Foreigners used to come to Taiwan for work, investment or tourism and left when their missions were completed. But since the 1980s, more and more overseas women--mainly from China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand--have settled in Taiwan because of marriage. According to the Ministry of the Interior, about a fifth of the 141,140 marriage registrations in 2005 were of Taiwanese husbands and overseas wives; overseas spouses now number around 366,000 in total.
Yang Li-rong, a social worker at Pingtung County's Family Education Center, has been helping these "new immigrant women" adapt to their new life. She explains that these new immigrants usually marry blue-collar Taiwanese husbands--mostly farmers and fishermen in her county. Among their other responsibilities, these new immigrants are expected to "continue the family line" for their Taiwanese husbands. So, about 95 percent of them become mothers within the first two years of marriage. The number of these so-called "new Taiwanese children" has, as a result, increased from 5 percent of newborn babies in 1998 to over 13 percent last year.
In a few years, these children will be going to school, but education in the home comes much earlier. "The fathers' priorities are work and friends and the grandparents don't take education in the home seriously, " Yang says. "The responsibility of caring for and teaching the children always falls on the mothers' shoulders." In her experience, adaptation to the new environment and culture usually takes from three to five years for most new immigrants. While the mothers are trying to learn everything themselves, it is hard for them to educate their children.
The Language Factor
One of the first barriers new immigrants need to overcome to be able to help their children's education is language. Mothers from China naturally have an easier time in both spoken and written Chinese. Those from Southeast Asian countries, with the help of family members and television, are usually quick to pick up the spoken language, but learning to read and write Chinese characters can be a huge problem.
In an attempt to help such mothers, many elementary and junior high schools have opened reading and writing classes specifically designed for new immigrants and their children. Yang has assisted in running many such programs and found that, while most foreign wives know about these classes and want to attend, only a few of them actually come. "Many Taiwanese don't want foreign wives to go out anywhere," she says. "They're afraid that their wives or daughters-in-law may make bad friends and run away, or may want to leave the marriage once they have learned enough to be economically independent." According to a Kaohsiung County Government survey, 70 percent of the 7,000 non-Chinese foreign mothers in the county cannot read their children's daily school report books.
Mothers thus find themselves in the frustrating position of wanting their children to get a good education and be high achievers, while lacking the ability to help them academically. Lin Chi-ping, a teacher at Kaohsiung City's Dasun Elementary School, did a survey on 300 first and second-grade students of non-Chinese foreign mothers and concluded that children of mothers who lack fluency in either spoken and written Chinese develop more slowly linguistically, which in turn impedes their learning in other areas. She notes that this can also have a negative impact on the children's social relationships. For example, to avoid being teased by other children over the "accent" they pick up from their mothers, many of these children are unusually solitary, and they also tend to have more conflicts with classmates.
An after-school session on Mandarin pronunciation. (Courtesy of Ta-li Elementary School)
Other surveys support Lin's findings. A 2005 report by National Chi Nan University targeting 281 elementary school children of Southeast Asian mothers showed that 8.2 percent were behind the curve in speech and language development as they entered elementary school. And tests seem to confirm this. Ten weeks after the beginning of the 2005 school year, Taipei County tested its first graders on Mandarin phonetic symbols, which are their main learning tool. The results showed that the failure rate for students of Southeast Asian mothers was 11 percent, nearly twice that of students of Taiwanese parents. (On the other hand, to add some perspective, the failure rate for children of aboriginal parents was 25 percent.)
Whilst it is important for the problems of children of foreign mothers to be identified and dealt with, the surveys and reports of their findings, especially media reports, tend to present facts in a negative way, concentrating on slower development, failure rates and the like. But this kind of spin on the data risks stigmatizing the new Taiwanese children as inferior in their learning and adaptation to school life which in turn runs the risk of making them the targets of prejudice from schoolmates and even teachers. "We call them the 'new' Taiwanese children but we haven't really accepted them as true Taiwanese," says Ke Yu-ling, executive director of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, a private organization that has been providing assistance to the new immigrants. "For fear of being discriminated against, these kids become defensive, lonely, and oftentimes will even hide the fact that they have a foreign mother." There have been cases in which children have transferred to other schools when their parentage was discovered by their classmates.
Contradictory Findings
But do these new Taiwanese children really perform as badly as some of the surveys show? Actually other surveys and tests indicate something quite different. Taipei City gave a Mandarin proficiency test to its sixth graders in 2005 and found that there was no correlation between the students' Mandarin ability and where their parents were from. The Ministry of Education (MOE) released a report in mid-2006, showing that grade-school students of foreign parents perform even better in many subjects than those whose parents are both Taiwanese, although they seemed to be falling behind in junior high.
The MOE report, based on a survey conducted by the National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), targets children of new immigrants from both China and Southeast Asian countries in more than 3,000 elementary and junior high schools nationwide and compares their performance in various subjects with other Taiwanese students. It appears that in elementary school, the new Taiwanese children performed on a par with other students in most subjects, although their Taiwan-related history and geography scores were found to be lower. Sophia Wen, a professor at NTNU's Department of Education who organized the survey, concludes that ethnic background does not appear to have any influence on the students' school performance. Wen points out that the public and even some teachers think that the new Taiwanese children can not perform as well as their Taiwanese classmates. "There are individual differences between them, just like between Taiwanese students," she says. "This can be caused by family background, difference in educational resources between urban and suburban areas or other reasons, but it just doesn't have much to do with where their mothers are from."
Indonesian and Vietnamese mothers introducing tastes from home.(Courtesy of Ta-li Elementary School)
It also appears that most new Taiwanese children do not think their mothers' nationalities have much to do either with their academic performance or their social relationships. Many new Taiwanese children, however, want their foreign mothers to gain more linguistic mastery and computer know-how so that they can help more with their homework.
Pan Wen-chung, director of the MOE's Department of Elementary Education, notes that there have been many surveys on this topic and their results have been diverse. The purpose of these surveys and reports is not to determine how well or how badly these children perform in school, but to find out where assistance is needed. "Each student, regardless of nationality or background, is stronger in certain subjects than others," he says. "We shouldn't be biased against them and presume that they are always behind in their schoolwork."
The government has made an effort to overcome problems, since 2005 earmarking NT$300 million (US$9 million) to be spent over a 10-year period to assist learning the local language and culture and provide other services. After-school classes--mainly in language and math--have been opened to help pupils, which their foreign mothers can also attend. Since 2003, new Taiwanese children have been listed as "disadvantaged students" like those from low-income or indigenous families that have priority admittance to public pre-school facilities.
Asset or Burden?
Some higher-education institutions have also tried to improve the educational level of new immigrants. The National Taipei University of Technology, for example, has just opened classes for new immigrants from Vietnam. The classes, aiming to help new immigrants better educate their children, are taught by the school's Vietnamese exchange students and cover Chinese, computers and some aspects of local culture. Leehter Yao, Director of the university's Office of Student Affairs, points out that when investing in Southeast Asia, many businesses find it difficult to find staff who speak both Chinese and the local language. The new Taiwanese children, picking up their mothers' native language and receiving a good Mandarin education, will, one day, be able to play a key role in this area.
This would be fine were it not for the fact that, amid all the help for both mothers and children in Mandarin, little attention has been paid to encouraging the children to learn their mothers' native tongues. There are some publications to help these children understand more about their foreign parents' cultures, and for other Taiwanese students to understand their classmates. But in reality, few families encourage immigrant members to teach their children their own languages. Often the reason given is that this may cause confusion or produce a strange accent when the children learn Mandarin. But this is usually just a fig leaf for cultural prejudice. Since most wives are really economic migrants from less developed countries, there is a strong sense among Taiwanese that these countries are backward and children should not be encouraged to identify with them at the risk of seeming inferior in mainstream Taiwanese society.
Currently, there are 60,000 new Taiwanese children in elementary and junior high schools. Just like other Taiwanese kids, some of them will become the backbone of the country and some problems to society. Right now, they are just pupils who all deserve an even playing field.
Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw