Looking at Taiwan’s move toward marriage equality in a historical and national context

Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash

Taiwan has a complicated history and a complicated status as a “place” and country. The country was formally founded in 1912 as the Republic of China. In 1949 with the Communist Revolution it was driven from Greater China to the island of Taiwan. On May 17, 2019, the Republic of China (Taiwan) became the first Asian country to legalize same sex marriage.

That alone is a controversial statement. Not only because same sex marriage is controversial in Asia (it is), but also because Taiwan isn’t commonly referred to as a country. At least not without upsetting Beijing.

It is important to remember the uniqueness of Taiwan to understand how truly historic and important the legalization of marriage equality is in Taiwanese society.

Much of why I think this is important stems from one conversation that I had while living in China. As a language learner at the time, I was speaking to whomever I could, and there was a group of Chinese and English speakers that would gather on a street corner once a week every week organized by my university.

I met a group of mostly young people although they weren’t all young to engage with one another and practice our Chinese and English. When you are trying to learn another language you try to talk about anything that will stretch your vocabulary, and this conversation gravitated towards marriage equality, politics, and democracy more generally.

I went to China to experience totally new things and learn about different viewpoints, and yet insanely I was shocked when I experienced these things and encountered these viewpoints. In this particular discussion, the crowd that surrounded me was adamant that marriage equality was well and good in Western countries, but it just in-congruent to Chinese culture and values. They were making the same argument against Democracy and in favor of communist single party rule China currently has.

Photo by Andrew Leu on Unsplash

I couldn’t understand it and I said so. I didn’t (and don’t) think that fundamental rights are contingent on the cultural context. Understandably, it was pointed out to me that they respect the Western liberal values, but that the West(being me) had no right to dictate right and wrong in the Asian context.

I have grappled with this ever since, and I don’t know if I will ever be satisfied on how or when it is okay to express convictions when the person I am speaking with comes from a vastly different background.

In his book, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, Ben Rhodes tells of finding the “language that spoke of the tension between ‘the world as it is’ and our effort to strive for ‘the world that ought to be’” (p.82). We have to understand what cultural, historical, and economic reasons a country has for holding different values. And even then there is a tension between knowing what we can change, and having the wisdom to know what our place in that change should be, if we have a place in it at all.

I actually had variations of this conversation numerous times, some people were more subtle than others although the message was the same: don’t dictate morality, your values aren’t appropriate in a broader Asian cultural context.