Undergraduate / "are you even a Taiwanese?" - The World I Come From, UC prompt#1: [6]

Here is the personal statement#1 for my UC app, I hope my not-so-fluent English doesn't cause much trouble/confusion in the essay. I think there are a lot of stuff that I can do to make it better/stronger but I have no idea of where to start and what I can do with the holes. Please advise me as much as possible(don't worry about being nice) and thank you very much! wish you all have a great thanksgiving break!

Prompt: Describe the world you come from- for example, your family community or school- and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

"Come on, are you even a Taiwanese? This is the response that I often hear from my fellow Taiwanese friends when debating about the Taiwanese foreign policies. Thanks to the comparatively short, but turbulent, history of Taiwan, most of the Taiwanese people have developed a sense of superiority over other countries, and a sense of Taiwanese identity, or pride, which can never be outstripped.

Being born in Taiwan, an island next to China, with a democratic government and twenty-three million very patriotic citizens, I was taught that Taiwan is economically more developed, and socially more stable, than China and therefore is unquestionably "better". However, as I cultivate myself from education, I also recognize the accords between those two countries and their people. The facts that Taiwanese and Chinese people both speak Mandarin, have the same culture, and share the same social values embedded me with some incertitude for the first time: can Taiwanese truly be better if the two are virtually the same, and if I should stay as assertive about Taiwanese superiority as I used to be.

Three years ago I came across the Pacific Ocean for a more liberal Western education, and for the first time I encountered numerous ethnicities concurrently. Getting to know most of my classmates, I instantly discarded the idea that we Taiwanese are better. Later, as I began some ingenious but nonaggressive debates with my foreign friends, I developed my own perspective and thought that I could be objective enough to persuade my classmates of both sides of the argument.

I could be wrong in my conclusion, certainly, for what I believe in sounded as if it favors China, the nemesis of my country, but I never thought that simply expressing myself could provoke so many people. "Taiwan is not a part of China." a Taiwanese official has stated; "The Chinese government does not deserve to own Taiwan, as it is a communist country," my grandparents have said; "You are not to date a Chinese girl or hang out with Chinese people," my mother declared; "What are you talking about? If you were that much in favor of China, why don't you just go stick with them?" one of my Taiwanese friends once said, and left.

My world shaped my early adolescence with full of bias and arbitrary hatred, but I am determined to stay firm in my new position. With a different belief, my world seems completely different to me; some of my friends may have since become more distant from me, but all this can be accepted because it is my opinion and beliefs that have forged me into who I am. I do not know whether the situation will be any different in the future, but I know in order to diminish the bias and unfold the fallacies of my countrymen, I have to start with myself; it is the world where I come from and the one I am currently living in that shape my character, and thus I should stay as I am: as Henry David Thoreau had said, "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think."