The concept of a homeland is not entirely tangible and depends on family, heart and loyalty, said Taiwanese-American performance poet Chia-Ti Chiu during a Sunday afternoon lecture.
Chiu interspersed her lecture, titled "Identifying Marks: Shaping 'Homelands' Through a Personal and Political Perspective," with readings of her own poems. The lecture, in Salomon 101, drew about 60 people and was presented as part of Taiwanese Cultural Week.
Chiu said an eight-month stay in China, when she studied Mandarin at the University of Beijing during her last year of college, helped her understand her identity.
"I am Taiwanese because of my genetics, but also because I choose to personally and politically claim myself as Taiwanese," Chiu said. "Homeland is not a physical place - it resides inside, it is innate."
"Most people in China are very passionate about not giving Taiwan independence. But their arguments are all the same - people just regurgitate the party line, 'We are all of the same blood,'" she said.
Chiu said she uses some Taiwanese words in her poetry because she likes the cadences they create and because it's difficult to translate the emotional resonance some Taiwanese words have.
Chiu began the lecture with the reading of a poem about growing up in the United States with Taiwanese roots. The poem describes her struggle to balance "these skewed sides" of herself.
Chiu said she was not aware as a child of being different until it was pointed out to her by other children. "Kids would point and say, 'What's that in your lunchbox?'" she said. "I grew up in a conservative Connecticut suburb. We ate rice where other families ate bread. We spoke Taiwanese in the house and English outside."
As a teenager Chiu said she was "the Asian kid trying to pass as white by going to parties and football games," but she later blamed whites for stripping her of her ethnic identity.
"Blossoms," the second poem Chiu read, addressed political issues as they related to her childhood. She spoke about having a "strange" name and wanting to change it because she desperately wanted to fit in.
Chiu currently teaches yoga at a Bronx high school and art at a middle school, where her pupils don't face the same racism she did when she was growing up, she said.
"They stand up for their heritage in school and proudly yell, "'I'm Puerto Rican' or 'I'm Dominican,'" Chiu said.
"At 18 I started to want to own my heritage. I went off to Sarah Lawrence (College) and had a burgeoning self-confidence. I wanted to be friends with other Asians - I wanted to shape myself," she said.
In college Chiu went through a "bitingly militant stage" where she renounced everything American, she said.
"What I didn't realize was that my parents had given up their homeland to create one here. When my mom came to one of my performances about institutionalized racism, she said to me, 'Did I make the wrong decision moving here?' I was speechless," she said.
During her first year in college, Chiu wrote poetry as an independent study project, she said. Her professor recommended that she turn her work into a show, and she began performing at school and then at New York City nightclubs such as the Nuyorican Poets Café, Gathering of the Tribes, Bluestockings, Bowery Poetry Club and 13 Bar/Lounge.
"Poetry and writing was a catharsis. It let me be angry, forgive, forget, and move on," she said. "Writing is taking me through the process of life."
