When the US media reported recently that former US vice president Al Gore's daughter Sarah Gore had married Taiwanese-American businessman Bill Lee (李君偉) in a California ceremony attended by both the Lee and Gore families, the local media in Taiwan took the news as a happy omen. However, a racist comment appeared on an Internet chatroom in the US just after the wedding that read: "Al Gore's daughter is marrying a chink? Boy, that is one Inconvenient Truth."
For readers here who might not be familiar with the insult, "Chink" is a derogatory word for people of Chinese or Taiwanese origin.
It is sad to see such racism in the US. But it's also interesting to note that none of the US news reports about the marriage mentioned that Lee's family was originally from Taiwan. This shows how multicultural the US has become, in that none of the wire services or gossip magazines felt the need to mention Lee's ethnicity.
Bill Lee, 36, is an American whose parents emigrated from Taiwan, and his father, Lee Chin-mu (
Lee Chin-mu, who is a professor of medicine in the US, hails from Tainan County and moved to the US soon after graduating from the medical school of National Taiwan University, media in Taiwan reported.
Sarah Gore first met her husband at a function for her father's Oscar-winning environmental documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, People magazine added, noting that the movie's executive producer, Jeff Skoll, served as best man at the wedding.
"As one person joked during the wedding toasts, global warming helped bring Sarah and Bill together," a family friend told People.
What does this marriage of the Lee and Gore families mean for Taiwan? It will probably lead to more news reports here about the former US vice president's work on global warming, and to more invitations for Al Gore to give lectures here.
Other than that, this is a typical "boy meets girl, girl marries boy" story uniting two families in the US, with a small but interesting sidebar about the connection to Taiwan.
Dan Bloom is a freelance writer in Taiwan.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS