I hesitated to write about this topic, because I did not want it to be misconstrued or generalized to reflect poorly on Taiwanese culture, or otherwise be understood as anything other than the isolated incident that I perceived it to be. I didn’t encounter anyone in Taiwan who shared the views of my first host family. However, I felt that it was important for me to process this experience through writing. When I studied abroad in Taiwan, I left my initial host family because of their Nazi paraphernalia and sympathy for Hitler. After asking for clarification about these artifacts, I spent the night tossing and turning with anxiety surrounding how to navigate this situation. I would later hear that the Taiwanese homestay team for CLS had visited and noted the Nazi symbols but accepted my host father’s assertion that they were just art pieces that he liked. However, the family was friendly and enthusiastic about hosting a foreign visitor, so they determined that it would be up to the student to decide whether or not they felt comfortable in that setting.
My host father gave me a similar initial explanation, but when I asked more questions I learned that he admired Hitler because he supposedly made Germany strong in the face of its enemies, and that he believed Taiwan needed to become strong as well because of the threat posed by China. Luckily their English was good enough to have a conversation; In fact, they were quite educated. My host mother was an elementary school teacher, and I think my host father was a dentist, though I don’t quite recall. When I tried to affirm that Hitler had killed countless innocents, and oppressed his own people, my host father responded that he “was not trying to convince me of his point of view” and offered me a book called Other Losses, which was supposedly about mistreatment of German prisoners of war. I became rather unsure of how to proceed, because I was trying to convince him of my point of view, and I strongly believed that he was in the wrong. I remember thinking to myself that even if German prisoners were mistreated it would not change anything about the horrible crimes of the Nazis, but I was feeling a bit unsafe and decided to diplomatically suggest that I might read the book some time in the future. My great-grandfather was also a German prisoner of war in America and gained citizenship, so I felt suspicious of these claims, but also only had that one anecdote to back up my rebuttal. Instead I described how my grandfather would always go hungry as a child in the days leading up to World War II, and how his uncle died in a bombing in Berlin, to illustrate my point about Hitler’s oppression beyond that of Jewish Europeans. However, I found myself again at a loss. I felt strongly that it was important to myself to argue against these views to reconcile my moral beliefs and German ancestry, but I also felt that I shouldn’t have to provide examples beyond the genocide of Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis, and that by retreating from that arguement I worried I was sinking to his level. After all, my host family told me that they had visited Auschwitz, and I was baffled as to how they had come away still supporting these beliefs. My host mother interceded and suggested that we shouldn’t argue and rather retire to bed, and that we all have different political beliefs, citing her support for China given her family is from there to contrast her husband’s strong opposition to the mainland country. To me this was very much not the same, but I retired to the room I had been given. I felt sickened by the way my host father’s eyes had lit up when I mentioned I was German, and tried to comfort myself by thinking it was good at least that a Jewish student or someone of another background targeted by the Nazis had not been assigned to this couple.
After making plans with my resident director to leave the following day, I decided to keep quiet for the rest of our stay. They rode the bus with me to show me the way to the National Cheng Kung University where I was studying, before they got the call from program staff. When I was picked up, they told me that they did not know before that Nazism was such a big deal for Americans. I felt unsure of how to answer that, and can’t remember how I responded. On the one hand it could have been that they had not known. Taiwan was a colony of Japan during World War II, but was not treated particularly harshly by the occupiers, the architecture built by the Japanese during that period is maintained. I was far from an expert on Taiwanese history at the time, and certainly not now, but I could understand that Taiwanese might not feel as strongly about World War II as Americans. Moreover, Taiwanese culture generally favors a more reserved social dynamic than that of America, so I could understand that the CLS officials from the island would not press the issue. However, although this might explain and excuse the reaction of the host family team during the home visits, I felt that it could only contextualize my host parents’ views. When I think about my rocky start in Taiwan, I often turn the events over in my head, pondering what I might’ve said or done differently. Even so, I’m proud of how I responded. I haven’t often encountered people whose views were so drastically different from my own, and in the past sometimes wondered if I would shrink from standing firm in my beliefs. Now I know that I can and will stand up for what I believe in.
