For Taiwanese Americans, Voting Back Home Takes More Than a Postage Stamp

They are some of the most determined voters in the world.

Every four years, several thousand Taiwanese Americans book expensive plane tickets, pack their belongings and fly across the Pacific Ocean to cast ballots in Taiwan’s presidential election.

Dual citizens can vote in Taiwan, with one catch: They cannot do so by mail.

What once felt like a patriotic duty has taken on greater urgency in recent years as China has intensified military pressure on Taiwan and doubled down on threats to absorb the island by force if it deems necessary. The increasing tensions have become an additional flashpoint in U.S.-China relations.

“Freedom and democracy are on the line,” said Leslie Lai, 42, who had traveled from her home in Oakland, Calif., to Taichung, a city in central Taiwan, where she spoke by phone ahead of Saturday’s election.

For many first-generation Taiwanese Americans, the quadrennial journey back to Taiwan has become something of a diaspora tradition since 1996, when the island held its first democratic presidential elections. Ms. Lai said that as a child in upstate New York, she was always vaguely aware of the latest developments in Taiwanese politics and would watch her parents fly back themselves to participate in presidential elections.

The desire to still vote in homeland elections speaks to the fluid identity that many immigrants embrace in an age of air travel and nonstop campaign updates through social media and streaming video. They are fully invested in their lives in America, including bracing for the monumental U.S. presidential election in November, yet retain a toehold overseas.

Exact numbers of Taiwanese Americans estimated to vote in Saturday’s election are hard to come by. More than 4,000 Taiwanese people who live overseas have registered to cast a 2024 ballot, according to Taiwan’s Central Election Commission. (That figure does not include those who travel to Taiwan more frequently and are not required to register as an overseas voter.)

While that represents just a sliver of an overall electorate with nearly 20 million eligible voters, Taiwanese politicians have long courted those living in the United States. There are as many as 700,000 Taiwanese living in America. They are seen as an important constituency that can help advocate the island’s interests in the United States, which backs Taiwan with military support, weapon sales and diplomatic visits.

All three of the main presidential candidates have visited the United States in the last six months, partly to shore up diaspora support.

Many first-generation Taiwanese Americans have felt stronger connections to their native land in recent years as China has threatened the island. While some voters in Taiwan have said that domestic concerns such as the rising cost of housing are some of the most important issues in this year’s election, Taiwanese Americans have been more worried about Taiwan’s sovereignty.

“When we live in the United States, we enjoy freedom,” said Foun-Chung Fan, 76, a retired physician in Livingston, N.J., who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan in the 1970s and has gone back to vote for the Democratic Progressive Party in nearly every presidential election since. “How can we turn around and say that Taiwan should be a part of China?”

The outcome of Saturday’s election is far from guaranteed, and within the diaspora, there is a broad range of political views.

This year’s presidential ticket features candidates from three parties. There is the governing Democratic Progressive Party, which asserts a distinct Taiwanese identity and has sought to bolster relations with the United States, and the long-established Nationalist Party, which has pushed for Taiwan to have closer ties and negotiations with Beijing while retaining sovereignty. Then there is the upstart Taiwan People’s Party, which has sought to tap into disillusionment with the two dominant parties by focusing on bread-and-butter issues.

Amy Chou, 67, a restaurant owner in San Francisco who has lived in the United States for 32 years, said that she flew back to vote because she was particularly concerned about the ruling Democratic Progressive Party. She blamed the party for what she said was its failure to maintain trade and tourism exchanges with China that could help to stabilize relations.

“It’s time for a change,” Ms. Chou said in an interview at a raucous political rally last week in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan, where she clutched a flag emblazoned with the face of Hou Yu-ih, the Nationalist candidate.

Dr. Fan leads an organization that has been helping to rally Taiwanese Americans on the East Coast in support of Lai Ching-te, the candidate for the Democratic Progressive Party. Some of their activities have included phone banking events, during which supporters call their relatives and friends back in Taiwan and urge them to vote.

During this election cycle, Dr. Fan said, he has noticed that younger, second-generation Taiwanese Americans are increasingly interested in becoming involved in Taiwanese politics.

That comes as second-generation Taiwanese Americans are experiencing a shift in their own identities. In interviews, some of them said that as children, they often told other Americans that they were Chinese because that was how they identified culturally or that was what their parents told them. A handful said they did so for the sake of convenience, because people in America often confused Taiwan for Thailand.

But as Taiwan’s international profile as a thriving democracy has risen, and as anti-China sentiment in the United States has grown, some Taiwanese Americans have said that they now identify more as Taiwanese, as opposed to Chinese — mirroring a similar shift that has happened in Taiwan.

Attachment to old identities — and divisions — can be more rigid among older immigrants from Taiwan. That was evident in 2022 when a Taiwan-born man who supported Beijing’s ruling Communist Party attacked a Taiwanese congregation in Laguna Woods, Calif., that pushed a Taiwanese identity separate from the mainland, killing one victim and injuring five others.

Jeany Yang, 79, who attends a different Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, said that she had been surprised by the shooting because most of the Taiwanese Americans she knew rarely discussed politics in public.

It did not mean they were uninterested, though. Ms. Yang estimated that at least half, or around 250, of the Taiwanese residents in her retirement community had flown back to Taiwan to vote in recent weeks. She had intended to do the same but canceled because of last-minute health issues.

Instead, she said, she and her husband would stay glued to Taiwanese news on YouTube and hope for their favored candidate, Mr. Lai, to win. She framed the Taiwanese contest in the same unequivocal way that many American voters portray the U.S. presidential race.

“This is a battle between evil and goodness,” Ms. Yang said. “We are seriously praying that Jesus picks the right person.”

Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting from Tainan, Taiwan.