Generation 1.5:Going Where the Action Is

The Queensland Taiwanese Center is alive with activity on a Saturday afternoon, reverberating with good cheer. The crowd has come to hear Stanley Hsu, a young second-generation entrepreneur invited to speak by the Taiwan Chamber of Commerce, share his entrepreneurial experience with young would-be entrepreneurs.

The 31-year-old Hsu is a licensed physical therapist who has opened a large mall-based clinic employing 10 therapists. He also owns a shop that rents vendors small cubes of space in which to display their wares.

Hsu has a great nose for business. He stumbled across the "cube shop" concept on the streets of Taipei while visiting his parents last year and thought it would be a good fit for Australia where rents and labor are expensive, and barriers to entry into the entrepreneurial arena are high. "People can go into business for themselves for just A$30-some a week," he says. "In Australia, that's a dream come true."

But Hsu's ambitions reach far beyond making money. In fact, he hopes to go into politics. A member of the Labor Party for many years, he is currently serving as its Brisbane secretary general, actively networking, and awaiting the opportunity to throw his hat into the ring.

Stanley Hsu has a keen nose for business. He's introduced the Taiwanese "cube store" concept to Australia, bringing entrepreneurship to the masses in this land of high rents and high labor costs.

Perhaps it is the flexibility and ingenuity characteristic of Taiwanese that has made involvement in multiple ventures a defining characteristic of second-generation immigrants.

Sung Wen-cheng, director-general of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Brisbane, says that while Australia's young people typically begin working in high school, the children of Taiwanese immigrants instead focus on their studies at the urging of their parents. Since they usually don't work part-time or join clubs, they enter the working world as adults with no job experience and no social network. As a result, they often struggle.

Johnson Chen, a 30-year-old who came to Australia with his family 15 years ago following political turmoil in South Africa, didn't get to enjoy the coddled life of most second-generation immigrants. Instead, he began working part-time while still in high school to help support his family. That experience honed his English and his "never surrender" attitude. After graduating from the law department of his university, he passed the civil service exam and went to work for the Queensland State Government's Department of Education and Training as a senior contracts administrator in its corporate procurement office.

Chen has also been preparing to go into business for himself. "I don't want to compete where loads of people are already doing business," he says. "I'm looking for things that people aren't doing and that have potential." After studying the outlook for green energy for a few years, he established Australia United Energy, which will focus on importing small wind turbines from Taiwan to Australia.

Chen is also active in the Taiwanese community. He is the secretary-general of the Taiwanese Chamber of Commerce, Queensland, and the director of the Taiwanese Chamber of Commerce, Oceania, positions that he hopes will provide stepping stones into politics.

Young "citizens of the world" are going wherever the opportunities are. To them, "roots" can be transplanted and homes can be moved. Arthur Kuo, 36, has decided to return to Taiwan to seek work and a spouse.

Unlike their parents, who were only interested in making money or living the good life, the second-generation immigrants are incorporating politics into their career plans.

Sung Wen-cheng believes that this younger generation will have to reach beyond the ethnically Chinese communities and enter the mainstream if it is to truly set down roots in this new land. Political participation is a crucial part of the process.

But that's a difficult row to hoe. Take the US, for example. Ethnic Chinese had been in the US for more than 100 years before Hiram L. Fong became the first Chinese-American elected to the US Senate in 1960. His success paved the way for other Chinese-Americans, including Elaine Chao, Gary Locke, and David Wu, to enter the political arena.

Taiwanese had only been immigrating to Australia for 30 years when Steven Huang became the first Taiwanese-Australian and first Asian-Australian on the Brisbane City Council in May 2011.

Born in Taipei's Wanhua District, Huang emigrated to Australia with his parents at the age of 12.

So-called generation 1.5 immigrants are those who emigrated only after completing elementary or middle school in Taiwan. Generally speaking, the Taiwanese portion of these immigrants' educations has turned out to be a mixed blessing in Australia, aiding them in their math and science classes but hindering them in their humanities classes. Huang, however, has traveled an unusual road. After moving to Australia, he spent nine months in a language school before enrolling in a local high school. He then embarked on a double major in political science and economics at the University of Queensland before his relatively poor math skills compelled him to give up economics. After shifting his focus entirely to political science, Huang became Professor Chiou Chwei-Liang's star student.

Huang has a good head for business in spite of his relatively poor math skills, and has achieved notable success in his business ventures. These include importing water-saving products (shower heads and faucets) for the city government, and exporting coal and iron ore to mainland China.

Steven Huang, who became a Brisbane City Councilor in May 2011, has ignited the political hopes of second-generation Taiwanese immigrants in Australia.

Huang has been quietly laying the groundwork for his political ambitions for 13 years. He made his first run for city councilor in 1998 while in his senior year at university. In 2002, he went back to Taiwan to work on DPP member Lee Ying-yuan's Taipei mayoral campaign. Though Lee lost, Huang gained considerable campaign experience.

"It wasn't really planned," he says. "It's just that when you move in those circles for a long time, you naturally develop political ties." Huang's father is an architect and executive director of the Taiwan Professional Environmental Engineers Association. His mother is a former member of the Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission. Huang's political endeavors not only have his parents' blessing, but also the unstinting advice and support of Professor Chiou.

"The real test will come next March," says Huang, who explains that he owes his position to the floods. Lacking the political clout that the ruling party derived from its flood relief efforts, the opposition party (the Liberal National Party) determined that its talented Brisbane mayor was its most creditable candidate for state office. When the mayor resigned to campaign, the deputy mayor moved into the mayor's office, opening up the space on the city council to which Huang was appointed.

Huang naturally can't serve only the Taiwanese immigrant community, but says he joined the LNP precisely because it has been a better friend to Taiwanese.

When Brisbane hosted the Asia Pacific Cities Summit in 1996, the then mayor, a member of the Labor Party, initially refused to invite Taiwanese cities to participate. Protests from Brisbane's immigrant community and pressure from the LNP ultimately compelled him to reverse course.

"The LNP is well positioned for next year's election," says Chiou. "Huang stands a good chance." Chiou notes that Huang has the advantage of incumbency and argues that as long as he provides good constituent services, the election's in the bag.

Some young people are using their bicultural experience to create opportunities for themselves locally, while others are using their bilingualism and biculturalism to seek opportunities in Taiwan.

Research by Hsu Jung-chung, a professor at Taipei Municipal College of Education, has shown that 32.3% of Taiwanese immigrants in Australia wish to return to their native land. Their reasons aren't surprising. They want to seek good jobs, be with family, take over the family business, or find a spouse, or they simply miss their motherland.

Generally speaking, young people who have studied medicine, agriculture, the humanities, and law are more inclined to stay in Australia because salaries are higher and job opportunities plentiful. Those who have studied business or an IT-related field are more inclined to go back because Taiwan offers better prospects.

Arthur Kuo, a 36-year-old who came to Australia with his parents in 1987, lived in Sydney for 19 years. Five years ago, he decided to leave the parental nest and, following in the footsteps of a younger brother who had left a year earlier, returned to Taiwan to find a job and a spouse.

Kuo, who studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate and medical engineering in graduate school, worked in Sydney for four years. But Australia has few technology companies and changing fields is difficult. Kuo tried starting his own business developing e-commerce and digital monitoring systems, but didn't succeed and decided that starting over in Taiwan was his best option. He now works in the financial industry handling foreign sales for his firm, which does business with Australia.

"Unless you speak English as well as an Australian, you're going to have a hard time finding a job in Australia," says Jessy Hsieh, who lived in Australia with her family for five years after graduating from a university in Taiwan. When she completed her master's degree 18 months ago, she went back to Taiwan where she worked for a migration agency as a marketing manager.

But the number of Taiwanese immigrants to Australia has fallen in recent years, and her company downsized. Hsieh left it to take a job with a company that arranges study tours to the US, a job for which English language skills were the principal qualification.

Generation 1.5 immigrants were born in Taiwan, yet many who move back have trouble adapting. Some even experience culture shock.

Lin Ling (not her real name), who holds a business degree from the University of Queensland, worked for a bank in Melbourne for four years earning the equivalent of NT$60-70,000 per month. On a purchasing power parity basis, her salary was roughly the same as that of a recent graduate in Taiwan. When her parents and younger brother moved back to Taiwan, Lin, left alone in Australia, began looking into the Asian job market. She now holds a position with the Taiwan office of an Australian organization.

"I'm not really used to the 'overtime culture' in Taiwan," she says. She explains that in Taiwan, you can't leave work before your boss, whereas in Australia, on the rare occasions that she had to work until 6:30, her colleagues would exclaim: "Why are you still working? Get a life!"

She's also unused to Taiwan's chaotic traffic and poor air quality. She doesn't dare drive a car in Taiwan and is scared even to cross the street. And she's suffering from allergies in Taiwan's humidity, leaving her to hope she will eventually acclimate.

Moving back and forth has become commonplace among the younger generation of immigrants. But how will it affect their careers? One school of thought holds that this younger generation hasn't put down deep roots in and doesn't strongly identify with Australia. Members of this generation who retain close ties to their motherland tend to feel that they can move back and forth as circumstances warrant. If their career should happen to stall in Australia, they can simply go back to Taiwan. But this school of thought therefore regards them as having no real loyalties.

Another school of thought holds that in the highly globalized modern world, transnational immigrants should move between cultures. They don't feel subject to the traditional either/or choice between their motherland and adopted land. They are adaptable individuals, citizens of the world who can adjust to local circumstances and have a broader and more fluid understanding of "home." Their work, family, and retirement plans are constantly evolving based on opportunity and circumstance. Having more autonomy and freedom of choice than their parents, they see their success in life as being in their own hands.