I was born in a tiny farming community at Wuri village in central Taiwan in 1961. There were seven families living there, all related to each other, all with the same last name. My great-grandfather was a sharecropper who moved to this area to work for a local landowner, planting and harvesting rice. It was a very labor-intensive job, but it put food on the table. He passed away when my father was only twelve, and my grandmother was left to raise her three sons and two daughters by herself. It proved too difficult for them; in the end, her youngest son - my uncle - was adopted by a relative to...