Texas’ Hotbed of Taiwanese Nationalism

Dai wan wei. The sounds of the Taiwanese Hokkien language don’t resemble Mandarin Chinese, which drifts from the throat in soft wisps. Nor is Taiwanese, as it’s more simply called, like the syncopated rhythms of English, that concoction of multisyllabic consonant-and-vowel blends manipulated by the tongue and lips. Rather, the Taiwanese language originates deep from the belly, creating rumbling sonorous tones that remind me of my dad’s laughter or my mom calling me for dinner, “ki jia buan!” 

Although I was born in the States, Taiwanese was the first and only language I heard and spoke until I entered grade school. Delivered through my grandmother’s stern lectures, my dad’s and uncles’ incessant jokes, or my aunts’ pleas to eat, the language molded my early worldview and sense of self. 

But during my parents’ youth, Taiwanese was spoken only in whispers or not at all on the streets of their homeland, where locals were forced to adopt Mandarin as their official language in 1945. During the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek and under his Kuomintang party government, my family, among many others, was forbidden to publicly speak their mother tongue, forced to adopt Chinese culture and language, and relegated to an underclass in their own land. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when they moved to Houston, that they began to explore what it meant to be Taiwanese. 

Down Bellaire Boulevard, west of the Southwest Freeway, past the PlazAmericas Mall and the Fiesta Supermarket, signs start to appear in Hanzi, the written characters common to Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese speakers. Grocery stores, banks, bubble tea shops, accounting offices, and restaurants dot multiple shopping centers—Diho Square, Metropole Center, and Dun Huang Plaza—until you travel west of Beltway 8 and the signs shift to Vietnamese. 

Visitors might mistake this section of Houston’s modern Chinatown as being homogeneously Chinese. More precisely, though, it’s a commercial, social, and cultural hub for immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the northern Chinese provinces, and the southern province of Fujian. But Taiwanese immigrants were among the first to develop shopping centers in this area in the 1980s, according to my uncle, who has his own office there.

While there’s a longer history of Chinese immigration—Chinese laborers worked on Texas railroads in the late 1800s and Cantonese immigrants settled in what’s now considered Houston’s “Eado” section in the early 1900s—Taiwanese immigrants didn’t arrive until after 1965, when an overhaul of U.S. immigration laws gave preference to migrants with special skills. Young college graduates took advantage of the opportunity. 

In the ’70s and ’80s, Taiwanese migrants, including many of my relatives, settled in Houston seeking freedom from the Kuomintang’s oppressive regime. Many were believers in Taiwanese independence, and they continued organizing for that goal in America. In their 20s, they formed student associations at the University of Texas, Texas A&M University, and other campuses. In their 30s, they established commercial enterprises. In their 40s and 50s, they expanded cultural institutions to welcome the younger generations. Now in their 60s and 70s, they helped bring Taiwan’s nationalist party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), into power back home, some 8,000 miles away.

Yet it’s difficult to say how many Taiwanese Americans live in Houston, or nationwide, because the U.S. Census Bureau generally lumps them in with those from mainland China. For political and bureaucratic reasons, Taiwan is not specifically listed in the census as an option for race. That omission reflects the United States’ complicated position on the relationship between Taiwan and China. In 1979, the United States extended recognition to the communist People’s Republic of China and withdrew recognition for the Taiwan-based Republic of China (ROC), a government whose leaders had fled the communist revolution. Since, the U.S. position has been to neither accept mainland China’s claim of control over Taiwan nor endorse Taiwanese separatist contentions that the ROC is an independent, sovereign state. 

Through a complex analysis of other Census questions about birthplace, ancestry, nationality, and languages spoken, the Pew Research Center estimated in 2019 that as many as 697,000 people with ties to Taiwan live in the United States. Census survey data from 2021 and 2022 indicated that about 410,000 U.S. residents report Taiwanese ancestry, and 8.5 percent of them live in Texas. Houston has the state’s largest Tawanese-American community, and it remains a hotbed for Taiwanese nationalism, as tensions between China and the United States rise and as Taiwanese Americans push U.S. leaders for more support. 

But what independence and identity mean for the younger generation of Taiwanese Texans differs from the ideas of Houston elders who have long fought for their homeland.

The older generations of my U.S. family have no memory of living in an independent Taiwan. The island, made up of mountains and plains, has a population of 23 million in an area a little larger than Maryland and is located roughly 100 miles from southeast China. It was first inhabited by Indigenous people and by early migrants mostly from the southern Chinese province of Fujian whose local dialect over time morphed into Taiwanese Hokkien. Taiwan has been colonized for centuries. Portuguese explorers renamed it Formosa—the beautiful island—and the Dutch and Spanish later invaded. Taiwan was annexed by the Chinese Qing dynasty in 1683 and, after 200 years, ceded in 1895 to Japan, who controlled it until 1945.

My grandparents grew up speaking both Japanese and Taiwanese. My grandmother served as a nurse for the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II. 

After WWII, Chiang’s ROC government took over Taiwan. An independence movement then grew, culminating in a massive protest on February 28, 1947. But the demonstrations were quashed after between 18,000 and 28,000 people were killed or disappeared during what became known as the 228 Massacre. Then, in 1949, Chiang’s government lost the civil war to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party, and Chiang and his supporters escaped to Taiwan, renaming the island the Republic of China—which remains the official name today, to the chagrin of many Taiwanese. What followed was the White Terror, four decades in which Chiang’s Kuomintang party kept Taiwan’s citizens under martial law and repressed any critical speech or activity. Before coming to the States in the 1970s, my parents and their siblings had spent their entire youth under Chiang’s dictatorship. 

One afternoon this May, at his accounting office a few streets away from busy Bellaire Boulevard, my uncle John Lin, the fourth of five siblings in my mom’s family, told me what it was like to grow up under martial law: “Pretty much [we] were treated as second class.” 

Free speech and the right to assembly were prohibited. The Taiwanese were made to pay fines or perform community service if they were caught speaking their mother tongue. (Many of my dad’s elementary school days were spent outside hoisting the ROC flag as punishment for violating this rule.) According to my uncle, from primary school through college, many students were made to memorize details about 5,000 years of China’s dynastic history but learned nothing about their own land. 

My grandparents were poor rural farmers, and Kuomintang rule affected them less than city dwellers. Still, my uncle noticed he had to work harder in school to get into college. The Chinese who’d arrived with Chiang received privileged access to universities and government jobs. 

Lin graduated from the National Taiwan University, completed required military service, worked a few jobs, then decided to move to the United States with his fiance, my aunt Vivian. When my uncle started graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin in 1979, he joined the Taiwanese Association of America (TAA) and became active in independence politics. 

He said he felt “deceived” when he started learning the truth in the United States about incidents in Taiwan, like the 228 Massacre. “We never got the real story,” Lin said, adding that as children they were taught not to ask questions: “‘Kids only have ears, no mouths, just listen.’”

In Texas, the seeds of opposition had been sown in 1969 when Taiwanese students at UT-Austin started gathering to discuss Taiwan’s political situation. In March 1970, they established the TAA and registered a “Formosan Club” with 40 members. The TAA offered immigrant students mutual assistance, social and recreational activities, and political education. Some members began agitating for Taiwan’s independence and an end to the White Terror.

By 1975, about 32,000 Taiwanese were studying in the United States, according to an article titled “Patterns of Personal and Political Life Among Taiwanese-Americans”  by Linda Arrigo, a retired Taipei Medical University sociology professor. These students formed more TAA chapters and were influenced by the U.S. civil rights movement and by anti-imperialist liberation theology, a largely Catholic movement founded in Latin America to fight for the oppressed. 

But joining the TAA could have consequences. 

Minly Sung, now 66, a Texan who later served as president of Houston’s TAA from 2019-21, first joined the organization as a student at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, though her parents warned her not to. Her older relatives had been persecuted for participating in the 1947 anti-government uprising in Taipei. Sung’s mom warned she had uncles who were “killed,” “executed,” or sent “to prison,” Sung recalled in an interview.

The Kuomintang party—which harbored ambitions of seizing power back from the communists and ruling a unified China, with Taiwan included—responded to young Taiwanese nationalists’ activism by sending “professional students” on government-paid scholarships to spy and report on U.S. campuses. If students were identified as TAA members or participated in pro-independence activities, they would be blacklisted, barred from reentering Taiwan, arrested upon return, and their families in the homeland would be harassed. 

Some Houston activists were blacklisted. Mike Kuo, a retired food manufacturing scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and former president of the Houston Formosan Association for Public Affairs, was put on the blacklist from 1974 (when he was a student at Texas A&M University) until 1992. But the threat of arrest didn’t stop Kuo, now 75, from visiting family. In 1991, he changed the name on his passport, donned a fake beard, altered his hairstyle, and snuck into the country. 

“I did not let my parents know I was there until one day when I visited my sister’s place. I knew the Taiwanese government would know and then put someone near my house to try to catch me when I visited my parents,” he said. To get his parents to come over, Kuo said he had his sister tell them she had gotten into a fight with her husband and needed their help. When they arrived, they were shocked, happy, and so afraid because they knew that I was not allowed to come back.” Then they all hugged and laughed until he had to leave. 

Government officials chased Kuo after realizing he was on the island, but they didn’t catch him until he was at the airport for his return flight. Law enforcement agents interrogated him for nine hours but found no grounds for arrest and let him go. 

Others who were blacklisted and attempted to visit were not as lucky. In 1981, Chen Wen-chen, an outspoken Carnegie Mellon professor who had joined a Taiwanese association as a U.S. graduate student, was detained and murdered upon his return (though Taiwanese authorities claimed Chen’s mysterious fatal fall during an interrogation was a suicide or an accident). The incident spurred congressional hearings to investigate the systemic surveillance of Taiwanese Americans by ROC agents.

“The fact that files are kept on Taiwanese students and faculty in this country is nothing new. For more than 15 years, students have been receiving parents’ secret letters, hand-carried here by close friends, informing them of family harassment,” Jim Leach, then an Iowa Congressman, said during the hearing. 

In Houston, TAA members and others staged demonstrations against the persecution of political dissidents, fundraised to support families, and advocated for Taiwan’s democracy until finally they started to see progress. 

Chiang Ching-kuo became president three years after his father Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975. But, after the younger Chiang’s death in 1988, Taiwan opened up under the native Taiwanese Kuomintang president Lee Teng-hui.

Lin, my uncle, as the secretary general of the Taiwanese Chambers of Commerce of North America, organized the group’s first official trip to meet with Lee in Taiwan in 1989. The delegation presented two gifts: a cowboy buckle with the U.S. seal, and smoked salmon. “We told him that, like salmon, Taiwanese Americans will one day go back home to our birthplace. And the buckle symbolized our invitation to him to visit us in the United States,” Lin said. 

It was the first time relations became friendlier between proponents of Taiwanese independence in America and the ROC government back home. A second wave of Taiwanese migration began in the 1990s, including businessmen who brought investment capital to Texas. Many members of my family benefitted, including my uncle, whose accounting firm grew and brought middle class stability to the family. 

In 2000, three years after Taiwan’s first direct popular election, voters on the island elected Chen Shui-bian, the country’s first nationalist DPP candidate, with help from a Houston support group.

Sung, who had graduated from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and was already active in Houston’s TAA chapter by then, helped organize the Taiwanese community in states from Florida to Texas to donate to DPP candidates and to travel home to vote. “I believed at the time that Taiwanese people had the first chance to win,” Sung told me.

When Chen visited Houston a year into his presidency, in June 2001, Sung was among those who met him throughout his weekend trip. Three-thousand Taiwanese Americans, including activists who traveled from other states, greeted the former president at his hotel with posters that read, “YES to Taiwan Independence” or, “I love Taiwan.” Sporting a bolo tie, cowboy hat, and boots, Chen chowed down on steak at the Taste of Texas in a 250-person luncheon that included Houston-area Congress members, then attended an Astros baseball game accompanied by Sung and hundreds of other Houstonians who supported Taiwanese independence. “It was like a carnival. People were singing Taiwanese folk songs. We were so happy, as if we had gone back to Taiwan for the inauguration,” Sung said. 

When another DPP president, Tsai Ing-wen, made a similar U.S. trip in 2017, Sung welcomed her with an introductory speech along with other supporters. On that trip, Houston and Los Angeles were Tsai’s only stops.

By the 2000s, Sung and my uncle had been joined by plenty of other activists and organizations. More than two-dozen Taiwanese organizations formed in Houston: Taiwanese Buddhist temples, Presbyterian churches, policy groups like the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, business organizations like the Taiwanese Chamber of Commerce, and cultural groups like the Taiwanese Heritage Society, which runs the Taiwanese Community Center near my uncle’s office, and the Taiwanese School of Language and Culture. (The City of Houston contributed $400,000 to help expand the Taiwanese Community Center in the mid-’90s.) 

These Houston groups support Taiwan’s independence, but individuals differ on how that independence should be defined. Some pro-independence stalwarts, like Kuo, believe Taiwan must rid itself of the ROC name and gain an official voting seat in the United Nations. “As long as you have to use those two names together, Taiwan/the Republic of China, you are not really independent,” Kuo said. “The threat from China is always there. You have sovereignty without real independence.”

Others, like my uncle, believe that Taiwan is already sovereign and independent and does not need to antagonize China by changing its name. In 2009, he helped establish the Share, Trust, Unity, and Family United Fund, an international charitable organization. While Taiwan has no voting power in the United Nations, his organization has consultative status with the U.N. Economic and Social Council. 

“To become a U.N. member is a complicated political process that is beyond our capacity. But it’s different to participate in U.N. global affairs,” Lin said. “At this moment, we don’t need to change our name to be independent. With support from like-minded countries, like the U.S. and Japan, to keep Taiwan a free and democratic society, and to participate meaningfully in the [U.N.] as recognized by other countries as Taiwan, is more important than changing the name.” 

Independence initiatives often get tangled up in the web formed by the uneasy relationship between China and the United States. In 2003, Taiwanese President Chen attempted to hold a popular referendum to create a new constitution and in 2008 initiated efforts to gain a seat in the United Nations under the name Taiwan. “The U.S. totally threw cold water” on those plans, Arrigo said. 

“They told Taiwan ‘You’re a troublemaker, you have no right to have a plebiscite or determine your own future,” Arrigo, the sociology professor, told me over a phone call from Taiwan. 

Arrigo is both an expert and an activist. She has fought for Taiwan’s independence for 50 years (she’s been arrested, deported, and blacklisted for her activities), and she’s served both as an officer for the social justice-oriented and environmentalist Green Party of Taiwan and a spokesperson for the DPP. She argues that Taiwan’s opportunities to get the United States to help free itself from China have diminished. “Now China is a major economic and military power that is even challenging the U.S. in world diplomacy. … Now, at this point, you can say, ‘Okay, can the U.S. support a Taiwan being independent?’ Well, it’s like the ship has already left.”

As China increasingly threatens U.S. global economic and political dominance, tensions have increased, said Yao-Yuan Yeh, a Taiwanese-American professor at Houston’s University of St. Thomas. The United States has reframed its relationship with China from one of cooperation to one of competition, he said. Yeh traces this shift to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power—Xi removed presidential term limits in 2018. Xi’s aggressive stance has included increasing military exercises near Taiwan. 

Yet any display of force from either country so far seems to be no more than a display, Yeh said. China sends missiles down the Taiwan Strait and conducts mock air and sea strikes to send warnings to Taiwan’s new president, DPP leader Lai Ching-te. Lai, who took office in May, has declared he will not change the status quo. So far, the United States has not signed a new bilateral defense agreement with Taiwan, (after an earlier treaty expired in 1979), though it has sold weapons to the country. In 2024 alone, President Joe Biden promised four times to send troops to Taiwan if China attacks, yet he emphasized: “We do not support independence for Taiwan.” 

Leading up to the U.S. presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris committed to Biden’s promise to defend Taiwan against any Chinese attacks, while GOP nominee Donald Trump remained more ambiguous, telling Bloomberg Businessweek, “Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company,” he said. “Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.”

Taiwanese leaders hold divided alliances—some have courted Democrats, while others have approached right-wing conservatives, including the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 fame) and Trump. 

“In Taiwan, everybody looks at things through the prism of who’s bashing China. So from that point of view, they saw Trump is bashing China and so they thought Trump was a hero,” Arrigo said. 

Often, Taiwanese are willing to shift with America’s political winds, she said, without examining the details or the bigger picture, she said. “[The United States] is quite arrogant, always thinking it has enough money and military power to get away with whatever it does at the time being, so the effect is the Taiwanese don’t see any moral issue in aligning totally with U.S. interests.” 

On the 10th floor of the Partnership Tower on Avenida De Las Americas, the Greater Houston Partnership’s conference room offers a view of downtown’s sparkling white and blue glass towers. Here, on June 4, the regional economic development organization, together with the Taiwan External Trade Development Council and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Houston (a de facto consulate), brought 13 Taiwanese companies to present products and services ranging from high-tech gadgets to plastic molds to lithium batteries.

Taiwanese companies are looking to profit off of the rise of artificial intelligence and the energy transition in Texas, and Texas business leaders see an opening to expand trade under Lai’s presidency.

“It is wonderful that Taiwan just had free and fair elections,” John Cypher, a leader for the business-friendly nonprofit hosting the event, told the gathering. “It seems that Taiwan’s business trends and then commercial trends are going to remain on the steady path … and this bodes well for Houston.”

DPP leadership in Taiwan has already been a huge boon to Houston and Texas. When Tsai Ing-wen became president in 2016, Houston’s trade with Taiwan hovered around $1 billion. Last year, it reached $10.2 billion, about half of the total Texas-Taiwan trade. According to the Governor’s Economic Development & Tourism Office, in 2022, Taiwanese companies infused $5.29 billion into eight different projects. Foxconn, a Taiwanese company, known for making iPhone parts, has been expanding its assembly plant in Houston. GlobalWafers, a Taiwan-based semiconductor silicon wafer company is expected to complete construction of its factory in Sherman, near the Oklahoma border, by the end of this year, and has promised 1,500 jobs. 

In July, Governor Greg Abbott traveled to Taiwan to meet with President Lai to discuss investments in semiconductor manufacturing, electric vehicles, and energy resilience. During the meeting, Abbott announced he would open a State of Texas Taiwan Office: “Texas and Taiwan are critical economic partners that seek to drive the future of innovation,” Abbott said in a press release. 

Unlike their parents, some younger Taiwanese-American activists are questioning whether such relationships between the island and the United States will bring about independence or better conditions for the next generation. Grace Huang, a 34-year-old Taiwanese American from Houston, moved to her family home in Taichung, Taiwan’s second largest city, in 2017, after her father passed away. Like many others, her father had suffered emotionally as an exile after being blacklisted by the Taiwanese government during the White Terror. 

Huang said she found out more about Taiwanese history when her dad was in terminal care. Initially, what she learned shocked her, Huang said in a phone call. But over time her discoveries gave her a more nuanced understanding of the independence movement. She arrived during a time of optimism: The Sunflower Student Movement had protested China’s tightening economic bonds in demonstrations all across Taiwan and helped propel Tsai to the presidency in 2016. 

But Huang said that in her seven years in Taiwan, she’s found that Taiwanese party leaders’ arguments no longer resonate and many younger people are struggling. Huang began attending meetings of the upstart Taiwan Obasang Political Equality Party, which formed in 2020 to promote gender equality, environmental rights, and reducing social service costs. “They also spoke up a lot about the barriers to entry into party politics … [because] the main parties are super, super rich,” Huang said. “They get so much funding and support from the government that it makes it even more prohibitive for new parties to enter and new voices to enter the conversations.”

Huang said that many people in Taiwan are “being crushed by [the] tech monopolization of Taiwan’s economy. … The disparities of salaried income are so extreme.”

Oliver Yang, 43, another expat from Houston, has seen even more changes during his 20 years in Taipei. In the late 1990s, he and I graduated from Bellaire High School, where a third of our class was Asian-American, mostly Taiwanese. Along with my cousins, we studied language and culture at the Taiwanese Community Center, and we attended Taiwanese summer camps. Some took student trips to Taiwan that we dubbed “The Love Boat,” since many teens who participated seemed more interested in making out than learning. 

Unlike our parents’ generation, the right to assert our Taiwanese-American identity in Houston was an unconscious act, not a rebellion. By phone from Taipei, Yang said the next generation seems even less concerned about Taiwan’s sovereignty. “Our parents have been struggling and trying to grow their families in the U.S. It is very different here. And people here are vocal about what they think and there is a lot of independence here. They are free to do whatever they want,“ Yang said. Many, he said, just “want to party and hang out and not care about politics.”

Back in Houston, despite differences on the question of national autonomy, the older and younger generations are working together to raise awareness of Taiwan’s distinct heritage and culture. On May 18, at the inaugural celebration for President Lai at the Taiwanese Community Center, I met middle and high school members of the Formosan Association of Student Cultural Ambassadors and members of the punk rock group East Wind Band. 

I stood next to my uncle, among a crowd of 500 people standing and waving their cell phones, emitting rays of light in the darkened room, as people sang along to the band performing “Island Sunrise” in the Taiwanese Hokkien language.

The song and lyrics (translated here by Musixmatch) were written by the punk rock band Fire EX for the Sunflower Student Movement’s struggle to promote Taiwan’s independence. 

Thinn-sik tsiām-tsiām kng
天色漸漸光 咱就大聲來唱著歌
The sky is lighting up, let’s sing the song loudly

Lán tiō tuā-siann lâi tshiūnn tiòh kua
一直到希望的光線 照著島嶼每一個人
Until the light of hope lights up everyone in this island

Jìt-thâu tsìt peh tsiūnn suann
天色漸漸光 咱就大聲來唱著歌
The sky is lighting up, let’s sing the song loudly

Hiān-tsāi sī hit tsìt kang
日頭一爬上山 就會使轉去啦
When the sun climbs up the mountain, everything will change

Ióng-kám ê Tâi-uân-lâng
現在是彼一工 勇敢的台灣人
Today is the day, the brave Taiwanese