Lee Vuochheang (chair, TransAsia Sisters Association, Taiwan): The TransAsia Sisters Association Taiwan was founded way back in 1995.
Today, two-thirds of our directors are immigrant women. Holding meetings when we don’t all share a native language can be a challenge, but at the same time it symbolizes how we are stepping out of isolation and becoming active participants in society.
The association has done a lot of cultural outreach work, like organizing culinary cultural exchange activities to tell the stories behind various dishes and promote understanding of our homelands as represented on our dining tables, and thus our own life stories as immigrants. This is also why we published the book The Homeland on Our Table.
In 2009, we founded TransAsia Sisters Theater, shooting the documentary Let’s Not Be Afraid and publishing the tabletop game Floating Market: Vietnam in Waves to promote Vietnamese culture. We also released an album entitled Drifting No More, which was another heartfelt experience for our members.
Moderator: Thank you to the representatives from the Cultural Taiwan Foundation and TransAsia Sisters Association, Taiwan for their engaging comments. In Taiwan Panorama’s more than four decades of covering Southeast-Asian issues, the content and narrative approach of our reports have gradually evolved from an external to an internal focus, reflecting how Taiwanese society’s attitudes toward the region have gone from unfamiliarity, to conflict, and then to coexistence and finally integration. Today, Southeast-Asian immigrants are part of Taiwanese culture, and I believe that the New Southbound Policy will continue to help Taiwan move toward a better future.
For this workshop discussion, the participants divided into three groups, with the Cultural Taiwan Foundation and TransAsia Sisters Association, Taiwan leading the discussion and participants writing down their hopes and suggestions for the New Southbound Policy. Here are some excerpts from these contributions.
Tran Ngoc Thuy (lecturer in Vietnamese, National Sun Yat-Sen University Community College):
In the past, the term “foreign brides” had negative connotations, with Taiwanese people associating it with ideas like marrying for money and engaging in sham marriages. Over the years, though, I have come to understand that this was because Taiwanese society had not had the chance to get to know Southeast Asians, and so the discrimination was not really deliberate. Meanwhile, what immigrants want is just equal treatment.
The current 2019 syllabus for “mother tongue teaching,” that is to say Southeast-Asian languages education for second-generation-immigrant schoolchildren, is simply not enough, with just one hour of class time a week. I hope that we can provide this new generation with more teaching materials and a more diverse range of learning opportunities.
Luu Thien Binh (executive director, TransAsia Sisters Association, Taiwan):
As a second-generation immigrant of Vietnamese and Taiwanese heritage, I feel that there’s a sense of us being considered second-class in Taiwan. Why are the children of Taiwanese and Westerners simply called “mixed race,” while we get called “second-generation immigrants”? Why is it considered “learning a second language” if we study Japanese, but “mother tongue education” if we study one of the seven Southeast-Asian languages? In a sense, Taiwan is like Hogwarts, in that there’s a kind of invisible “sorting hat,” and the Taiwanese one is extremely unyielding in its sorting. Cultural outreach work should challenge this invisible sorting hat and break down this class divide.
Priya Lalwani (preparatory committee member, Alumni Association of Expatriates Staying in Taiwan):
I’ve been in Taiwan for 33 years, one of the longest-term “new residents” of Taiwan. Taiwanese people are very friendly to foreigners, but often end up unintentionally asking questions that can be somewhat offensive out of simple ignorance. I hope that the government and NGOs can offer Taiwanese more avenues and opportunities to understand immigrants.