COLONIZER AND COLONIZED: THE HAN-AMERICAN PARADOX

Personal, Culture

I’m mix-raced, half-white and half-Asian. My mom is a first generation immigrant from Taipei, Taiwan. My dad, on the other hand, is originally from Missouri and, unlike my mom’s side, his family has been here since the Irish Potatoe Famine in the 1850s.

Photo with my dad’s side of the family and my mom’s side of the family

I was raised in the San Fransico Bay Area, which is an extremely liberal, progressive part of the United States. Because of that environment, growing up, I was not unfamiliar with the term “colonialism.” I still distinctly remember as early as third-grade, I had an assignment where we had to explain why the California Missions System (a system used by the Spanish to forcefully convert Native American’s to Catholicism and take away Native American territory) was bad for the Native Americans. From there on out, Social Studies in elementary school and then history classes throughout middle and high school talked about the evils of colonialism. By the end of my high school experience, this is what I understood about colonialism: colonialism was a historical event where white people around the world kicked out or killed native populations so that they could use their resources or have their land. 

For me, colonialism felt distant. It was something from the past and was something that only applied to native people (like the Native Americans) and the whites. Lucky for me, I’m only half-white! Whenever talking about colonialism, I never identified as white, but solely as Asian. To begin with, this blocking out of my white identity to avoid the responsibility that comes with a history of being a colonizer is wrong. Putting that aside for the moment now, there is still a huge problem with ignoring colonization, even were I to only identify as Asian. 

This past summer I went back to Taiwan for the first time without my mom, staying with more distant relatives and tagging along for some research with a professor from one of the universities there. The professor was an indigenous Taiwanese person (of the Atayal people) who studied both agriculture and indigenous studies. To be totally honest, I didn’t know much about what it means to be Taiwanese and what Taiwanese indigeneity is.  

While helping with the fieldwork, I learned so much about the country that my mother calls home. More than that, I got the history from the perspective of the indigenous Taiwanese people. To really oversimplify, the history of Taiwan is a history of multiple empires and countries coming in and colonizing. It was wave after wave of foreigners coming in to take the land and natural resources from the indigenous people. First, there were Europeans, who came mostly to set up a trade network. Then came the Han Chinese (Chinese people from the mainland of China) in the imperial era (with emperors) who more aggressively settled and took land.  After that came the Japanese, who went very far in trying to either eliminate or assimilate the indigenous people. Lastly came the Republic of China, who are again Han Chinese, just from a different era. This overview skips out on a lot of really tragic details and hardships but captures the idea that the indigenous Taiwanese population has been overlooked and forcefully pushed to the side for generation upon generation by many different people groups. 

Photos of my research group and members of the indigenous community.

I found this all out word of mouth, either from my professor on the long trips to and from the indigenous communities.  When I was hearing it straight from the mouths of the indigenous people, colonialism felt anything but distant. This forced me to figure out where I stood in this. 

I went back to my family and found out what my bloodline had to do with this colonization. Long story short, I found out that my grandma’s side was a rich business family that came over during the most recent wave of colonization with the Rebulic of China, while my grandpa’s side has been in Taiwan since the imperial period. My grandfather even claimed that one of our ancestors was the first tax collector on the island and rode around Taiwan on a white horse, collecting “dues” from the indigenous people. This history of my Han lineage was heavy with colonization.

Image of original indigenous Taiwanese language distribution vs image of current indigenous Taiwanese population distribution (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fc/Formosan_Distribution_01.png/225px-Formosan_Distribution_01.png, https://english.ey.gov.tw/cp.aspx?n=1082F2A7077508A4)

Gaining this knowledge of both Taiwan and my own family history dispelled the myth the colonialism only applied to white and indigenous people. It completely blew my mind that Asians could be colonizers too (in my case, the Han Chinese). I realized that I cannot hide behind the “I’m Asian” argument when it comes to colonialism anymore. Just because Asians are a minority in America, doesn’t mean that they can not/ do not benefit from colonialism. Both colonialism and privilege take on many forms throughout the world.

The question now, having understood my privilege and family history (and in a lot of ways continued active participation) of colonialism, is what do I do? What do I do knowing that I have these different forms of privilege in these different contexts? How do I properly acknowledge the wrongs that my ancestors have done in different contexts? How should I even identify myself when I’m in these different contexts since I’m mix-raced? 

It’s all really complicated and I would say that’s where I’m at right now. I have come to terms with my colonial history, I need to figure out exactly what I should do about it.