When yams and taros meet:
Miss Li is Shantungese. She is forty this year and has been married for ten years. Because she grew up in southern Taiwan, she speaks Taiwanese very fluently. Before she got hitched, she figured that if she married a Taiwanese, at least linguistically there would not be any problem. Little did she expect that her marriage partner wouldbe a Hakka (a subgroup considered part of the "Taiwanese, " but of Hak-kanese rather than, as the majority of ben-sheng-jen, of Fukienese origin), and she couldn't understand even one sentence of that dialect. And although her husband's family all understand Taiwanese and Mandarin, when they get together they are still accustomed to conversing in Hakka. "When I had first married into his family, I felt like I was a foreigner," she says. That old feeling of being excluded was really hard to take.
TV hostess Fang Ti is Fukienese. Her physician husband is from Shulin in Taipei County, and she has come across a similar situation.
In the past when her husband's family got together, this Mandarin speaker often couldn't get a word in. She recalls that this simply couldn't continue, so she had to devote herself to studying Taiwanese. Over the past several years, she has become able to use Taiwanese on TV to host programs.
Some problems are only discovered after marriage, but there are also frictions that can arise before marriage. Before a certain mainlander girl was going to marry into a Taiwanese family, the husband's family insisted that only a certain number of gift cakes would be an auspicious number. But the father of the bride did not feel this was necessary, and even said thoughtless things like "we don't have this custom in the mainland" and "in the mainland we feed these kinds of cakes to dogs. " As a result, although the two families still went through with the marriage, there has been a certain distance.
According to research by Wang Pu-chang, an assistant researcher at the Institute of Ethnology at the Academia Sinica, without controlling for other variables, there are definitely more disputes in cross-group households than in households in general. No matter whether in attitudes toward education of the children, methods of handling the family finances, or daily habits, there are differences in all areas. There is even a higher incidence of arguments than in households where both partners come from the same subgroup. Among the sample of same-subgroup marriages, 6.9% had considered splitting up; the corresponding figure for cross-group marriages was 8.6%.
Capable in both Taiwanese and Mandarin:
But when you turn it around, in other respects, yaro households have the upper hand.
Yaro families are usually bilingual. In a modern society where the more languages one knows the better, yaro children often have linguistic advantage. Miss Yang is a senior magazine reporter. Because she belongs to a yaro household, she is capable in both Mandarin and Taiwanese. She is very well versed in the subtle dynamic produced by the different backgrounds and cultures of her parents, which is quite an advantage for her when doing a report. In particular, when she has a topic that requires her to go to southern Taiwan, she is often much more able to get a sense of the feelings of the interviewees.
After being married, Hsiung Shu-hwa left her children in the care of her Taiwanese mother. Thus the children were already fluent in Taiwanese by he age of two. But when the kids returned home, they were in the habit of speaking Mandarin with Mom and Dad. "After they would hear children's stories at Grandma's, when they came home not only could they give a rendition in Taiwanese, they could even translate them into Mandarin for us, "says Hsiung Shu-hwa in a satisfied tone.
Fang Ti's child is also a Mandarin-Taiwanese bilinguist. Add to that that she studies English in kindergarten, and she is already "trilingual."
According to Wang Pu-chang's research, the generation of children produced by cross-group marriages has a lower "provincial identity consciousness" than those of purely Taiwanese or mainlander families. "This holds regardless of whether you look at it from statistics on provincial identification or political attitudes," he notes. That cross marriages are helpful to inter-group assimilation is because, in theory, they are a voluntary, two person joint effort, which is the most difficult method to achieve inter-group fusion. Other types of blending, such as cultural, psychological, attitudinal, social, behavioral, or citizenship, can all, on the other hand, more or less be achieved through designed techniques.
Confused yaros:
Tsai Ling-yi's father is Fukienese and her mother is from Tainan. When you ask her if she feels like she is Taiwanese or mainlander, she in fact just feels confused. Her official identity card says mainlander (after her father), yet she most often uses Taiwanese as her language, and she also has no feelings toward mainland China whatsoever. Therefore she describes herself as a "half and half."
Today, as provincial consciousness is intensifying, the yaro households feel most helpless. Legislator Chou Chuan's father is a mainlander and her mother a Taiwanese, so she is classified as a mainlander, and moreover is seen as part of a "mainlander clique" politically. Chou Chuan feels extremely angry about this: "Don't ask me to choose sides." Is it possible that yaro people can choose to love only their mothers or their fathers?
Most yaro people don't want to be labelled. And when politicians try to express their feelings, the ordinary yaros turn them right off. "Don't ask me about the issue of provincial identity, I'm not interested," says Shen Wen-ying, a yaro teacher.
A new kind of hometown melancholy:
Hsueh Ching-wu had been hearing his father describe "beautiful rivers and mountains, my mainland hometown" from the time he was small When he was little he perhaps had some fantasies, but when he got a little older and he knew that sanitary conditions there were not so good, the fastidious Hsueh lost all interest in "the old hometown." Despite the fact that he often travels abroad, he rarely has a notion to go to the mainland. "We'll talk about when they've got indoor plumbing!" he proclaims. Now studying abroad, what he constantly misses are the streets of Taipei. Although his ID has him classified as being from Jiangsu, his "hometown melancholy" is obviously for a place quite different than his father's.
After more than 40 years of growth in Taiwan, whether it be in outward appearance, living habits, or value systems, it is extremely difficult to distinguish ben-sheng-jen and wai-sheng-jen. Some differences in fact are merely stereotypes. "Who says mainlanders invariably eat hot peppers? My wife is Chekiangese and won't touch hot food." Or, "Mainlanders love to eat beef? What a joke. Chinese people have never loved eating beef, " says legislator Ju Gau-jeng, who has taken a Chekiang wife. In fact, many stereotypical differences between Taiwanese and mainlanders are completely groundless.
The taros have set down roots here. After marrying a yam wife, they have learned to like rice congee and have taught their wives to eat fried bread and oily bread sticks. The only problem is when the "little yaros" get picky and insist on McDonald's. "Ridiculous! How is it that a yam and a taro can give birth to a French-fried potato?" sighs the father of one little yaro.
Today's Taiwan is truly a special place which brings together unique features of all places in China, yet it has also produced a style different from any of those places. In Taiwan you can see Szechuan restaurants everywhere, but the food isn't as ludicrously hot as true Szechuan cuisine. Although they can't take things too spicy, Taiwanese have learned to accept things a bit spicier from Szechuanese, while Taiwan's Szechuan natives no longer eat food as hot as in the past because of changes in the living environment and climate. Thus, in terms of living habits, everyone is adapting to the locality, food is getting all mixed up, and even the people are changing.
Twice a "provincial outsider":
"In the past few years I have gone back to the mainland to visit relatives. But in terms of living habits, it's just like the experience of being a 'provincial outsider' as I was the first time 40 years ago arriving in Taiwan," says an old mainlander soldier returning to Taiwan after visiting the old hometown. After being accustomed to life in Taiwan, it is difficult to get reaccustomed to living in the mainland which makes these people wai-sheng-jen yet again.
Premier Lien Chan is from Tainan, and his wife Fang Chiung is a mainlander who was born in Chungking. The couple have four kids. When you ask them if there is any trace of provincial differences in their home, Fang Chiung has a hard time answering because it's really quite difficult to find a problem where there is none. She considers that although she is a mainlander, she does not like the mainland as it is at present, so she absolutely doesn't miss the family hometown. And there is no provincial differentiation. "Although traffic in Taipei is a mess, I still prefer the place that I have lived for decades." She describes herself as a Taiwanese Chinese.
Liao Chung-shan, a professor at the National Ocean University, is a native of Henan Province. At the age of 15 he came with the military to Taiwan, and even today his Taiwanese is not very good. His wife Lin Li-tsai is from Kaohsiung. The pairing up of these two people involves no tale of passionate romance. "It was entirely that I had reached the age where I wanted to take a wife, and being alone in Taiwan I could only marry a wife from here. Moreover, my wife is an orphan, and was afraid that if she married into a Taiwanese family she would be looked down upon, so she had the idea of marrying a mainlander without any family burden. So after we were introduced by someone, we got married," says Liao, describing his marriage as extremely ordinary.
The new hometown becomes the old hometown:
Nevertheless, unlike the great majority of mainlanders, Liao Chung-shan completely accepts that Taiwan is his home. He says, "After a long time, the new hometown is the old hometown." He feels that in sentimental terms China is his "natural mother" but Taiwan is the "nursemaid who raised him." After 40 years in Taiwan, he is already a "Taiwanese" who belongs to this place. Therefore, even though he can't speak Taiwanese well, and the husband still likes to eat that steamed bread, none of this affects the feeling between himself and his wife, because they share a common love for this land.
You know? Although Taiwanese call themselves yams and call mainlanders taros, in fact neither yams nor taros are native plants to this soil. It's only that both of them have grown in this earth, so they have become common plants here. As for people, they are like the yams and the taros--having grown on this piece of earth for a long time, the taros become like yams and the yams look more and more like taros, and the two produce little "yaros" through marriage. Can you really say what it is they are?