When my father moved back to Taiwan, my family bought a pair of fax machines. In theory, this was so he could help me with my math homework. I was starting high school, in California, and everything, from what instrument I played to the well-roundedness of my transcript, suddenly seemed consequential. In seventh grade, I had tested just well enough to skip two years of math, and now I was paying for it. I had peaked too early. In fact, I was very bad at math. Like many immigrants who prized education, my parents had faith in the mastery of technical fields—math and science—where answers weren’t left to interpretation. You couldn’t discriminate against the right answer.
Faxing was cheaper than long-distance calling, and involved far less pressure. The time difference between Cupertino and Taiwan was such that I could fax my father a question in the evening and expect an answer by the time I woke up. My homework requests were always marked “Urgent.”
He replied with equations and proofs, explaining the principles of geometry in the margins and apologizing if anything was unclear. After wearying of America’s corporate ladder, he’d moved to Taiwan to work as an executive in the burgeoning semiconductor industry, and he was busy establishing himself at his new job. I skimmed the explanations and copied down the equations and proofs. Every now and then, I rewarded his quick, careful attention by interspersing the next set of math questions with a digest of American news: I told him about Magic Johnson’s announcement that he was H.I.V.-positive, I narrated the events that led up to the Los Angeles riots, I kept him up to date on the fate of the San Francisco Giants. I told him about cross-country practice, made honest commitments to work harder at school. I listed the new songs I liked, and he would seek them out in Taipei’s cassette stalls and tell me which ones he liked, too:
I like the November Rain by Guns N Roses. The Metallica is also great. I couldn’t enjoy the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam. The old songs reinterpreted by Mariah Carey (I’ll Be There) and Michael Bolton (To Love Somebody) are marvelous. The MTV’s “unplug” is a great idea!
As a teen-ager, I had better things to do than fax with my dad. He seized upon anything I mentioned and barraged me with questions. When I described one of my classes as boring, he interrogated my use of the term, observing that “lots of ‘challenges’ are emotional ‘boring’ but reasonable ‘useful.’ ” I told him what we were reading in history class, and he asked, “You are convinced that Oswald alone killed JFK?”
He always asked me what I thought about things. Maybe this was an attempt to prolong our back-and-forth. He would bring up sports, a subject I didn’t think interested him at all:
Redskin is too much for Bill!?
It’s down to the last week. This year, the NBA is very exciting? Is Nick [Knicks] out yet?
It’s Buckley [Barkley] vs. Jordon!
This World Series was spectacular.
We were like two strangers trading small talk at a hardware store.
Whenever there was a weeklong break from school, my mom and I flew to Taiwan. We spent summers and winter vacations there; weeks would pass when the only people I spoke to were my parents and their middle-aged friends.
I never wanted to go to Taiwan. I couldn’t understand why my parents wanted to go back to a place they had chosen to leave.
My father left Taiwan for the United States in 1965, when he was twenty-one, and he was nearly twice as old before he set foot there again. In those days, you left if you were able to, especially if you were a promising student. A dozen other physics majors graduated with him from Tunghai University, and ten of them ended up pursuing careers abroad. My father flew from Taipei to Tokyo to Seattle to Boston. He scanned the crowd at the airport and saw a friend who’d come from Providence to pick him up and drop him off in Amherst.
But the friend didn’t know how to drive, so he had promised to buy lunch for another guy in exchange for a ride to the Boston airport, then to Amherst, and finally back to Providence. The two young men greeted my father at the gate, traded backslaps, and rushed him to the car, where they stowed his worldly possessions—textbooks and sweaters, mostly—in the trunk. Then they set off for Boston’s Chinatown, a portal to a world they had left behind.
In the years that followed, willingly marooned far from home, my father acquired various characteristics that might mark him as American. He lived in New York, witnessed and participated in student protests, and, according to old photos, sported long hair and vaguely fashionable pants. He arrived as a devotee of classical music, but within a few years his favorite song was the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.” He subscribed, very briefly, to The New Yorker, before realizing it wasn’t meant for newcomers like him, and requesting a refund. He discovered the charms of pizza and rum-raisin ice cream. Whenever new grad students arrived from Taiwan, he and his friends piled into a car to pick them up. It was a ritual, and it was a type of freedom—being on the road and possibly eating well—that was not to be passed up.
My dad wasn’t drawn to the U.S. by any specific dream, just a chance for something different. Still, he understood that American life is unbounded promise and hypocrisy, faith and greed, new spectrums of joy and self-doubt, freedom enabled by enslavement. All of these things at once.
When my mother was a child in Taiwan, her father set up a chalkboard in the family’s kitchen and wrote a new word in English on it every day. The Second World War had interrupted my grandfather’s medical studies, so he became a civil servant. He wanted slightly more for his children. My grandparents had their children choose American names, like Henry or Carol. The children picked up the basics of English, this bizarre new language, which they might use to speak a new future into being. They learned about the rest of the English-speaking world through a subscription to Life, where my mom first discovered the existence of something in America called Chinatown.
She arrived in the U.S. in 1971, to study public health at Michigan State University. Soon after she got to East Lansing, signed a lease, enrolled in classes, and bought a stack of nonrefundable textbooks, she received a message from her father. As she was making her way to Michigan, a letter had reached Taipei informing her that she’d been accepted to the University of Illinois, her top choice. So my mother recovered whatever tuition she could and left for Champaign-Urbana.
In the sixties and seventies, students from throughout the Chinese-speaking world found one another in these small, relatively remote college towns. School anchored my mother to the Midwest, but she roamed freely: a job at a community center in Kankakee, where she was one of only a few people who weren’t Black; a summer spent waitressing, where she ate ice cream every day for lunch. But some of her Taiwanese classmates couldn’t deal with this radical new context—or maybe it was a lack of context. She still remembers one girl who stopped going to classes altogether and spent her time drifting around campus. Even at the peak of summer, the girl wore her heaviest winter coat. Many of the other Taiwanese students kept their distance from her.
There were the potlucks with friends, when my mom would make lion’s-head meatballs; road trips to grocers that carried bok choy; the spontaneous communion of dorm life. You could identify Taiwanese students by their Tatung rice cookers. My mom took up painting, much of it abstract and surreal, with color patterns that didn’t reveal a discernible mood.
My father went from Amherst to Columbia University. From there, he followed his academic adviser to the University of Illinois, and met my mother. They married at a student center on campus. Only one person from their combined families was able to attend. But at least they had their friends. One was an artist, and he drew pictures of Snoopy and Woodstock on cardboard and arranged them in the grass outside the student center. Everyone brought a favorite dish.
My parents took a road trip to the East Coast for their honeymoon, snapping photos along the way. Their memories of this time come back to them in impressionistic fragments, since they lost all the undeveloped film when someone broke into their car in Manhattan.
I was born in 1977 in Champaign-Urbana. My dad wanted to become a professor. But, when he couldn’t find an academic job, we moved to Texas, where he worked as an engineer. The suburbs of Dallas afforded us plenty of space. One could get lost in that vastness. A few years ago, I found a small square of brittle, yellowed paper from the early eighties—an ad my mom took out in the local classifieds:
CHINESE COOKING LESSONS—learn to Cook exotic dishes using ingredients and utensils readily available.
$12 per class. For further information call Mrs. Hsu at: 867-0712
Nobody ever called. When I began speaking in a drawl, and begging for cowboy boots and an American name, and after it had been made clear to them that the local steak house wasn’t for their kind, they decided to move.
My parents’ American addresses are a history of friendships and acquaintances: a spare room in someone’s attic, visits to family friends whom they’d heard about but never actually met, a summer job in a small town a few hours away, an opportunity in an unfamiliar, emerging field. They didn’t dream of life in a big city so much as map out proximity to friends, Chinese food, a good school district—so, after Texas, it was either Delaware or California, and they chose California.
Cupertino was in transition when we arrived, in 1986. There was a huge factory downtown, farms on the outskirts, and a few buildings occupied by Apple. Apple seemed like a joke—nobody used Apple computers. As Silicon Valley flourished in the late eighties and early nineties, more Asian immigrants moved there. All my grandparents came from Taiwan to the South Bay, and most of my parents’ brothers and sisters settled there as well. The suburbs were amenable to a kind of haphazard, gradual transformation—flagging businesses were remade by new waves of immigrants, and strip malls began turning, store by store, into archipelagos of hyper-regional Chinese food and the latest in imported hair fads. There were bubble-tea cafés and Chinese bookstores, parking lots mazy with modified Hondas and moms hoping to preserve their pale complexions with full-face visors and elbow-length driving gloves. Chefs from Hong Kong and Taiwan joined the throngs of engineers coming to California. The pressure to appeal to non-Chinese shoppers or diners casually disappeared. Neck bones and chicken feet and various gelatinous things, VHS dubs of the latest Taiwanese dramas, Chinese-language newspapers and books: all could pay the bills, and then some.
Soon, my mom began grumbling about the newer immigrants from China—how they left their shopping carts strewn about the parking lot of the Asian grocery store. The distinctions between an immigrant who came from Taiwan in the sixties or seventies and one who came from mainland China in the nineties were probably imperceptible to anyone outside the Chinese-speaking diaspora. They looked roughly the same, and they probably both had accents. But they stood in different relation to American culture. These new, boisterous immigrants probably didn’t even know there was once only a single Asian grocer in the area, and it wasn’t even that good, and you had to drive a half hour to get there.
Among the surviving items from my parents’ frugal early years are weathered paperback copies of the Pentagon Papers and “Future Shock,” Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s 1970 best-seller about what happens to our psyches when the society around us undergoes rapid structural change. A pamphlet of Theodore Allen’s essay “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race,” with “HSU” written across the cover. A book on Nixon’s visit to China; one on African American history. For a brief spell, my father toyed with Anglicizing his name, asking to be called Eric, but he soon realized that assimilation of that kind didn’t suit him.
From Amherst to Manhattan to Champaign-Urbana to Plano to Richardson to Mission Viejo to Cupertino: there were always the records, an old record player my father had assembled from a kit, a pair of Dynatone speakers. He started building his record collection as soon as he arrived in America. At first, he used a mail-order LP club, the kind where you overpay for a few and get a dozen more for a penny. The records were mostly classical. But sometime in the sixties he grew accustomed to Bob Dylan’s mysterious, off-kilter songs blasting from a neighbor’s apartment. He started buying Dylan records, learning to appreciate that voice, thin and deranged, perhaps more than he ever came to understand the words.
His records stayed protected in their shrink-wrap, if possible, to avoid wear to the cardboard sleeves. He would peel back part of the plastic to stamp his name. Some of his records were given away over the years, but the core remained: Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones, Neil Young, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles. A few by the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd; some Motown collections. A lot of classical music. Blind Faith, because, when my parents were graduate students, an older faculty member from the West Indies had pulled out his violin during a dinner party to play the solo from “Sea of Joy.” There were John Lennon and George Harrison solo albums, but none by Paul McCartney, so I assumed that his post-Beatles career was awful. No Beach Boys meant they were probably awful, too. There was no jazz, except for a lone Sonny and Linda Sharrock album that’s still sealed. My parents played “Thriller” so often that I thought Michael Jackson was a family friend.
My father’s record collection had the effect of making music seem uncool to me. It was something that grownups took seriously. He listened to Guns N’ Roses, whereas I listened to baseball games on the radio. He was the one recording hours of MTV on one VCR and whittling his findings down to a greatest-hits tape on another VCR. He was the one who always wanted to go music shopping. He bought Rolling Stone and Spin and carefully copied their lists of the year’s or the decade’s best albums, and then he searched for the ones he thought he might enjoy.
But, once I started middle school, I realized that my dad’s record buying had prepared me for the social hierarchies of recess. I started reading his magazines, picking up on things early enough not to seem like a poser, which I feared more than anything. And I tagged along on his after-dinner trips to the record store. We seemed to spend hours apart, occasionally intersecting in some unlikely aisle. We were enthralled by the same music, but we related to it differently. I listened to Slash’s flamboyant, searching guitar solo on “November Rain” and heard a suggestion that freedom and vision could carry you away. To my dad, Slash was the product of thousands of hours of study and practice.
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.
In Taiwan, my dad lived in Hsinchu, a small coastal town about an hour south of Taipei. Hsinchu was mainly known for its gusting winds and seafood meatballs. It was a sleepy town, but now there was a large high-tech campus off the highway, where all the semiconductor companies were headquartered. Giant, futuristic malls started popping up downtown.
When my mom and I visited, my parents would drive to Taipei on the weekends to seek out old tea shops and movie theatres they remembered from childhood. They didn’t need maps. Decades away hadn’t dulled their memories of which stalls served the best baos. My parents grew younger in Taiwan: the humidity and the food turned them into different people. I sometimes felt like an interloper as we sat on weathered wooden stools and silently ate giant bowls of beef noodles that, were this America, would have prompted romantic soliloquies about their childhoods in Taiwan.
I spent two or three months of every year in Taiwan. I listened to ICRT, an English-language radio station, for Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40,” which offered weekly dispatches from a more recognizable reality. My parents had fond memories of listening to the station when they were teen-agers, back when it was Armed Forces Radio. In time, my father became less interested in new music, and listening to the countdown was, in part, my attempt to connect with him, to remind him of the American splendors to which he might one day return. It took me a while to understand that this was our life now—that my parents had worked hard in order to have a place in both worlds. Becoming American would remain an incomplete project, and the records in my father’s collection began to seem like relics of an unfollowed path.
As a teen-ager, I busied myself with the school newspaper and the debate club, because, unlike math or science, I thought I could actually get better at these things. Flipping through my father’s old physics notebooks, I knew that the formulas and graphs would never make sense to me. But one day I realized that my parents spoke with a mild accent, and that they had no idea what the passive voice was. The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf—one that we could also use against them. Home life took on a kind of casual litigiousness: the calm and composed child laying traps with a line of questioning; the parents, tired and irritated, defaulting to the native tongue.
I spent a lot of time with my mom. She drove me all over the South Bay, to cello lessons, cross-country meets, debate tournaments, record stores. She taught me how to shave. Every Friday, we went to Vallco, our local mall, starting at Sears and working our way to the food court for dinner. If store employees talked to you, she said, you replied, as cheerfully as possible, “I’m just browsing,” and they left you alone. I would tell her what everyone at school was wearing, and we would try to figure out where you could buy those clothes.
Later, I realized that we were both assimilating at the same time, sifting, store to store, for some possible future—that we were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never quite be perfect.
Like millions of other teen-agers, my first glimpse into the possibility of “alternative” culture came in 1991, when I listened to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It was one of the greatest songs I had ever heard, mostly because it was the first great song I had chosen for myself.
I believed that I’d happened upon a secret before everyone else, and I was addicted to this belief. I heard the song late one night on the radio. The next day at school, nobody knew what I was talking about. There wasn’t even a video yet. I patiently awaited the release of “Nevermind,” the album it appeared on.
When it arrived, I was puzzled by the way that the band members chose to express themselves, undermining their innately catchy songs with layers of menacing noise. I carefully studied any magazine and newspaper articles I could find about them, copying down the references they made to other bands. I wrote a letter to the fan club listed in the “Nevermind” cassette’s booklet, expressing my singular grasp of their values.
One day, Nirvana was a relatively obscure band. Then everyone saw the light. Gradually, classmates began showing up wearing the same Nirvana T-shirt, crispy yellow ink on black. Was this a sign that a secret could be cherished by everyone? That we would remake the world in our own image?
When Kurt Cobain, the lead singer, was a teen-ager, he read an article about punk rock and concluded that this was the music for him. It was the early eighties, and it was a while before he actually heard any punk records. He later recalled being disappointed that the music wasn’t as aggressive or as vital as he’d imagined it. His own version of punk drove the band’s career. He seemed hellbent on redirecting his new fans toward the music he loved: Shonen Knife, the Raincoats, the Vaselines. He led us down a trail, pointing us toward out-of-the-way landmarks. Casting about in these other territories became my reason for being.
Naturally, the day came when too many kids at school were wearing Nirvana shirts. How could everyone identify with the same outsider? It wasn’t the band’s fault. Cobain seemed nonchalant, even hostile, toward his fame.
I began making a zine. I’d heard it was an easy way to get free CDs from bands and record labels. But it was also a way to find a tribe. I scoured record stores and mail-order catalogues for seven-inch singles that sounded quiet and loud at the same time. I thought I had a lot to say, but I felt timid about saying it. Making a zine was a way of sketching the outlines of a new self, writing a new personality into being. I was convinced that I could arrange the piles of photocopied images, short essays, and scraps of cut-up paper into a version of myself that felt true.
My zine was earnest yet cynical. Wasn’t this thing that had fallen out of fashion actually great? Why does everyone dress this way, rather than that? I wrote breathless odes to foreign films I’d never seen, passionate and overlong dissections of the indie-rock singles I found at Streetlight, in San Jose. There was “X-Files” fan fiction, screeds against our rote homework assignments. I saw coolness as a quality primarily expressed through zealous discernment, and I defined who I was by what I rejected, a kitchen-sink approach to negation that resulted in essays decrying “Beverly Hills, 90210,” hippies, private school, George Bush, braided leather belts, the police state, and, once the band became trendy, Pearl Jam.
Faxes arrived with a faded and distant look, the advice already ancient. My dad was curious about my zine (which he referred to as my “publications”) and asked if I could fax a copy to him. I explained that it wouldn’t be the same.
He often implored me to apply some of the energy I spent memorizing sports statistics or writing record reviews to my schoolwork. I just had to study my textbooks the way I studied my magazines. I could tell you what albums were slated for release next month, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, pass the written portion of the driver’s test. Whenever my father wrote something that came across sterner than intended, he quickly followed up, unprompted, to clarify:
Last Friday, I overemphasized the toughness. Don’t be scared. The life is full of excitement and surprises. Handle it and enjoy it. . . .
I feel sorry that I cannot be around all the time to support you whenever you need. But I feel comfortable since mom can do good job and you are quite mature. But if there is any thoughts or problem, call me or fax to me.
Love, Dad
By junior year, I’d finished every math class my high school offered, though I sustained damage to my G.P.A. along the way. I was now free to devote myself fully to the school paper, my zine, and the debate club. I figured that I had to be really good at these other things to make up for all the C’s on my transcript.
It felt a little anticlimactic when Kurt Cobain died, in April, 1994. We had already mourned his passing the month before. Someone had heard that he had died of an overdose while on tour in Italy, and the rumor spread through my school. We didn’t find out until the next day that Cobain was still alive, by which point we had already cycled through various stages of grief and mourning. In journalism class, under the impression that he was gone, I cut a picture of him out of a magazine and glued it to a pin, declaring that I would wear it for the rest of my life.
When Cobain really did die, of suicide, I wasn’t particularly surprised, because his physical and mental health had seemed precarious. He often spoke of his debilitating stomach issues. A history of depression ran through his family. The pressures of fame and all the non-stop touring seemed to exacerbate whatever he was feeling. His ragged voice and hunched frame weren’t just affectations; they were manifestations of his discomfort.
I faxed my dad the night it happened. I couldn’t understand Cobain’s death. My dad wrote back:
I agree that it’s a society tragedy, too much pressure. If he felt that it’s beyond his control or creativity or else, it sometimes led to the conclusion of suicide, especially for talented artists. They felt that the sense of living disappeared. So sometimes, the “normal” people is more easy to adapt to the reality which fills with not ideal situation and needs compromise. That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to every one of us. What do you think?
Imade a scrapbook of articles about Cobain. I answered one of the prompts on my A.P. French exam with a diatribe about what society had done to Cobain, praising the stand he had taken against racism, sexism, and homophobia. It was tragique that we’d smothered him, rather than heeding his lessons. I did poorly on the exam. Clearly, the establishment would never understand us.
A couple of weeks later, I faxed my dad a copy of an article I wrote for the school paper about Cobain’s death, and what it said about our generation. I was using the term loosely, since Cobain was ten years older than I was. I believed that there was something exceptional about our era, the pressures we faced, the struggles to remain content in aimless times. There were all these terms that seemed unique to us, like “dysfunction,” “dystopia,” and “angst.” I tried them on, but nothing stuck. I watched the news and saw fans dressed in black, maintaining a vigil in a park near Cobain’s house, crying for days in the arms of strangers. That was a level of feeling I couldn’t grasp. Still, I was a persuasive enough writer to concern my father, who responded:
What I want to say is that we have to have ideal thinking, heart, feeling about the society, environment, etc. But we also need to accept that there must have a way to change the world, or surrounding, to be better. It might take many years, or even generations, or many death. But still, emotion alone will not change the situation. The real work will. Kurt is talent. No doubt about it. And he is important. His death need to be analyzed very seriously. Our society do have problems. But don’t paint the generation with stereotype such as lost. . . . I think that’s true for all generations during a certain period of their life.
What do you think? In reading your article, I found that my English is very poor. What’s the meaning of “dysfunction?”
Again, we have to have emotion that differentiate human being with machine, robot. But we also need to know how to control it and will not be carried away by it. Do you agree?
Iwas sixteen, and I wanted to be carried away. I would leave for college the next fall. I fantasized about going somewhere strange and new. Los Angeles wasn’t far enough. San Diego was lame. Seattle was far enough, but in a useless direction. I felt too young for New York. Boston was lame, too. My dad wanted me to start seriously considering my options. “Berkeley is a good school with a good campus,” he wrote. The only drawback, he explained, was its “neighborhood.” Berkeley wasn’t a bubble, like nearby Stanford. The campus bled into the world around it—People’s Park, where gnarly street punks and homeless people lived; Telegraph Avenue, where hippie burnouts still wandered. Just a few years earlier, in 1990, someone had taken hostages at an off-campus bar, leading to an all-night standoff with the local police. One student died and several were shot before the hostage-taker was killed.
Life had delivered my parents thousands of miles away from their families. They had made the most of bad situations, answered to close-enough versions of their names. Then it somehow took them back to where they had come from, only by then their families had slowly moved to the U.S., to be closer to them. My parents craved routine stability. They wanted me to acquire recognizable skills, to be just accomplished enough to seem well-rounded. Berkeley was a good school with a good campus—on this point, we agreed. But I was desperate to go there because of the enormous slices of pizza and cheap records, the left-wing bookstore tucked inside the parking garage, the weirdos yelling about free speech or abortion on the quad.
I was an American child, and I was bored, and I was searching for my people. ♦
This is drawn from “Stay True: A Memoir.”
Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the forthcoming memoir “Stay True.”
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