"Where are you from? Ahh you ABC!"

This morning I had to do errands to finish my ARC application and 2 out of the 3 taxi drivers were talking about me, wanting to know about me, and talking about ABCs, American Born Chinese. I never heard negative things about being an ABC but maybe that's also because I'm living in Taipei. Most of the people I have talked with said that it is good that I would come back to my home country and experience my culture. I remember having a conversation with Will at the airport about being an ABC and he said it wasn't bad since he had many ABC friends. Then you get the term FOB, fresh off the boat so everyone is labeled.

I knew that one of the things I had to get accustomed to was people understanding that I am Chinese, born in America. During my interview, my hiring manager even told me right away that this was something that I was going to experience and I might get frustrated. It's sort of complicated just because my father was born in Guangdong, China, a southern province of China where Cantonese is the main dialect. My father knew how to speak Cantonese and Mandarin. My mother was born in China but she moved and immigrated to Taipei when she was 2 years old. She only knows Mandarin. Then my parents married in Taipei and immigrated to the U.S. where my older sister and I were born. People would speak to me in Chinese and of course when I respond, the immediate question is, where are you from? They sometimes guess and I usually got mistakened for being from Hong Kong. I say I am an American but they want to know my ethnicity too. So it goes into this whole long story and I don't want to say I'm Chinese because even though I'm technically Chinese, I'm not from China and there is tension between China and Taiwan. Most of my relatives live in Taipei but I can't say I'm Taiwanese because I'm not that either lol It should be an easy thing but I find myself always rambling about who I really am. Then the usual response after answering in broken Chinese is "Ahh you ABC!" Especially in the U.S., I would sometimes get offended being called that but after living in Taipei for about 2 weeks and hearing it everytime I communicate with someone, I just learned that it's the way of life and that being an ABC isn't SO bad. I heard from some people that Asian Americans have a higher prestige and the funny thing is that in Taipei, apparently many of the "ABCs" go to the bars lol It was even mentioned in the Taiwan Lonely Planet guidebook that many "ABCs" go to this one specific bar..which I might check out later lol

-Chihchat