“ARE YOU CHINESE OR TAIWANESE?” a co-worker once asked me. She was of the Asian persuasion too, so we already had the ethnicity chat when I first started working there months ago.

“I’m Chinese,” I replied without a second thought.

“But you were born in Taiwan, right?”

“Yes.” I sort of stared at her, puzzled. “But I’m still Chinese.”

She kept going. “You were born in Taiwan. Your family is from Taiwan. And you have a Taiwanese passport. That means you’re Taiwanese.”

At the time I thought she was crazy. And annoying. And a bunch of other things like busybody, suck up, brownnoser. Work politics aside, who gave her the right to tell me what my ethnic identity should be? Besides what was the difference between being Chinese and Taiwanese? It was all semantics.

Before my family immigrated to the States, we lived in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where there were only a handful of Chinese families. Although we were originally from Taiwan, we said we were Chinese. Then we moved to Texas, where I went to junior high and high school, and in the South our self-identification reflected the United Nations’ position. There is only One China—the People’s Republic of China.

Our new neighbors weren’t quite sure what Taiwan was or where it was, only that a lot of their things were “Made in Taiwan.” Saying I was Chinese elicited responses like, “Where in China are you from?” To which I would have to explain that I was actually born in Taiwan and have never actually set foot in mainland China. However, saying I was Taiwanese, well, that didn’t get any responses other than a glazed stare and perhaps a comment about Thai food.

I moved to New York City in 1998 and for a while the identity split wasn’t an issue. I was free to say I was Chinese, Taiwanese, Hawaiian, South African, whatever. No one questioned my claim to be of any ethnicity. I said “Chinese” because I inherently believed I am ethnically Chinese before being geographically Taiwanese.

Then a weird thing happened. In 2001, my boyfriend at the time and I decided to go on holiday in Shanghai. We went to the Chinese embassy together to apply for tourist visas since he was from New Zealand and I wasn’t a naturalized U.S. citizen yet. Because I held a Taiwanese passport, I was told to queue up in another line, the line specifically for Taiwanese citizens who wished to visit mainland China. His visa was a typical stamped sticker in his New Zealand passport. But mine? Mine was a passport booklet of its own.

The Chinese government did not recognize my Taiwanese passport as a legitimate form of national ID, and for me to visit the mainland, they essentially issued another passport. (This was the case in 2001.) Both booklets were green. One said “Republic of China” and the other said “People’s Republic of China.” It was all “republic” and “Chinese,” right?

Instead of the cultural homecoming I had romanticized, I discovered more weirdness once in Shanghai. None of the hotels acknowledged my Taiwanese passport because I stubbornly tried to use it as a form of ID (instead of the little green booklet I was issued). In several places, they refused us lodging because we were “outsiders.” I can understand my scruffy white boyfriend being an outsider, but why me? I’m Chinese!

…Aren’t I?

My father is from Hubei, China. Too young to formally enlist in the Nationalist Army, he was whisked out of communist China with Chiang Kai-shek’s army to Taiwan. He was fifteen. My grandfather on my mother’s side was from Hunnan, China. He also served in Chiang Kai-Shek’s army and fought in the Sino-Japanese war from 1935-1945. In 1948, he was transferred to Taiwan, where he met his wife, my grandmother. She was born and raised in Taiwan but her family was originally from Fujian Province on the southeastern coast of China. Like the majority of the population living in Taiwan, their heritage harkens back to mainland China and not to the mountains and plains where the indigenous Formosans dwelled.

This tangled history creates an identity crisis not only for people like myself, who grew up abroad and live abroad, but for the Taiwanese population in general.