In 1988, at the peak of their careers, Bess and James decided to emigrate to Australia for the sake of their son, whose health was sagging under the academic pressures of junior high school in Taiwan.

Leaving home lugging his book bag at 7:00 am, he'd take not only a lunch box but a "dinner box" as well. With marks "stalled in the single digits," he was quickly losing confidence and started feigning illness to avoid school. It wasn't anything too serious, just a nagging cough, but a doctor diagnosed it as an allergic reaction to the air of Taiwan. Seeing her son's spirit and health both turn for the worse, Bess decided to head for a country free from exam torments.

Before emigrating, James was a financial vice president for a securities company and Bess the office manager of the accounting firm, T.N. Soong. The couple lived on Tunhua South Road in Taipei, went down one flight to their parked car, drove to work and then drove back home. It was a life where, as James once put it, "the soles of our shoes never had to touch Taipei's grime."

（left and right） Seven years ago, as a new immigrant to Australia, the Changs' daughter was still in elementary school. Now she's a pretty young woman. （photos by Vincent Chang）

No thoughts of return

Having decided to emigrate, they didn't imagine they would ever move back. Trips to Taiwan would just be for visiting relatives, they thought. If they had known all along that they would return, they wouldn't have forked out on decorating their new home, and they wouldn't have sold their 1980-square-foot apartment on Tunhua South Road. Today they just look at Taipei's real estate prices and sigh.

What gave them the gumption to emigrate in the first place was that both husband and wife had worked for foreign companies in the two decades since they had graduated from college. Bess, in fact, owed her job to her English ability.

While Bess had confidence in her English for Taiwan, she judged it would never be up to snuff abroad. Yet she was able to parlay her career experience into a job in the immigration department at the Sydney branch of the accounting firm C.H. Chang.

For the first half year James served as house husband, and he was quite professional about it. He cooked well and even took baking classes at night. After cleaning house, he'd enjoy himself by playing ball or swimming. But soon being idle got boring.

He took the exam for a real estate license, but disadvantaged by not having studied locally, he failed. He had worked for IBM in Taiwan for ten years, and he inquired about getting a job in their Sydney office, but IBM was making massive lay-offs. Later he turned to selling insurance for Australia's largest insurance company. His customers were mostly immigrants from Taiwan.

January 23, Liberation Day

Originally Bess and James held the attitude that "there was no turning back." But they didn't expect the Australian economy to go from bad to worse. One day Bess's boss told her that they were thinking about expanding by buying another firm's immigration business. Things took an unexpected turn overnight, and on the following day, the boss said that in accordance with market analysis, not only were they not buying, they were also going to eliminate her position.

On January 23, 1991, she came home to tell her husband that she had been "liberated." Anxiety-ridden James couldn't sleep all night, thinking about how they had lost their main source of income.

So James went back to Taiwan and asked old friends for help in finding work. He knew that he was competing against other returnees. Perhaps because he hadn't left for too long, he still had good contacts, and he got six offers. Happy that his "usefulness hadn't expired," he moved back, at first by himself.

As regards to going home, Bess was thinking about their children's future. Neither son nor daughter was willing to live with a family of strangers, and none of the family's Taiwanese friends in Australia was willing to take them in. Studying at the Taipei American School would cost over NT$100,000 a term, so that was ruled out. Finally the parents turned to relatives in America.

James' younger brother there said he would take them in, and the kids were interested in America, so they finally packed up to go study in the States.

A second disruption

The children had always lived with James and her, and so Bess couldn't help but feel depressed when she returned to Taipei alone after taking them to America.

After teaching English at a language center for a while, she was hired by the Australian Commerce and Industry Office in Taipei in January of 1992 as an administrative manager, and she started on a new career.

Though taxing, her work was very rewarding. Yet Bess didn't expect her children to have problems getting along with their cousins. Her son was old enough to live by himself at college, but her spoiled daughter had a nasty temper and was getting into trouble with her many boyfriends. Worried about how she was enduring the throes of adolescence, Bess brought her home.

There is a limit on enrollment at the Taipei American School, and so her daughter enrolled at the American School in Taichung. To be with her, Bess quit her job at the Commerce and Industry Office and found work at a domestic emigration agency in Taichung. On weekends they sometimes go to Taipei to see Bess's parents, who are in their eighties.

Choosing and Loving

Today, the husband is working on the mainland, the wife and daughter are shuttling between Taichung and Taipei, and the son is in America. "One family in three places," a relative likes to quip, "how chic can you get?" To his wife, daughter and son, James quotes an old Chinese idiom, "Principled in action, fair with people." Applying this standard wherever they are, in whatever situation, they each have their own role to play.

Now Bess is helping others emigrate, and she speaks to her clients from her own experience. "Don't move all your assets abroad," she warns them. "Emigrating is risky, and few can make it a road of no return." Next she stresses how learning the language is well worth the effort spent, how hard life will be with trouble communicating.

What comfortable lives she and James had before in Taipei! And in Australia they lived as high-class overseas Chinese in a house of 3600 square-feet, with a big front yard and a swimming pool around back. One Australian dollar was worth NT$24 when they bought the house, but only NT$18.5 when they sold. They lost NT$3 million on it. "In big moves like those, you never make money," James says.

Not begrudging the money they lost, they regret neither the leaving nor the coming back. Everything in life is a learning experience, and the integrity of their international family is a source of pride for them. Relying on the family's sense of togetherness, they've adapted to wherever they've gone.

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(left and right) Seven years ago, as a new immigrant to Australia, the Changs' daughter was still in elementary school. Now she's a pretty young woman.

(photos by Vincent Chang)