Taipei resident Chen Pei-jun, a 31-year-old biotech researcher with a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, is the kind of voter the KMT needs to win back. As a teenager, Chen's heart belonged to China. A brilliant student, she attended the exclusive Taipei First Girls Senior High School, directly opposite the presidential office. In school she learned matter-of-factly that the red brick office, built in 1919 during the half century Taiwan spent under Japanese colonial rule, was occupied by the legitimate government of China. Each morning, on her way to class, Chen reverently observed the President's guards slowly hoisting the red, white and blue Republic of China flag. She shared the KMT dream that one day this flag would again fly over Tiananmen Square. At night she read books by mainland-born writerswistful childhood memoirs set in Hunan or Fujian or Shanghai. "I wept," she says. "Their experience became my experience. Their China was my China. I longed to return. I was the perfect Chinese." Today Chen is remodeling herself as the perfect Taiwanese, and has given up on reunification. Her transformation began when she went to the U.S. in 1995 to study. On campus, she met students from the mainland and realized she had nothing in common with them, and bristled when they described Taiwan's President as a "provincial governor." In her spare time she read books about the island and its history, written by exiled dissidents, which were not available in Taiwan. Since returning from the U.S. in 2002, two years after the KMT was first knocked from power by the DPP, she has been filling in the gaps of what she calls her "missing years." "The KMT lied to me," she says. "I was brainwashed. They made me think I was Chinese just to further their own ends. I'm not. I'm Taiwanese."
