems we navigate, including the privileged and marginalized identities that we hold.