Life Histories of Four Chinese and Taiwanese Immigrants in Tallahassee, Florida

This thesis explores the life stories of four Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants in Tallahassee by collecting detailed narratives. There are three aspects that this thesis focused on: 1) motivations for emigration from their home countries to the United States and changes in their socioeconomic status afterwards; 2) cultural, political, and religious shifts of identity after immigration; and 3) the religious conversion of three of them and the roles that the Chinese Church plays in their daily lives. Narrative analysis of an ethnographic method used with this study. The findings of this project suggest that there were various factors motivating my participants to immigrate to the U.S. and all of them have experienced upward mobility. However, they have also encountered structural social inequalities that cannot be solved by individual actors. In terms of the shifts in their identities, the narratives collected from the participants show that there is a complex relation between their cultural identities and citizenship. Further, Christianity and the Chinese Church also play important roles in three of the participants’ lives, which offer them a different perspective discussing their identities. Overall, this thesis has filled a gap in the academic literature; no scholars have previously explored this immigrant group in Tallahassee. additionally, I provided information for future anthropological studies that relate to diasporic immigrants’ lives in the U.S.