"You all look alike"

After living in Taiwan for the past 15 years, my "Taiwanese-American" accent when speaking Mandarin Chinese isn't particularly noticeable; your average person doesn't instinctively realize I'm not originally from here. If I spend the rest of my life here as planned, then perhaps one could view my formative years in the United States as a minor abberration; a Taiwanese guy who happened to spend a few years in America growing up.

However, despite embracing Taiwan as my adopted home, there will always be some differences in the way I see things due to childhood upbringing and how I grew up; differences that you might not really consciously notice until you stop and think about it.

One example is that I don't draw quite as strong a separating line between East Asian countries compared to the "locals". By that, I mean that comparatively speaking, I just can't "feel" the rivalries we have with nearby nations in the same way some of them do, in a "us vs them" kind of way.

This in likely due to my "Asian-American" background growing up in America where *all* of us Asians were equally "outsiders", which is a concept and mindset that may be quite foreign (heh) to most Taiwanese. To put it simply, the Asian-American diaspora flattens out a lot of differences, for better and for worse. I was part of an "Asian-interest" acapella group in college, and just in my time there, we had people from Japanese, Thai, Korean, Hong Kong, Chinese, Taiwanese, Singaporean, Korean (adopted), and some form of White ethnic backgrounds. While there were obviously differences, there was much more in common between us, because as you might expect, there still are a lot of broad cultural similarities between our parent's cultures.

For us growing up in Midwest America, it was common to be the only Asian kid in your class, and the way a lot of us saw it, it didn't really make much of a difference what country your parents came from. We were all just seen as "Asian" by the other kids. Japanese? "Asian". Chinese? "Asian". Thai? "Asian".

(something that I find fascinating is that if I had grown up in a place with a larger Asian presence such as Los Angeles, I might have felt quite differently, with stronger rivalries against other groups.)

We all primarily spoke English, and generally weren't particularly fluent in our parent's native languages. Thinking back upon it, our parents definitely didn't see things the same way, as they were more likely to cook foods from their country of origin, and would find it easier to make friends from a similar background. But for us kids at school, it was fairly "America-dominant"; the so-called "melting pot", if you will.

This isn't to downplay some of the very real historical or geopolitical grievances our parent's countries might have with one another. But in the "neutral" territory of America (well, more so back in the 1990s when I grew up), the more practical day-to-day struggle of making it in a completely different culture and society overshadowed the geopolitical rivalry between their original countries thousands of miles away.

I've generally believed that given the opportunity to put aside preconceived notions and to interact with each other as people in good faith (or neutrality, at the very least), the vast majority of people can get along. It can be hard to do when you find yourself immersed in a certain paradigm (such as growing up in an East Asian country where you're taught more about the unpleasant histories with neighboring countries), but when you find yourself unburdened by such context and history - for better and for worse - there are possibilities to see things in a different way. 

Not necessarily better, of course. But different, for sure. And that generally has some value in of itself!