Taiwan, Mainland Natives Share Concern for Quake Victims

Diners entering the New Fortune Chinese restaurant in Gaithersburg last week could have been forgiven for thinking they had been teleported to a banquet hall in Taipei. A red banner printed with Mandarin characters offered congratulations to Taiwan's incoming president, Ma Ying-jeou. The ceiling was festooned with strings of Taiwanese flags. And the emcee kicked off the evening of tributes to Ma with a stirring rendition of Taiwan's national anthem.

But in the group of hundreds of Taiwanese were numerous immigrants from mainland China. And the emotional high point in the evening was a moment of silence for the victims of the earthquake that devastated the mainland this month.

"I am horribly sad about this tragedy. . . . But it also makes me feel so warm, so supported, to know that Taiwanese feel the same about this as mainland Chinese," Shu Chen, 77, who emigrated from the mainland province of Fujian, said afterward. "After all, we speak the same languages. We eat the same foods. . . . We're all Chinese, no matter where we came from."

For years, Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants to the United States have largely lived apart -- attending separate social gatherings, forming separate community associations, even organizing separate New Year's dragon dances. But the outpouring of grief and donations from Chinese Americans of all backgrounds since the earthquake has highlighted and possibly accelerated a decade-long trend toward ever more intermingling.

Virtually every association, social club and religious group serving Taiwanese Americans has responded to the disaster. Within hours of the temblor, the Taiwanese Chamber of Commerce of Greater Washington marshaled $10,000. Guests at the Gaithersburg dinner held by supporters of Ma contributed an additional $15,000 to a collection box passed around the room, organizer Rita Lee said.

"Tragedy tends to bring out the best in people, and our community is no exception," said Charles Lai, executive director of New York's Museum of Chinese in America. "But there's an added layer of family and cultural linkages that really do span the political divide, as well as increasing economic ties between [Taiwanese Americans] and China that has begun to soften some of the political hot-mindedness."

To some extent, the growing closeness of Taiwanese and mainland Chinese immigrants has mirrored the thaw in relations between their respective homelands. Taiwanese voters elected Ma largely on his promise to repair relations with the mainland. And China quickly accepted private relief teams from Taiwan in what many interpreted as a gesture of goodwill toward Ma.

The rupture between the governments dates to the communist takeover of China in 1949, when Chiang Kai-Shek and his defeated Nationalists forces fled to Taiwan. Although the island has enjoyed de facto autonomy ever since, Beijing insists that Taiwan remains part of China and has reserved the right to ultimately reunite it with the mainland by force.

The divergent histories have produced dramatically different immigration experiences for residents of Taiwan and the mainland. In the mid-1960s, when Congress ended decades of legal restrictions and quotas that had virtually barred Chinese from entering, the United States did not have diplomatic relations with China. So the vast majority of Chinese who began immigrating were former Nationalists from Taiwan or from other non-communist places such as Hong Kong.

President Richard Nixon's opening of relations with China in the early 1970s and China's relaxation of its own emigration rules dramatically altered the pattern, as tens of thousands began streaming in from the mainland each year.

Today, four out of five Chinese-born immigrants in the United States came directly from the mainland. Together with those born in Taiwan and Hong Kong, they form one of the largest immigrant groups in the United States, numbering 1.8 million nationwide, with 60,000 in the Washington area, according to the census.

Along with their U.S.-born children, Chinese Americans make up one of the country's most socioeconomically diverse immigrant populations.