Contesting Boundaries and Navigating Identities: Second-Generation Adult Children from Cross-Border Marriages in Taiwan

Abstract

Scholars who study the children of immigrants in North America and Western Europe have developed several paradigms to analyze the second generation's ethnicity. The major ones are options, capital, and boundary-making. This article contributes to this literature by exploring the emerging formation of second-generation identity in East Asia. Although the region is known for its self-perceived racial and ethnic homogeneity, an influx of marital immigrants and their bicultural children has transformed its demographic landscape. Through in-depth interviews with 57 adult children from cross-border marriages in Taiwan, this article examines their strategies for identity management under the typologies of majority identity, biculturalism, rescaling, and differentiation. Because of changing receiving contexts as a result of the state's policy of geopolitical multiculturalism, a bicultural identity has increasingly become a likely option for children of Southeast Asian mothers. Ethnic dividends are mostly available for university students with academic capital, but they are not equally accessible to children of PRC-Chinese immigrants. While the boundaries dividing “Taiwanese,” as the mainstream national group, from immigrants and their offspring have shifted and softened in recent years, second-generation children are obliged to become national subjects whose ethnic identity does not conflict with national loyalty and whose patriotic duty is to convert their ethnic capital into transnational networks.