“Wait a second! Do not take your seat! My high school Chinese teacher said scornfully, “Your Chinese pronunciation is terribly bad; you are speaking Taiwanese Chinese.” utterly shocked, embarrassed and humiliated, I sat down motionlessly holding my tears back without talking back to my teacher. I’ll never ever forget the Chinese teacher’s name and the scene when he commanded me to stand up among my classmates because of my poor Chinese pronunciation. I was born to be a citizen of the Republic of China, R.O.C. for short, but I’ve never been to China; I was asked to speak Chinese but I was never taught how to speak Chinese until I went to grade school.

I know without fail that I have been trained and educated like the way a typical Chinese speaks and acts. As a grade student I was not allowed to speak Taiwanese my mother tongue at school. Remember that at school if overheard speaking Taiwanese, everyone of us would get punished by wearing a placard like a speaker crying out to the public, ” I must speak Chinese.” On campus there was an awe-inspiring sentence rolled down from one of my school building walls, “作個堂堂正在的中國人””Being a dignified and righteous Chinese,” which means, to live or to die is Chinese. But from deep inside I was perplexed, “Am I a Chinese or Taiwanese?”

In 1992 when I stepped into the land of America, I was checked by a U.S. Immigration officer at the L.A International Airport to enter the country for advanced studies. As I turned in my application form, he crossed out the name R.O.C. in the section of nationality; instead the name Taiwan remained.

In the early 1990s, Taiwan witnessed a great shift that had never been experienced than it had before economically and politically. “Taiwan’s miracle” upgraded the island to be one of “the four dragons” in Asia. The Taiwan stock market shot up to 10,000 points; the common greetings become something like “Do you buy stocks?” rather than “Have you eaten yet?” in the early days. One of the cover stories in the Time magazine called R.O.C. the Republic of “Casino”, a gambling island. One the other hand, the government was marching on to a democratic system. More political parties came into being. Public opinions could be published and heard in the newspapers or even on the street. Since then, the public have seemingly controlled what they want; yet they are unknowingly losing traditional values, or even they don’t know exactly what right or wrong is. If we open the different newspapers or turn on TV stations sided with certain political parties, we may receive extremely differing information on the same issue or topic. We the public become confused with the accuracy of the information we have received from the media. Perhaps we don’t know who we are or what our country is. We have LOST OUR IDENTITY. This is the country of Republic of Confusion.

My older daughter tended to poke fun at her sister saying, “Cheri, you’re born in America and namely you’re American; but it’s ridiculous that you CANNOT speak English.” Like my second daughter, we are a multidude of confusions, for Republic of Coufusion, R.O.C. is our name