As Silicon Valley boomed in the early nineties, so did Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. Soon, my parents’ friends began moving back after decades away, maintaining homes in two countries so that their children could finish high school and go to college in the U.S. My dad had risen to middle management. But he tired of the corporate ladder, where advancement to the uppermost strata seemed tied to arbitrary factors, like the color of one’s skin. My parents eventually decided that he would move back to Taiwan, too. A job as an executive awaited him. Never again would he have to dye his hair or touch his golf clubs.
I sometimes ran into classmates at the airport and realized that we were all there to drop our dads off at work. It was a bit like the Chinese folktale of the Gold Mountain, about American opportunity in the gold-rush era. Except, in those days, the men would cross the Pacific in search of work in America, not the other way around.
The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories. I often try to weave the details of my parents’ lives into a narrative. How did they imagine themselves? How did they acquire a sense of taste or decide which movies to see? Would they have recognized themselves in “Future Shock”? And was there an influential Eric in my father’s life? The things around them were like the raw materials for American identities, and they foraged as far as their car or the subway line could take them.
They had chosen the occasional loneliness, the meandering life style, the language barrier. What they hadn’t chosen was identification as Asian Americans, a category that had been established only in the late sixties. They had little in common with the American-born Chinese and Japanese students organizing on their campuses for free speech or civil rights; they didn’t know much about the Chinese Exclusion Act, Charlie Chan, or why one should take deep offense at such slurs as “Oriental” or “Chink.” My parents and their cohort wouldn’t have recognized that they were representatives of a “model minority.” In fact, they hadn’t even planned on becoming Americans. They didn’t know such identities were available to them. Their allegiances remained to the world they had left behind.