Associate Professor of American Studies Wendy Cheng the history of the Taiwanese immigrant identity in a Los Angeles Times article on the current Taiwanese American experience. Cheng told the Times that older immigrants tend to define themselves as waishengren or benshengren, depending on whether their families’ Taiwanese ancestry dates from before or after the 1949 Communist victory in China, after which waishengren fled China for Taiwan. Younger immigrants are more likely to identify as Taiwanese regardless of their families’ ancestry.