by Yang Jun-Dah
語言:
English
Photo credit: Screenshot
FOR THE THIRD straight tournament spanning 2017, 2023, and 2026, the Taiwan men’s national baseball team was eliminated during pool play in the World Baseball Classic (WBC). This world championship tournament is organized in partnership with Major League Baseball (MLB) and national teams are allowed to field MLB-roster players — leaving Taiwan significantly underpowered compared to MLB-heavy teams such as the U.S. and Japan.
But one player on Team Taiwan’s roster did emerge a winner: Stuart Fairchild, who plays professionally under MLB’s Cleveland Guardians organization. Fairchild’s mother is Taiwanese, hailing from Taichung but left at age 12 to the United States, making the Seattle-born American eligible to wear the Chinese Taipei jersey.
Nicknamed “Fei Zai” 費仔 (colloquial translation: Fai-guy) by Taiwanese media, Fairchild’s batting performance during the WBC included a spectacular grand-slam home run against Team Czechia — cementing him in the hearts of sports fans across Formosa. Already subject to the Han Taiwanese zeal of fetishizing biracial diaspora children of Han-Caucasian parentage (that problematic yet persistent terminology of 混血兒, literally “mixed-blood child”), Fairchild was soon snapped up by a local cafe chain for a coffee pod photoshoot; Elle Taiwan and Marie Claire Taiwan posted listicle profiles and recent wedding photos; and a Taiwanese sports network even tracked down his American father-in-law for a quote.
But it was another family media mention that gave Fairchild’s heritage a new dimension: in the days after Team Taiwan’s elimination from the WBC, reports emerged that Fairchild is actually of Amis / Pangcah heritage.
This was a surprise even to the Indigenous Peoples Cultural Foundation 原住民族文化事業基金會 (IPCF), which vigorously promotes Taiwanese Indigenous athletes on social media. An Instagram post on March 5 ahead of the WBC celebrating Team Taiwan’s significant Indigenous representation actually omits Fairchild, and the Foundation had to post an updated graphic on March 12 once the news broke. Media clips dating back to 2025 and 2022 also seem unaware of this detail.
IPCF’s Instagram graphic on March 5 (left) versus March 12 (right). Photo credit: IPCF
By journalistic ethics, this biographical addendum comes with an asterisk: the Amis / Pangcah connection was apparently announced by Fairchild’s Taiwanese sports agency, which in turn said the detail came about when the agency was having a meal with Fairchild family, where Fairchild’s mother Mimi mentioned in conversation that Stuart’s maternal grandmother was Amis from Hualien. The convoluted indirect reference here is intentional: for some reason media reports never paraphrase Mimi Fairchild as saying, “My mother is Amis”. As of press date, there does not seem to be an actual media interview of either Fairchild directly confirming this ancestry.
All of this would be quaint trivia save for the difficult history of Indigenous heritage in Taiwan, built upon eras of colonial violence and centuries of Han Chinese assimilation and suppression of Indigenous peoples. The KMT authoritarian government forced Indigenous peoples to take Chinese language names, and it took until 2024 for Taiwan law to allow Indigenous peoples to solely use their ancestral language name on official documents, without being chained to a Chinese name. Contemporary Han Taiwanese attitudes towards Indigenous cultures vary from outright gaffes proclaiming all Taiwanese are Indigenous to dubious ancestry claims to closeted genealogies. Most fall under unconscious bias and oblivious ignorance, as even former president Tsai Ing-wen’s Paiwan ancestry tended to be glossed over by domestic media.
A casual and belated claim of Indigenous ancestry, then, naturally invites scrutiny.
In any case, the baseball-crazy Taiwan public is eager to eat this news up. One wonders if the topic ever came up in the Team Taiwan dugout, with a majority-Indigenous locker room and cultural vanguards among them. Fairchild’s representatives say he is looking forward to more time in Taiwan during the next MLB offseason. It would seem a team-bonding road trip is in order come November.