The liverwort who wanted to take root

Abstract

This article offers an introspective, intentionally imperfect, and contradictory exploration of various dimensions of multiple selves, belonging, and the migrant experience. It focuses on the author’s personal experiences, examining the contradictions and challenges inherent to constructing a diasporic identity. The author unravels the complexities of self-identification and external perceptions, emphasizing how labels, names, and physical appearance influence interactions and self-understanding in specific cultural and geographical contexts. The adequacy of conventional words and terminology is questioned, as is their capacity to fully capture the richness and diversity of migratory and diasporic experiences. An argument is made for a more flexible conceptualization capable of accommodating the wide range of different backgrounds, challenges, and realities of racialized people and migrants of East Asian origin. Overall, the article proposes a re-evaluation and re-orientation of the dominant narratives and discourses around identity and migration. Through a personal reflection, it seeks to celebrate the multiplicity and complexity of diasporic identities and experiences using contradiction as a starting point.

[Reels]

I want to be buried in an airport

I don’t want my memory honored with bouquets of flowers; I prefer perfumes from the duty-free shop. I want to find sanctuary in those empty miles whose coordinates are devoid of emotional significance, where the only spatial reference points are Relay Shops. Bury me in a place where the remains of my human emotions—vestiges of a cyborg body—flow aimlessly as the greatest hits of 2010 echo in an empty coffee shop.

At the airport, you belong here, there, and there, and here, and also nowhere, all at the same time. Airports are mausoleums for bodies forever adrift that are left to die in a foreign country, with one eye closed and the other open, staring at the boarding gate information screen. Migrating is like confronting death ahead of time.

I landed at the airport in Taoyuan at about four-thirty in the afternoon, a time that means nothing, on a summer like many others. A family from the Taiwanese diaspora stood in front of me, hogging the stage. The airplane aisles were abuzz with their dramatic presence: the mother, in an accent refined by the superficiality of Silicon Valley, spoke loudly enough to make sure that everyone on board knew her children were ABCs (American-Born Chinese). As if the violin cases they were lugging on their backs didn’t already speak volumes.

I looked on with a cringe-tinged resentment as a female passenger gushed out compliments and stoked the mother’s ego. I turned to look at the violin cases, those coffins of cultural expectations and American dreams projected by a tiger mom. A specter from my own childhood appeared, staggering down the airplane aisles with my own violin case as I practiced the fingering for Wieniawski’s Légende, Op. 17 on the headrests. I did my best to embody the most refined version of a model minority, emulating Liu Xiaochun, the young violin virtuoso in Chen Kaige’s film Together. My parents used to boast about our education. Though, deep down, this was a way to reassure themselves and try to persuade themselves that the myth of the European dream was true and that migrating had been worth it.

Our visits to Taipei always coincided with zhongyuan púdù (中元普渡), because we visited during summer vacation. According to the Chinese (lunar-solar) calendar, this event is celebrated on the fourteen or fifteen night of the seventh month, the moment when the gates of hell open and hungry spirits are released to roam the streets for a month.

My cousin—always eager to impress a healthy respect (or fear) for the unknown upon me—would warn me, somewhat morbidly, about the sort of traps the spirits might set for me. “Don’t you dare swim in the pool this month,” they would say, “a ghost might be tempted to pull you by the legs and drag you down into the depths.” They used to tell my sister she should dress “modestly” to avoid attracting these spirits to our home, another sign that certain traditions are ready to be consigned to the past. And, of course, you couldn’t pronounce the word “Guǐ.” To avoid attracting the ghosts’ attention, they used “好兄弟” (good brothers) instead. “What if I say it in Spanish? How can Taiwanese ghosts understand me?” They glared at me and replied:

“Ghosts are polyglots”

“Even if you speak your broken banana tongues… espanchinglish, espanglish, Chinglish, espanchiñol… They will understand you.” Apparently, the dead understand the diasporic body better than any mortal. They too are wandering around from place to place, in search of belonging. In their longing to connect with their roots, they find nothing but the roots of their own hair.

The procession of people in the airplane aisle finally began winding its way towards the exit. The moment I switched SIM cards, the news broke in the family group chat:

“Grandpa has passed away.”

Before I knew it, a message I had written before getting on the plane that had been waiting to be sent was automatically delivered: “I bought the gordal olives, finally.” I quickly deleted the message.

I knew it had not been a sudden death. My maternal grandfather had been diagnosed with cancer more than 5 years earlier. He spent his last days in Kaohsiung. After finding out about his diagnosis, his fifth wife decided to divorce him and keep the house. I remember hearing that he had said he wanted his ashes sent to Taipei, where his children by his first wife, my grandmother, still live. Since my grandfather had spent most of his life in Kaohsiung, this decision surprised his families.

For migrant families, mourning comes with its own set of complexities. How do you grieve for someone who is 6706 miles away? A Taiwanese ABC friend of mine shared this experience with me: the only time he ever saw his father cry was on a flight to California. When his grandfather passed away in the 00s and his father was unable to attend the funeral, the father was apparently unperturbed, or so it seemed according to the Western perceptions my friend had assimilated. My friend asked his father if he was mourning, to which his father responded that migrating was like confronting death ahead of time. Years later, after my friend’s father retired, the family, disenchanted with the American dream, decided to return to Taipei, even though they knew that the Taipei they were going back to was no longer familiar to them. My friend’s father is what they call a shī gēn de lánhuā (失根的蘭花), which is something like…

…“A rootless orchid”

My friend told me he got that idea from reading Taiwanese author Chen Zhifan and his “Introduction to the United States” (Zhifan, 1957). In it, the author, who had migrated to the United States, experiences a deep sense of loss and rootlessness when he visits a small university outside Philadelphia to contemplate some flowers that reminded him of the ones in the parks in Beijing. This generated a sense of uprootedness in the author, who claimed that “those flowers shouldn’t be there,” comparing himself to an uprooted orchid.

“I felt those flowers did not belong there; they should be in a more traditional Chinese setting, surrounded by palaces or pavilions. With the change of scenery, the flowers seemed to have faded, as had my emotions, and I shed tears for no apparent reason.

I have been wandering overseas since I was a teenager, but, until now, I had never cried without knowing why. While in foreign lands, I have seen some things that are completely different and others that are similar to things at home, but they never made me homesick […] Yet, when I got to America, my emotions took a drastic turn. I would often dream about my childhood home being destroyed in storms, or my mother’s hair turning gray. [...] Flowers and people that are transplanted in the United States look like they are in a strange place, which gives us a deeper appreciation of the beauty of our native land and our cultural roots” (旅美小簡, translated in English from Chenta Tsai’s translation into Spanish, 1957: 48–50).

This excerpt from Chen Zhifan reminds me of other more recent examples of authors talking about losing one’s roots—I’m thinking of Billi Wang’s The Farewell and Audrey Sullivan in Joy Ride…. That longing to return to their “native” lands and the disenchantment of finding themselves back in a 270-square foot apartment in Brooklyn. These characters deconstruct the idea of belonging as being anchored to certain coordinates, finding home in affective networks.

I call this the new “romantic comedy,” a far cry from the hackneyed “boy-meets-girl” romantic love trope. This is one response to the surging wave of diasporic creators. Here, the hero’s odyssey is idealized as the hero returns to their “native lands”—driven by their fervent desire and urgent need to fully belong somewhere—only to discover that said place is a geographical pipe dream, leaving them stranded in limbo….

…Endlessly browsing Netflix’s catalog with no intention of watching anything

I am profoundly envious of those intact beings who are never confronted with the contradictions of their own identity and manage to label themselves with astonishing ease. This is perhaps due to the privilege inherent in never having to question whether they belong. Having been born in a “tailor-made” system that embraces them without forcing them to undergo a process of constant reconstruction, they have not had to rebuild themselves from scraps.

I have yet to reply to my relative’s message. I think those of us who were born in the nineties, as bystanders of the transition to the digital age, are still on a journey to learn to manage social networks as a synergistic extension of our beings. It’s an ongoing choreography between the vastness of cyberspace and the tangible “meat space.” Wailing with grief and being vulnerable on social media is still something that doesn’t come naturally, at least not for me. We watched our predecessors navigate the tides of modern society by learning to become solitary entities in mourning. But in the age of social networks, we are likely to see the way grief is expressed evolve. I’m thinking about that disturbing video of Jonas Bridges dancing at his grandfather’s deathbed to the rhythm of Justin Bieber and DJ Snake’s “Let Me Love You” (Bridges, 2020); Julia Rodríguez’s controversial GRWM (Get Ready With Me, 2023) video where she’s getting ready to attend her grandfather’s funeral, or the Tweet sent by the stepson of the billionaire in the Titanic submarine accident to one of the members of the band Blink-182 even after he learned that his stepfather had gone missing (Szasz, 2023).

The article, “Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn? Overview and Analysis,” explains that postmodern mutual support groups create bereavement communities, forging connections between strangers suffering a similar loss. But social networks can recreate something that existed in pre-modern times: a “bereaved community” (Walter et al., 2012: 289). I enter the following in the Google search bar: “How to respond to a WhatsApp message from a family member announcing someone’s death. Reddit.” I call the relative who had announced my grandfather’s death, but it goes to voice mail. I pick up my bags and get into a cab.

It’s rush hour in the middle of a typhoon. The radio is playing Jay Chou’s “Tīng māmā dehuà” (“听妈妈的话”). The seats have bamboo bead covers and there’s a Buddhist amulet hanging from the rear-view mirror. The driver tries to start a conversation about the weather. It was raining so hard you could barely see the road.

—This Haikui typhoon sure has hit us hard.

When I was little, I used to wonder why typhoons were given names

I imagine it’s part of our vain attempt to keep chaos under control, a placebo to assuage our fears. Fear seems easier to digest when we give it a name, a pathetic attempt to tame the untamable. We often borrow the wrong words to immediately exorcise our life events, leaving those experiences devoid of a name. We do not allow ourselves to ruminate over those words before taking the final gulp. Because anything that goes unnamed does not exist. But is everything that exists nameable?

There was a time when I became obsessed with naming things after what they ultimately were not. It seems that my yearning to belong was so pressing that it drove me to fill bullet holes in with a mishmash of gibberish, mistranslated Anglo-Saxon terms, and therapeutic jargon that had been taken out of context from threads on X (formerly Twitter) to protect my own echo chamber. It was easier to conform and adapt to the conventions and preconceptions inherent to these words instead of seeing them as nothing more than imperfect codes designed to round us up to the nearest integer. In an unexpected turn of events, the taxi driver asked me a question I would never have imagined I’d be asked in the city where I was born:

—Where are you from?

Armed with an automatic response, forged through countless repetitions, I started telling him the story I’d rehearsed: born in Taipei, transplanted to Madrid at the tender age of ten months. -I don’t need your autobiography, he interrupted, cutting my story short. -I thought you were Korean.

In Taiwan, we are trapped in an irrational ranking system of sorts. An unwritten code dictates that a polished appearance earns you the label of Korean or Japanese. Through the mists of time and experience, I’ve discovered that, in certain circles in Taiwan, being mistaken for Korean is considered a compliment—which is nonsense, if I may say so. I remember one time when an employee in charge of guarding aerial thresholds examined my passport with bureaucratic certitude. “This isn’t you,” he declared, like some sort of identity oracle. I did not protest. I am not male. And that isn’t my name; it’s a simplified version of my original name. That person is not me.

It’s a me rounded up to the nearest integer

But—given that possessing a passport is a privilege—for the time being, I suppose, they’re papers. They’re words. They do not define me, nor do I expect them to define me. Long ago, I became disillusioned with words’ potential, or rather, with the way words are interpreted from a hegemonic perspective. Take, for instance, the words “diaspora” and “migration.” We know there is no single way to migrate. Nor is there a single narrative that fully defines a diaspora; instead, there are diasporas and migrants.

After all, is the experience of a person who migrates as an adult the same as that of someone who migrates before they’ve reached the age of reason? Is it the same thing to migrate as an adult capable of identifying systemic, structural, and social inequality versus migrating as a child who grows up oblivious to the oppressions that will be inflicted upon their body due to the mere fact of being racialized? Can you compare a diaspora raised in a place where Chinese is widely spoken and used to consuming Chinese culture with a person who grew up in a White Spanish community consuming Spanish culture? Aren’t there class inequalities between a migrant who migrates to study abroad and a migrant who migrates to survive? Is a diaspora whose bodies are subject to more types of oppression comparable to one that is not?

The act of naming may well be an attempt to unify our diverse identities, a way to freeze ourselves in a state of perpetual immutability where our essence remains static and unaltered. It’s not so much the label itself that poses this dilemma, but rather the weight and connotations we have attached to it. These are the limits we confine ourselves to when we adopt a particular label. I am constantly reflecting on my stage name, a mosaic of slurs and insults that, paradoxically, have set the foundation for “Putochinomaricón,” (FuckingChinesefag) even though I do not literally embody any of these identities.

The experience of being a minority within a minority is quite an ordeal. Since my early childhood, I’ve found myself navigating a sea of dualities and adaptations, an odyssey marked by periods of confusion and conscious adaptation. I vividly recall visiting establishments in Fuenlabrada and Usera, especially those run by Chinese people in these two areas that are home to many of the region’s Chinese migrants. In a pragmatic effort to avoid unnecessary confrontation, my parents instructed me to assert my Chinese identity, despite my Taiwanese heritage and the fact that I was born in Taiwan. This parental directive was not entirely devoid of authenticity. My family roots are firmly planted in China, where they remained until my grandfather embarked upon his migratory journey to Taiwan.

In the West, I have noticed a homogenizing trend that lumps “East Asian” individuals together under the monolithic category of “Chinese.” This generalization, however simplistic, has been a persistent cause of existential exhaustion. The constant task of clarifying the breadth and depth of my identity has emerged as an onerous obligation. Furthermore, international politics has cast its omnipresent shadow over my identity narratives, infusing them with an additional layer of complexity. The palpable pressure exerted on Taiwan by China’s One China policy, on the one hand; and the United States’ opportunism and instrumentalization, on the other, are prominent facets of this intricate narrative.

Coming to grips with my identity has been a developmental odyssey made even more intense since my return to Taiwan, a place where I am not racialized or relegated to otherness until my broken accent betrays is presence. In this context, I find myself immersed in a sea of superficial familiarity where, at first glance, I seem to blend in effortlessly. Over the first few months of this reintegration, I was struck by a sense of bewilderment, a palpable discomfort born of a sudden and disconcerting lack of a strong identity. Let me explain. Throughout my life, my sense of self has been inherently molded and defined through resistance, an identity construction forged by the injustices experienced as a racialized person. In Taiwan, I found myself navigating the bewildering terrain of apparent belonging, an experience that, although apparently inclusive, was plagued by a lack of connection due to the barriers of language and culture. Despite the illusion of being just another citizen, the reality of my experience was marked by linguistic limitations that hindered my ability to engage in authentic, meaningful interactions with the locals.

This experience, in turn, led me to spaces that were predominantly inhabited by diasporic bodies, mostly those who identified as ABCs. In these spaces—often inaccessible and tinged with classism—, our identities and relations were inextricably associated with consumption, which served as the grounds for cultivating our interactions and connections and keeping them alive. And so, the experience of living in Taiwan was defined by a complex duality, one in which the appearance of belonging coexisted with the reality of separation and limitation. This duality, in turn, had a profound influence on the way I constructed and thought about my identity, presenting challenges and reflections that forced me to reconsider and reevaluate the foundations upon which I had previously constructed and conceptualized my identity.

As a creative, there have been phases in my career when I’ve found myself immersed in a process of re-orientalization, an idea introduced by Lisa Lau in response to Edward Said’s Orientalism. According to Lisa Lau: “Re-Orientalism theory […] focuses on the Orientals’ role in perpetrating Orientalism, notes that curiously, even when in an elite position or positions of power, this elite group of Orientals still reference the West as centre and place themselves as Other. They are not just being Othered any more by western powers, they are in the process of self-Othering. And of course not just literally themselves; they also in the process relegating other orientals they are regarded as representing, as Other” (emphasis in the original, Lau and Mendes, 2011: 3). This semblance of authority and authenticity attributed to insider-outsiders from the Asian diaspora limits our potential as diasporic bodies and homogenizes our experiences through a “pseudo-mimesis” of what it means to be Chinese.

After all… Am I more Chinese if I speak Chinese? Am I less Chinese if I speak broken Chinese? Am I more Chinese if I fully reject my Spanishness? Am I more Chinese if I wear hanfu? I have a lot of mixed feelings about this last point. The hanfu movement has re-emerged as an ambiguous protagonist in this twenty-first century cultural drama. With conflicting opinions, some applaud it as a cultural renaissance, while others critique it as a stage for promoting Han supremacy, as reflected in such events as the 2003 launch of the Hanwang website, whose aim was not just to glorify hanfu but to direct a supremacist narrative.

Although many of these labels can serve as useful tools for articulating and recognizing diverse identities, they are also inherently limited in their capacity to capture and convey the richness and complexity of individual and collective human experiences. At their most reductive, labels can help perpetuate a linear, static understanding of identity that subsumes the multiplicities and fluidities of human experience.

It is imperative, therefore, to challenge and destabilize the linear conceptualizations of identity prevalent in dominant discourses and practices. The most authentic and vivid expressions of identity are often made manifest and apprehended through movement, which enables a recognition and affirmation of the multiple “selves” that coexist and converge within each individual, challenging and resisting hegemonic impositions, being conscious of being….

…a liverwort who longed to take root…

…and never managed to learn how to use its rhizoids. To imagine this future is to contemplate a horizon of possibilities where identity can be conceived and cultivated beyond the confines of the hegemonic gaze. It is an invitation to explore a hypothetical scenario: given the freedom to construct ourselves beyond resistance and oppression, who would emerge in this present moment? This conceptualization is echoed in Paco Vidarte’s reflections in Ética Marica (“Queer Ethics,” 2007), where he alludes to the image of a giraffe grazing rather than using its neck, a powerful metaphor for an existence limited by hegemonic constraints.

Chenta Tsai. Photo by Neelam Khan Vela. Used by permission.

This approach proposes a reorientation where we deliberately put ourselves at the center of our narratives, rejecting a peripheral position of otherness. To affirm the contradiction inherent in our multiple selves is to embrace a spectrum of complexity that defines our existences. It is a vibrant celebration of multiplicity. After all, can we construct our existence not just by responding with resistance, or as a composite of despicable fragments, but rather as a sculpture carved out of a raw material with all its integrity, fueled by our own desires and by the simple yet profound aspiration to not just survive but also thrive? Is it possible to conceive of our three-delicious fried rice dish beyond the leftovers, sputters, and insults we have re-appropriated as tools for political resistance?