When Hua Hsu’s father moved to Taiwan, the two kept in touch by fax. It was cheaper and less pressure than long-distance calling, Hsu writes. “I could fax my father a question in the evening and expect an answer by the time I woke up.”
In the sixties and seventies, students from throughout the Chinese-speaking world found one another in these small, relatively remote college towns. School anchored my mother to the Midwest, but she roamed freely: a job at a community center in Kankakee, where she was one of only a few people who weren’t Black; a summer spent waitressing, where she ate ice cream every day for lunch.
I was born in 1977 in Champaign-Urbana. My dad wanted to become a professor. But, when he couldn’t find an academic job, we moved to Texas, where he worked as an engineer. The suburbs of Dallas afforded us plenty of space. One could get lost in that vastness. A few years ago, I found a small square of brittle, yellowed paper from the early eighties—an ad my mom took out in the local classifieds:
Soon, my mom began grumbling about the newer immigrants from China—how they left their shopping carts strewn about the parking lot of the Asian grocery store. The distinctions between an immigrant who came from Taiwan in the sixties or seventies and one who came from mainland China in the nineties were probably imperceptible to anyone outside the Chinese-speaking diaspora. They looked roughly the same, and they probably both had accents. But they stood in different relation to American culture.
My father’s record collection had the effect of making music seem uncool to me. It was something that grownups took seriously. He listened to Guns N’ Roses, whereas I listened to baseball games on the radio. He was the one recording hours of MTV on one VCR and whittling his findings down to a greatest-hits tape on another VCR. He was the one who always wanted to go music shopping.
The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories. I often try to weave the details of my parents’ lives into a narrative.
I spent two or three months of every year in Taiwan. I listened to ICRT, an English-language radio station, for Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40,” which offered weekly dispatches from a more recognizable reality. My parents had fond memories of listening to the station when they were teen-agers, back when it was Armed Forces Radio.
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