‘Are you Chinese or are you from Thailand? No. We are from Taiwan And are Taiwanese/Americans’: a transnational study on Taiwanese/Americans’ ambivalent transnational citizenship

The number of Taiwanese/American migrants and individuals has increased significantly in recent decades within the U.S. migration landscape—a trend that further raises the question of how to position Taiwan in its current quasi, pseudo, or unsanctioned status as an independent nation-state. Since its exclusion from the United Nations in 1971, Taiwan has long faced an enduring identity crisis, compounded by its contemporary ongoing feud with Mainland China and complex diplomatic relations with the United States (Bush, 2013; Harrison, 2006; Cheng, 2023). Besides, although the political, cultural, and national identity regarding Taiwan has been extensively discussed in both scholarly and non-scholarly planes (Brown, 2004; Chang, 2006; Gu, 2006, 2017), a systematic attempt at understanding how Taiwanese/Americans engage with literate activities to negotiate their citizenship identities has been wanting. This project addresses this gap by examining Taiwanese/American individuals’ literate activities in everyday contexts (Billig, 1995) and exploring how these literate activities shape their understandings of Taiwanese/Americanness. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to citizenship that draws from Writing Studies, Migration Scholarship, and Asian American Studies, this project employs a multi-sited methodology that encompass data sources (Marcus, 1995, 2008), including ethnographic interviews, observations, artifact collection, reflection drawing, and archival data. The findings indicate that Taiwanese/Americans’ literate activities are inherently ambivalent. That is, as they navigate different cultural domains and spaces, they oftentimes negotiate divergent linguistic, documentary, material-object, cultural, and identity-related demands and expectations across space-time contexts. This ambivalence in their transnational literate activities results in an ambivalent transnational citizenship, as they continuously traverse identities of being Taiwanese, American, Chinese, or Asian, demonstrating varied citizenship affiliations with their nationalities, national communities, cultural heritages, and ethnicities. However, such ambivalence also provides interfering points for Taiwanese/Americans to reject fixed transnational and national identifications, contingent upon their projected, imagined, and real and situated transnational communications (Anderson, 1983; Appadurai, 1996; Ong, 1999). This enables an empowering ambivalent ethos that they embody as transnational citizens. Such lens of ambivalence offers a critical contribution to the current scholarship on transnational literacies, citizenship, and identities by proposing a conceptual framework—ambivalent transnational citizenship—that portrays Taiwanese/Americans specifically, and transmigrants broadly, as agential individuals who resist dominant immigration rhetoric tropes.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Meng-Hsien (Neal)

Contributors dc:contributor

• Russell, Lindsay Rose
• Prior, Paul
• Koven, Michele
• Young, Morris
• Cisneros, David

• Keyword1: Taiwanese/american Transnational Citizenship
• Keyword 2: Transnational Literate Activities

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Meng-Hsien (Neal) Liu

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130197

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F130197