Hyphenated identity

Hyphen - could be a surgical scar stitching two identities. A direction with no destination. A minus sign that leaves you, after the subtraction, byelingual. Identity is not the hyphen. It is the verb that animates▼ it.

Born and raised on a subtropical island, I economic-exiled▼ myself to a southern continent, for the calling, the freedom and the distance from my dad’s curfew▼, and maybe to honour my Venus in Sagittarius.

Technically I am a first-generation immigrant. I still speak my mother tongue, Mandarin, but my Taiwanese Hokkien has been fossilised since the day my grandmother passed away.

I learned English from Western migrants in an all-English preschool. I was tracing the Latin alphabet while my mother tongue's phonetic system▼ waited. For years, I absorbed the vocabulary of a country I had never visited, the history and culture of a people I had never met. When I finally set foot in the America twenty years later, it felt eerie. A collision with a life that almost was. I saw a version of myself skating through the USC campus instead of National Taiwan University. At the 9/11 memorial, I wept with a weight I hadn’t yet found for my own people. After the best surf of my life in Hawaii, I thought: this is the happiest I could be. It was all so foreign, yet strangely nostalgic, not for a place I had lost, but for the parallel past lives I had constructed in my head.

Somehow I found my way to Australia. Since then my English has rerouted from textbooks into office chats, and into the language I share with my closest. My grandmother was proud of her coloniser’s tongue, Japanese. To me, English opens a second door to the world, now the mirror in which I watch myself being seen.

Once, I stumbled across four club doors on campus: Disability, Women’s, LGBTQ+, and People of Colour. Having self-identified with three, I wondered if being ‘handicapped’ by an adopted language earned me a key to the fourth. In the meantime, I’m still controlled by the monkey DJ▼ in my head, who fine-tunes my fluency based on how loose, safe or tipsy I feel.

It’s a double displacement when you marry your queer and Asian identities together. The queerness that felt like an outlier in Taiwan became my anchor in Australia, and my political identity became the new minority, folded into a broader Chinese monolith where I am constantly forced to define myself. In fact, Taiwanese aren't racial enough to be token here anyway, as most people just assumed I am some type of Asian. Same but different fonts.

I remember when the public law lecturer asked whether Taiwan is a sovereign state, I held that silence like a legal waiver, witnessed by Chinese internationals and Australians in the room. I genuinely hadn't figured out how to hold all of it yet. I carry a conflicting history in my pockets. I am one-quarter Chinese with a grandfather from Hebei, raised in an education system that taught me we were separate.

When I arrived in Australia, I carried nine years of compulsory Taiwanese education plus another seven of higher education. I speak like a Taiwanese, smoothing all my words together. My highest praise for a dessert is ‘not too sweet’. I sip the last of my water before I leave a restaurant. Films by Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang ▼trigger the most vivid memories of my hometown.

The day I told my partner I am more extroverted in Mandarin, her eyes glistened with unshed tears, as if she had glimpsed a part of me she might never fully know.

But even I have only recently begun to see myself more clearly, as if my self-awareness has shifted from something 720p to 1080p. For a long time, I was oblivious or simply not thinking too deeply about who I was. Eight years of diary entries now feel like digital ruins, records of a self that was living but not fully observing itself.

Who I am, where I belong, these are not fixed answers waiting to be uncovered. They unfold over time, shaped by what I remember, what I forget, and what I choose to carry forward.