In our family photo album, there is a black-and-white picture of me with a lei around my neck taken on the day that my Mother, younger brother and I left Taiwan to come to the United States to join my Father who was studying at an American university. We had been separated from him for more than three years.
Because we left Taiwan earlier than many others, this photo was taken at Taipei’s older Songshan Airport. It was not until early 1979 that flights left from Taoyuan International Airport – then known as Chiang Kai-shek International Airport. In the album there are a few other photographs of us with the friends who came to send us off, moments frozen in time and the Aunties and Uncles, now already passed on, forever young. I am grateful to the person(s) who took those photos and then sent prints to us all the way from Taipei.
Our travel documents record a departure date in September. I have no memories of that day. I only have a vague memory that after we landed in the U.S. Mom pointed through the airplane window at a man in a raincoat standing outside the small terminal building and said, “看,爸爸在那儿.” “Look, there’s Daddy.”
All these decades later, I recognize now there is a duality to this black-and-white photo. On the one hand, it documents my departure from the “Chinese” phase of my life; on the other hand, it also marks the start of my current “Chinese-American” existence. I emigrated from The Republic of China and immigrated to America.
According to Wikipedia, immigrants like me are labeled “1.5 generation” or “1.5G”: “individuals who immigrate to a new country before or during their early teens. They earn the label the ‘1.5 generation’ because they bring with them or maintain characteristics from their home country, meanwhile engaging in assimilation and socialization with their new country.” We who are 1.5G are different from first-generation individuals who are foreign-born as well as from second-generation individuals who are the U.S.-born children of foreign-born parents.
So, when the Happy50Plus Team offered me the opportunity to have some “real estate” on their Website, I jumped at the chance. I would like to use this space to explore the unique life experiences of us 1.5G immigrants. This blog will explore what it means to inhabit two geographic locations, view two cultural landscapes and, in essence, co-exist in two identities, often not harmoniously. I hope you’ll join me on this journey and share your own thoughts and experiences, either as a 1.5-generation immigrant yourself, or as the parent or grandparent of a 1.5G. Perhaps you, too, have family photos of the day you left to come to America.
I hope you will share them and your memories and/or family stories.