Setting Down Roots in Taiwan

At 9 a.m., a group of women sits together at Ah-Fen’s Posubao, a store selling Yunnanese snacks located in a private house on the periphery of a market just off Huaxin Street in New Taipei City’s Zhonghe District, an area to which many Burmese-Taiwanese people gravitate.

The leader of the group is Liu Cuifen, known as Ah-Fen. She made her name locally for her flaky Yun­nan­ese posubao buns. Her daughter Lily Yang is among the group. The family, originally hailing from Yunnan, immigrated to Taiwan from the small eastern Burmese town of Tangyan when Lily was a child, relying on the cooking skills cultivated in their old home to raise a family of ten.

Lily Yang came with her family on the grueling trip from their hometown to the then-capital Yangon, to take a flight to Taiwan. This photo was taken as they stopped in Mandalay along the way. (courtesy of Lily Yang)

Coming “home”

As a result of the many traditions upheld by Yun­nan­ese families, and their immigrant origins, the family is always mindful of where they came from. For example, high up on one of the white interior walls hang portraits of grandparents who passed away on the China-­Myanmar border, along with portraits of family members celebrating weddings, on visits home, and receiving awards. These various images quietly hint at the fam­ily’s tumultuous history and their journey from Yunnan to Myanmar and on to Taiwan.

Lily Yang opens an old suitcase that her father brought from Myanmar. Full of the family’s precious memories, it contains the police clearance certificates her parents used for immigration, graduation certificates and awards received by the children at various stages of their lives, and photos that have long since faded.

This is where she recently found the certificates issued by the ROC government that recog­nized her family as “overseas Chinese,” enabling them to obtain tempor­ary Burmese passports with which to travel to Taiwan. What surprised her was that the field stating their reason for coming to Taiwan indicated simply that it was for “establish­ing a domicile.” Regardless of all the hassle around packing up and moving the whole family to a new country, the official documentation on the Taiwanese side treated the process as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “So, was there always a link between Taiwan and me?” she couldn’t help but think.

A family photo that Lily Yang’s father brought with him when he left Myanmar for Taiwan (Lily can be seen in the front row, first right). Immigrant families like Yang’s make a special effort to remember where they came from. (courtesy of Lily Yang)

A childhood left behind

Coming to Taiwan, then, seemed like the fulfillment of fate. Nevertheless, from a young age, Yang knew she was different from other people.

In multiethnic Myanmar, a cacophony of different languages is commonplace—Burman people speaking Burmese, Shan people speaking Shan, and ethnic Chinese in the north, who mostly hail from Yunnan, speaking Yunnan Mandarin. After coming to Taiwan, though, she found herself surrounded by an unfamiliar language in a strange country where nobody understood the dialect she had grown up with.

The linguistic and cultural barriers she faced saw her lag well behind her peers in element­ary school. Although still young, she soon learned to hide the part of herself that belonged to Myanmar in order to avoid the curious looks of others. The Burmese Lily Yang began to fade away in the process of growing up, until she set foot in her native land again after more than 20 years.

In Myanmar, she could comfortably speak Yunnanese Mandarin again; the snacks of her childhood, a rare sight in Taiwan, could be found everywhere; and friends and family didn’t call her by her formal Chinese name, Yang Wanli, but rather by her childhood pet name, “Xiao Tuan,” which means “chubby” in Yun­nan­ese. Memories that had been buried were revived, and she felt as if a missing piece of herself was finally found again.

Lily Yang’s (center) parents opened their own store in an alley adjacent to Huaxin Street, where they could ply their trade in a distinctive Burmese snack food.

Rapping about home

If Myanmar is the focus of nostalgia for this new genera­tion of Burmese-Taiwanese, then Taiwan, where they were raised, is like the invisible hand that has molded and shaped them.

In Yang’s Burmese hometown, several tunes from Taiwan, but sung in Yunnan Mandarin, are popular in the Chinese community. The lyrics are concise, describing the life of a person of Yunnanese heritage, his past in his hometown of Kutkai (a small town in Shan State in eastern Myanmar), and his feelings of rootlessness in Taiwan. The dir­ect, unfiltered phrasing created a buzz among the usually low-key, conservative ethnic ­Chinese community.

The author of these lyrics is Nay Zaw Aung (Eric Duan), who turns out to be from a family connected with the ROC’s “lost army,” soldiers who set themselves down on the Burmese side of the Myanmar-Yunnan border after the Chinese Civil War. His grandfather was a National­ist soldier who followed the ROC forces as they were driven south into Myanmar, later relocating to Taiwan to settle in Longgang, Taoyuan. Answering his grandfather’s call to “come home,” Nay Zaw Aung came to Taiwan, where he tested into a college for overseas Chinese students at what is now the Linkou Campus of National Taiwan Normal University, before ultimately gradu­ating from National Tsing Hua University.

In those days, Taiwan was the spiritual homeland of many overseas Chinese. Nay Zaw Aung, who grew up listen­ing to Dave Wang and Chang Yu-sheng, had a dream of performing on stage, a dream that has been fulfilled in Taiwan. Here, together with classmates from college, he formed the band Underflow, which became popular among young people for a time, serving as its lead vocalist.

After graduating, the band broke up and its members went their separate ways. Nay Zaw Aung never forgot his ­musical ambi­tions, eventually experimenting with rapping in his ­native language despite having no musi­cians to back him up. Not only did it stick, that a capella aspect is now a core part of his current identity as independent musician “Duan.”

These Burmese buns come in both sweet and savory varieties. Their layered flaky wrapping is their most distinctive feature.

What makes Taiwan Taiwan

Nay Zaw Aung’s tracks are not concerned with mere love and ­romance, but with social issues, family, and national affairs, and he never shies away from voicing his own thoughts and feelings. His person­ality is just as straightforward as his tunes, and even though he has drawn criti­cism, he remains true to himself.

Taiwan’s influence on him in this regard cannot be ignored. Having lived in Taiwan for more than 20 years, Nay Zaw Aung admits that he is becoming more and more like a Taiwanese himself.

A lover of sports, he is drawn to Taiwan’s wealth of natural resources. Having settled in Hsinchu, he often hikes historic trails in the mountains and goes surfing or deep diving in the sea, taking advantage of the geo­graphy to its fullest. Seeing the news that Taipei has been rated the most livable city in Asia, he agrees en­thusi­astic­ally. “I really love Taiwan!” he says with a brilliant smile.

Who would not consider him part of the generation nurtured by Taiwanese society? As such he has grown into someone who loves freedom, lives un­restrained, and is staunchly faithful to himself. He may have come from Myanmar, but he is intimately bound to Taiwan.

The difference becomes especially clear each time he steps out of his comfort zone. Whenever Lily Yang returns to Myanmar, she too feels happy to revisit her childhood memories, but also realizes how different she has become from her family and friends of the same genera­tion there. “My cousins in Myanmar always joke with me about how ‘you Taiwanese’ are such-and-such.”

Nay Zaw Aung, from Kutkai, Myanmar, found a stage for himself in Taiwan, fulfilling his dream of becoming a singer.

Mingalar Par Myanmar Street bridges cultures

A few years ago, Lily Yang was invited by the in­depend­ent bookstore Brilliant Time to serve as a tour guide for Huaxin Street, home to Taiwan’s largest Burm­ese community. To flesh out her tours, Yang ­finally began to make an effort to explore her own background, about which she had been fairly unclear before.

This became the reason for a trip back to Myanmar. She now travels there every once in a while, usually hauling with her a massive suitcase loaded up with different things when going and when coming back.

She likens herself to that suitcase, always carrying a part of Taiwan to Myanmar, and then a part of her native land back to her adoptive country, dedicated to promoting cultural exchange between them.

Having lived on Huaxin Street from a young age, she noticed that the era experienced by the Burmese ­elders who first settled there was receding, and ­although the flow of goods and information was ­becoming ever easier, the cultural memories pecu­liar to this ­com­mun­ity were growing ever weaker. Yang decided she wanted to use her unique identity to promote awareness of this immigrant group in Taiwan, recording their disappearing stories at this crucial point in time. She went on to found the magazine Mingalar Par Myanmar Street, drawing content from this place where she has lived since childhood.

Lily Yang founded a publication called Mingalar Par Myanmar Street to bridge the gap between the Taiwanese public and Taiwan’s community of ethnic Chinese from Myanmar.

New generation, new perspectives

Regardless of whether or not they have a strong sense of identity or have deliberately explored their pasts, as they travel between countries, cultures, and ethnic groups, the second generation of this community are bound to go through a process of self-discovery and identi­fica­tion. Through this process, they can finally find ways to deal with their reality and answer the question of who they are, even if the process inevitably involves contra­dictions, struggles, and conflicts.

Are they Yunnanese? Taiwanese? Chinese-­Burmese? Whatever one may call them, what is certain is that trying to slot them into a single identity is too narrow. There is no doubt that they are both people of the “island of immigrants” that is Taiwan, and citizens of the world. 

venue courtesy of Mixing Studio