Home?

Zoe and I finished our first school year at a new school called TAS (which stands for Taipei American school). I started TAS because our family has decided to continue living in Taipei and it would not be a good idea for me to go to a local junior high school. The local junior high schools are one hundred times harder than it already is in local elementary school, with things such as more competitiveness and harsher teachers. Also, another year of Chinese might be too much, and we would have a hard time transitioning back to English.

Ever since I moved to Taiwan, I thought that our lives were a lot more unusual and crazy than average people, and that there is hardly anyone that has similar lives to us. I always felt like the outsider wherever we were in Taiwan; at my local school I was known as “the American that moved to Taiwan not so long ago.” Most of the time I could not relate to my classmates, they did not understand me, nor did I understand them because they have lived nowhere else except for Taipei. When I went to America for summer vacation it was the same because many people have lived in Palo Alto their whole lives and I felt like they didn’t understand me. At my US summer camps I would have to explain my background. I would tell people that I currently live in Taiwan and that I went to a local school when I first moved back from the US. After a couple years there, I transferred to an American school so I am fluent in Chinese and English. It would be this weird and complicated story and I could sometimes see the question marks popping out of their heads.

TAS has been a very interesting experience so far. TAS’s original mission was to create an American public school in Taipei, but it is really different from an average American school in the US. It wasn’t until I started getting to know more and more people at TAS that I realized that everyone in the school are cross-culture kids, just like me! Everyone has their own individual story that may even be more complicated and more interesting than mine. In a way, TAS is its very own culture. No matter where you are from, as long as you go to TAS you are exposed to at least two or more cultures: Taiwanese/Chinese from the environment outside of school, and American from TAS. However, most kids are exposed to more than two cultures, for instance, there are a lot of international kids who move from country to country every few years because of their parents’ work. For example, one of my friends that is also new this year to TAS just moved from Singapore, and before that lived in Dubai, Panama and Belgium. All of these kids are very interestingly culturally influenced. Another friend of mine has lived in Belgium most of her life and went to a local school there, but then moved to England for her dad’s work and learned English at a public school – she didn’t know any English at all before she went to England. She stayed there for a year and then she went to Singapore and adapted to an American accent; after a year, she came to Taiwan. Now, she is totally fluent in English and speaks in an American accent with not a hint of Dutch accent when she speaks to me, but she still speaks to her parents in Dutch. After a year, she will go back to Belgium. My local school experience is very similar to her experience and we can relate.

First day of school at TAS

I have another friend who has lived in Taiwan her whole life and is in the most advanced Chinese class with me. Her Chinese is better than mine. Not surprising at all, right? Except she is Caucasian. At first when I saw her I thought for sure she was American because I wasn’t familiar with TAS yet, but then I had dinner with her and her parents and they spoke to her in an Australian accent, but she replied in an American accent. On top of all that, she spoke in Chinese to the waiter without any foreign accent! Mind blown! What? She started to explain to me her complicated and unusual story: Her parents are both originally from Australia and came to Taiwan to teach History at TAS, she was born in Taiwan and her parents decided to send her and her sister to a local preschool and local elementary school all the way until fourth grade. She went to TAS in fifth grade and she has an American accent because of TAS, but her parents speak to her in an Australian accent and don’t know any Chinese. I bet she went through a lot of the same misunderstandings and frustrating times as I did, being an outsider in local school and also being kind of like an outsider with your parents at times. The thing is, a lot of people think that she is a foreigner, but she really isn’t, she just looks like one, but isn’t one inside. She told me that she thinks that everything that everyone does is totally normal in Taiwan and never gets culture shock, but she still is different than everyone else in Taiwan because of how she looks. We would be shopping around, and she would break out her perfect Chinese to the cashier lady who would have an expression full of fascination and confusion for a split second. She probably wishes that everyone would just be more chill and treat her normally but still I absolutely love it when she speaks Chinese although I am not sure why. It is kind of how my local classmates were absolutely obsessed with the idea of me being an American, which was nice but a little too much. I feel like I can relate to her in that sort of way but also can’t because I am not in the same position as her, I probably don’t fully understand how she feels. She is fascinating to me and I admire her crazy experience.

Home. Just thinking about what it means is confusing not just to me, but to a lot of other kids at TAS.

There are also a lot of teachers and some students with Australian, British, or New Zealand accents. In the US most people might think that those type of special accents are so posh or fascinating. Well, actually the words and meaning are practically all the same, they just sound a little different, that’s all. I can picture if there was someone with a British accent in a school in American everyone might be crowding that person asking questions like: “Do you drink afternoon tea with your pinkie up?” “How is the Queen like?” “Do the girls ever wear those poofy dresses with wires and tightening strings at the back?” But at TAS everyone just treats people that have those type of accents like everyone else and don’t think that it is super surprising.

In health class, we did this CCK (cross-culture kids) survey that we would not have been able to do in America. With questions such as: Is the question “Where are you from” hard to answer? Can you process miles and inches, but also kilometers and centimeters? Have you lived in one or more countries? Have you heard that the sport where you kick a ball around can be called soccer or football? Most kids answered yes to these questions.

Most of the kids at TAS are also very understanding when others have to move away and when others move in. Most of my friends are going to be moving somewhere else within a couple of years and the other ones that are not moving seem to understand more. Of course, they are still sad, but they are not like, “Oh my gosh! I will miss you so much! Why do you have to move?” I got that a lot when I was moving from Palo Alto to Taiwan. It was quite frustrating because it was not under my control whether we moved or not. I really appreciated how everyone was trying to tell me how much they care about me and that they liked hanging out with me. But it’s like saying, “You can’t move or else I will be devastated!” And it was just a lot of pressure. I feel like it is a lot more settled at TAS with attitude more like, “Hey I am going to be really sad without you because you are such a great friend, but I hope that you will have an amazing experience ahead of you.”

I am really lucky to be able to experience being around such special people from around the world that I can relate to with different perspectives. I think that all the kids at TAS are more open-minded and wiser. I think that everyone that leaves TAS will live a happier and more successful life and at the same time influence the people around them to make this world a better place.

What is your definition of “home?”