This book reflects a lifelong quest for me, the writer, introspectively trying to understand better and search for the meaning of ‘hyphenated people’. My immigration and repatriation experience instigated a continuing academic interest in the past and fraught future of Taiwan’s unique status as a country, as well as national identity. Having been forced to uproot from a comfortable life in the liberal US and transplanted into the collectivistic society in Taiwan, as a young teenager, I was relentlessly rebellious to my parents and teachers at school while constantly being taunted and rejected as an outsider by my peers, labelled as the obnoxious ‘American girl’; worse, scorned for not being able to follow the ‘unspoken rules’ in Taiwanese society and double-marginalised for not being ‘American’ enough. My darker brown skin tone often drew a discriminatory racial question based on the premise of whiteness in America: ‘if you say you came from the US, why is your skin colour so dark?’

To my amusement, with the recent release of new director Feng-I Fiona Roan’s debut film American Girl (2021), I thought I was watching an autobiography of myself, except that I did not have to deal with a family member who is bedridden with a terminal illness. American Girl is a coming-of-age story of a Taiwanese girl who feels her world has been unplugged, after years of living in Los Angeles, when she is suddenly forced to move back to Taiwan with her family. Although the protagonist, Fang-yi, still speaks Mandarin, she has fully adapted to American culture and American English, and feels disorientated in the strange environment. She struggles to accept her new reality ‘back home’, and her frustration with the living situation is reflected in the tensions in her unhappy home life, especially with her mother, who has been diagnosed with cancer. Her reverse culture shock is exacerbated by the young teen’s growing dissension with Taiwan’s militaristic education system, most evidently with the school’s enforced hairstyle regulations and uniform-wearing, not to mention the public shaming and caning practices the teenage girl experiences in classrooms that were considered typical of the time.