“What’s your ethnicity?” is a question I still struggle to answer. My default response was, “I was born in Taiwan,” which is a fact but manages to skirt the actual question.

In part, my conflict with that question stems from how I never properly understood the definition of ‘ethnicity.’ I was told that ‘Taiwanese’ is not an ethnicity, and even its status as a nationality is a litigious topic. The Han Chinese, on the other hand, is an ethnicity, but that term is so readily associated with the Chinese mainland that I felt eschewed from that identification.

My parents were also polarized on this subject. My mother grew up identifying as Chinese, because her father identified as such, having been born on the Mainland but fled after the Communist takeover in 1949. My father’s family, on the other hand, traced their lineage back to the Hakka people and Taiwanese aborigines who co-occupied Taiwan centuries before the Chinese Civil War that established Taiwan’s current status (a history lesson for another time).

My father abhorred being called Chinese, while my mother sometimes refers to Taiwan as a province of China. There was a clear distinction of people as ‘Native Taiwanese’ or ‘Mainland Chinese’ that extends to parents’ generation, but that has since abated in my generation. Having never been able to understand my maternal-grandfather’s thick Mainland-Chinese-accent along with being to recognize our clear cultural differences, I've always considered myself more Taiwanese than Chinese.

In fact, the idea that Taiwan and China are supposed to be parts of one entity never crossed my mind growing up, because the two states had so many social and cultural differences while functioning completely independently—both politically and economically. Every piece of identification I had, from my passport to my birth certificate, read ‘Republic of China’, which refers more to Taiwan and is not to be confused with the People’s Republic of China.

I speak a Taiwanese-tongue, speak Mandarin with a Taiwanese accent, and grew up in a political climate distinct from China. I think and act differently knowing that my human rights are protected, and I’ve always loved politics because Taiwan has a democracy and hence the room for me to cultivate that interest. I am, therefore, distinctly not Chinese. My memories of my homeland are very different from someone who was born in Mainland China.

I was born in Taiwan, and I am not Chinese, so then saying, “I’m Taiwanese,” should be a straightforward matter. But doing so has quarrelsome implications. It gives the immediate suggestion that I am pro-Taiwanese Independence, which I am in theory but fear for in practice. Given that 95% of the Mainland Chinese population opposes Taiwanese Independence, I feel like I’ve become an opponent of 1.3 billion people.

“The capital of Taiwan is Beijing,” said a classmate jokingly as I tried to laugh. My identification as Taiwanese always raised brows, with the reason being that Taiwan is not a country by official terms. “Taiwan is a part of China,” is a phrase I heard too often in America. It was always ironic to me why those in a nation that prides itself in championing democracy and human rights would push another state who also values those abstractions into the not-so-loving arms of one of the worst violators of those virtues.

From not wanting to offend Mainland Chinese people to being tired of the judgment from everyone else, I struggled with acknowledging being Taiwanese. But I realized that I cannot identify as anything else. That small island nation has shaped so much of who I am today in such a distinct way that no other words can be found.

To struggle to arrive at an ethnicity and to struggle further embracing it, I realized those experiences were just another characteristic of being Taiwanese.

I am Taiwanese, unapologetically, pridefully.