Sourness, sweetness, bitterness and spiciness : diaspora narratives and shifting identites amongst Taiwanese people living in the UK

• Main Author: Hung, Ying-Lin
• Published: University of Bristol 2010
• Subjects: 306
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.525444

The sense of my shifting diasporic identity prompted a curiosity about how other Taiwanese diaspora change their identities. In order to unravel the mysterious identity shifting, I recruited a group of Taiwanese people, who have lived in the UK for various reasons for three years minimum, from the internet and real life to conduct my study. By using the methodology of collective biography/collective memory-work, which is developed from Germany, Australia then to the UK, and from German to English, my participants are required to have literacy skills of English and Chinese. After four workshops of doing collective memory-work, I had collected stories of four different environmental settings of the workshops, the writings from all participants and email exchanges amongst us. To make the diaspora narratives more complete, I supplemented my autoethnography with the collective biography. This study focused on two main factors - language and culture. Linguistics, however, was excluded in this case, and alternatively, I drew attention to how the relation between language proficiency and self confidence impacted upon our diasporic identities. In addition, I also explored the relationship between writing and identity, which played a crucial role in collective biography, even the whole study. As this was a participant-oriented study, under the big umbrella of culture, I chose certain aspects that had been stressed during the workshops. Our awareness of cultural difference had been shown in food, space, weather, greetings, attitudes and values, which all affected our diasporic identities in terms of emotional, cultural and geographical displacement. In the last chapter, I inspected my reflexive musing about the whole study and thoughts about the feasibility of collective biography for Taiwanese people in the future.