“One generation not yet passed by another generation.
The new generation already speaking a different tongue.
During migration the father mountain from the mainland came unaccompanied.
Mother speaks Siraya. I speak Jiang-chiu.
But father says home is beyond the mountain of the mainland.”
—excerpt from a poem by my uncle

In Adrift, a woman sits in a boat far too small for her body, floating alone in the middle of a calm, indifferent sea. Her skin adorned with contemporary interpretations of Taiwanese Indigenous tattoos—symbols that feel both familiar and distant. Her arms hang loosely over the boat’s sides, her hands hidden beneath dark waters. She does not steer. She does not struggle. She floats. Waiting.

I painted this during an early season of searching—when the ground beneath what I thought I knew began to shift. For much of my life, I held a firm belief that I was tied to Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples. That conviction was at the core of how I understood what it meant to be Taiwanese. It felt black and white. Definite. But as I began to ask deeper questions, I was met not with clarity, but with silence and contradiction.

Family stories point to Han ancestors arriving from Amoy in the 17th century. Some stories suggest they may have taken Indigenous wives—though records are silent. Others in my family are adamant: there is no Indigenous connection. Like many across Taiwan, my history bears the imprint of patriarchy and colonization. Genealogies were often rewritten to trace lines back to imperial China, while Indigenous roots were hidden—silenced—for safety, for assimilation, or for the hope of social standing.

My grief was real. It felt like losing someone. Like a death. As if the story I had built my sense of self upon had collapsed, revealing only fragments and contradictions. This painting holds that silence. It names the grief of a cultural inheritance that may exist, but only in whispers.

What does that make me, then? Am I Amoy? Chinese? That identity feels like a stranger to the deepest parts of me—almost in conflict with the core of who I am. And yet, even within my own family, few would claim those labels. They would say, We are Taiwanese. Still, without clarity, I’m left in between. Unmoored. The story I once carried so confidently feels fractured, and I, in turn, feel hollowed—like a shell of someone who once knew who they were.

The woman in the boat is the answer I’ve been reaching for. She is what was lost: the unspoken names, the forgotten songs, the heritage that never made it through the generational lines. She floats, suspended in stillness, untethered from time. Too large for the vessel that carries her. She is history—bodied, tattooed, present—and yet out of reach.

Adrift holds no resolution. It lingers in that space between knowing and not knowing. Between grief and reverence. Her submerged hands mirror my own desire to touch something sacred beneath the surface—to find truth in silence, to hear the stories of those who were never written into the book.

This painting is a lament, a prayer, and a quiet honoring. For the erased and the remembered. For the ancestral voices that still move like current beneath the waves. For the ones who speak in whispers I’m still yearning to hear.

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