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After Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, KEFF, a Taiwanese-American artist, began to think he might never be seen as “American enough,” despite his American passport, who has lived in the country for nearly two decades. Since then, English is his first language. He endured numerous racist incidents, including verbal harassment and anti-Asian slurs, and soon began to think about what life might look like elsewhere.
When he had the opportunity to make a movie in Taiwan in the summer of 2019, he took advantage of it.
“I’ve tried to be American, and that doesn’t seem to work,” KEFF, 30, told NBC Asian America. “Why don’t I try to be Taiwanese?”
His film “Taipei Suicide Story” was selected for last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Asian immigration to the United States rose. Many came for job opportunities, higher education, and a better life for their children, often becoming naturalized citizens.
But today, many Asian Americans—most of whom are of East Asian descent—are moving “again” to Asia, citing better job opportunities abroad and a desire to experience life in Asia, as well as anti-Asian racism and other social problems back home. While it’s a trend that started before Covid-19, the US’s mishandling of the pandemic and the ability to work remotely has given young people more incentive to do so.
Compared to Covid-19 concerns and personal factors, “the emergence of anti-Asian hatred and violence has been much slower,” said Luke Siu, associate professor of Asian and Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
According to Siu, concern about anti-Asian hatred did not become prevalent until late last year or early this year, and many Asian Americans decided to relocate last summer. These movements are most likely temporary.
For Clara Park, a rising student at Yale University, the pandemic and shift to virtual learning prompted her decision to take a year-long hiatus and move to South Korea.
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Clara Park is working as an extra in the drama
“I hated online lessons when I was taking them in the spring,” Park said.
She is now working as a production trainee on the time travel drama ‘Times’.
But her responsibilities go beyond her job. As the only person in her immediate family in Korea, she has the added duty of “acting as an actor” at extended family gatherings, such as birthdays or traditional graveyard visits.
After more than six months there, she is reconsidering her plans after graduation. Before, she didn’t think she could plant roots in Korea due to language barriers, but now, doing so is not only possible but desirable.
For others, moving to Asia was less of a choice.
In late January 2020, Noneko Hsu, a professional flutist who’s been on cruise ships since graduating from the University of Michigan, was ready to start a new decade. But two days before she planned to fly from Taiwan to meet her ship, she received an email telling crew members from Asia not to come because of Covid-19.
“We cannot sign any Taiwanese resident if they have been in Thailand within the past 15 days,” the email said. She wrote again to make it clear that the Taiwanese are from Taiwan, not Thailand, but received no response.
So Hsu watched the epidemic progress while working as an event coordinator at a hotel in Kaohsiung.
On top of the expected linguistic and cultural differences, many find that moving to Asia raises questions about immigration, privacy, and their future jobs. Some renounced or never sought citizenship in these countries to avoid mandatory military service. Others have little or no contact with the countries they are in now.
While some feel lucky to escape the pandemic, many are also struggling to get the privilege to be in Asia in the first place.
Melody Chen is a student who spends an intervening year to enroll in Chinese-language engineering classes and apply for Taiwanese citizenship. In addition to avoiding Covid-19 and wanting to improve her Chinese, she wanted to experience life in Taiwan for a few months to see if she was somewhere “she would like to consider living in the future”.
Chen tune. (courtesy Melody Chen)
“I’m just so disappointed with the idea of America,” Chen said. “People can go bankrupt with medical bills – and that doesn’t sound like an American dream.”
But she acknowledged that decision comes with the risks of passing Covid-19 on to locals, something people were quick to remind her of when she posted a video on TikTok documenting her trip to Taiwan.
Until recently, places like Taiwan and Singapore remained largely unaffected by Covid-19, making them desirable locations to escape the pandemic. Some Asian Americans have chosen to continue working or studying at US-based companies and universities, despite the 13-16 hour time difference. In their spare time, they would attend concerts, go to clubs and eat indoors at restaurants earlier in the year while most of the United States was in lockdown.
But the drive to avoid Covid-19 restrictions has been complicated by sharp increases in cases in several Asian countries this spring, which could prompt some to return home as the United States reopens thanks to the availability of a vaccine.
While some have moved abroad during the pandemic, Seo said only a fraction of the Asian American community is able to do so
.
Not every Asian American had access to this kind of mobility.” Those who did represented “an elite, multinational population with higher mobility who have the privilege of navigating through these various places, and being able to move quickly and respond to situations like these.”
Its mobility is not limited to Asian Americans. At the start of the pandemic, Asians with financial resources also moved to the United States, and many Americans who lived in hot urban areas, such as New York City, moved to less densely populated areas, where they had more room to quarantine.
Annabelle Ban, 21, acknowledged the privilege of having a US passport, and the ease it gave her in entering Singapore in January. After working in a laboratory tracking ronavirus in wastewater in the United States last fall, she moves on to a six-month research project in Singapore to interview Chinese migrant workers about their health experiences.
“On paper, it looks like I’m doing something I’ve given – which I really want,” Pan said from her hotel quarantine room. “But that was largely for my mental health.”
She said she was grateful for the institutional support she received, something she said was not available to her mother when she immigrated to the United States about 25 years ago.
For many, living in their parents’ country of origin has offered them new insights. s
nny Huang has extended the 2019 Fulbright English Tetching Assistance Program in Taiwan to continue working with children in the Aboriginal community. She said that experiencing “a little bit of where they came from” gave her an appreciation for the “practical decisions” her parents made to survive in the United States, which included leaving their community and traditions behind.
“In the United States,” she said. We won’t be able to find out how much the loss is.”
Far from family visions, many find that the United States looks different from the country they left. Covid-19, mass shootings, and the continuing emergence of Asian hate crimes make the prospect of a comeback complicated.
Helen Lee, 24, who had been working in Asia before the pandemic, went on a trip to Nepal in February last year. I planned to stay for three weeks, but after the border closed, I faced the choice of returning to the United States or taking refuge elsewhere. She chose Nepal, where she has been working remotely ever since, and her time there has changed her perspective on happiness and her Asian American identity.
He told me, “Often I define my identity as producing something—like you do more of this, the better.” Having lived in Nepal, she found happiness in slowing down and in activities like making soy milk from scratch – something she used to do with her father but stopped doing because her time was “more valuable elsewhere”.
Because of Covid-er19isa restrictions, Li may have to return to the United States in the next two months, fearing overheating from the ongoing news cycle and productivity culture.
In the longer term, it remains to be seen what big implications these moves might have. Factors such as an individual’s ability to speak the local language, the economy, and the epidemic influence the lessons individuals will take from their time in Asia.
“I wonder if this will have – hopefully – a positive effect – on Asian Americans,” said Wen Liu, an assistant research fellow at the InAcademia Sinica Institute of Ethnology, c Taiwan, who herself moved from New York to Taiwan last year. J
She said Americans who have spent an unexpected time in Asia can find “a different way of relating to Asian culture that is not static or so – in a way – cute.”
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