As the invited host of the Taiwan External Trade Development Council’s Taiwan Expo in Vietnam, held in Hanoi, Nguyen Thu Hang, clad in a traditional Vietnamese ao dai, presented confidently in both Mandarin and Vietnamese, introducing Taiwan’s top traders to Vietnamese manufacturers.

Frequently invited to host dinners for the Vietnam Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei, Hang this year began lecturing for beginner’s Vietnamese courses at Shih Hsin University, while also writing her second book on Vietnamese pronunciation and continuing to produce weekly videos for her YouTube channel Hang TV. To say she leads a busy life would hardly be an exaggeration.

Ten years ago, though, things were quite different. Fresh out of high school in Vietnam, she spent her days at home playing video games until a year later, in 2010, she decided to go to Taiwan to study, a decision that would prove a turning point that led to the remarkable life she leads today.

Nguyen Thu Hang (photo by Jimmy Lin)

A tough life as a foreign student

“Back then my mom was working as a domestic helper in Taiwan for about NT$17,000 a month, but my tuition was NT$36,000 a semester, plus we still had family debts to pay off.” To lighten the load on her mother, during her first year in Taiwan Hang lived with her mother at her employer’s home, saving on rent and using her free time and vacations for work.

“Summer vacations were particularly valuable because there are no restrictions then on the hours a foreign student can work.” In the mornings she worked in a breakfast shop, and at lunchtimes in a self-service ­canteen. Then, in the after­noons, she sold tickets at a lottery store, and in the evenings she was a waitress for a stir-fry restaurant. “I grew up in a poor family and came to Taiwan for a chance at a new life,” says Hang.

Then, in the midst of all this hard work, opportunity knocked. In 2015, while guesting on a TV program for Southeast-Asian immigrants on CTS, Hang happened to meet John Li, who was helping a friend with some advertising work. The two hit it off almost immediately.

After Hang began teaching Vietnamese part time and Li became her student, the two began working together, thinking up ways to make language teaching more attractive to students. They took singer Wakin Chau’s well-known classic “Friends” and used it as the basis for a Vietnamese teaching video. They entered the video in a competition for migrant workers and foreign students, and despite being total newcomers, saw their video shared over 100 times and got thousands of new fans on their own Facebook pages.

With a new wave of YouTube video creators on the rise in Taiwan at the time, the pair seized the opportunity and in 2016 started Hang TV, uploading videos teaching Vietnamese and introducing Hang’s life in Taiwan.

Vietnamese immigrant Nguyen Thu Hang and Hakka TV anchor Paul Shiang (left) jointly hosted the 2018 National Day ceremonies. (courtesy of the Office of the President)

Lighting up her daughter’s future

One particular video, “My Mother the Foreign Domestic Helper,” touched many viewers. Hang’s mother’s time in Taiwan came to an end in 2018. When they went to see her off at the airport as she headed back to Vietnam, every­one was weeping, no-one more so than her now former employer—everyone, that is, except for the elder Nguyen. A lot of viewers were puzzled: why didn’t she cry too?

“Actually I felt quite sad for my mom! Before she came to Taiwan she was fragile, and whenever something painful happened she would dwell on it and cry to the point she’d almost pass out,” explains Hang.

After 14 years of working in Taiwan, though, she had become as strong as steel and much less openly emotional. “She swallowed all the loneliness and homesickness she felt and the hardships of her work, and by the time she left, she had no more tears to cry. She just went straight to Customs and never looked back,” Hang says, welling up.

After a moment’s hesitation, Hang then reveals, “Later on I found out that when my mom had just arrived in Taiwan, her employer would only let her have one boxed meal a day, half for lunch and half for dinner!” Even when Hang’s grandmother passed away, her mother couldn’t attend the funeral because of her work in Taiwan. All Hang could do was read out the eulogy sent over by her mother, which brought all the family members in attendance to tears.

Hang’s mother hoped her daughters could marry into good families, but after returning to Vietnam at the end of her first stint working in Taiwan, she realized that the family was still living in such poor conditions that it would probably hurt the girls’ prospects if any interested party should visit them at home. To solve this, she borrowed money from relatives to build a house and get her daughters educations, and then set off back to Taiwan to earn money and pay back the debt.

Nguyen Thu Hang works as a teacher of Vietnamese pronunciation and is very popular with her students. (photo courtesy of Nguyen Thu Hang)

Breaking down stereotypes

In 2018, Hang and Li tied the knot. Today, the YouTube channel they run together has more than 100,000 subscribers and continues to do remarkably well.

With the two of them profoundly aware of the often erroneous, yet deeply rooted stereotypes Taiwanese and Vietnamese have of one another, Hang and her husband hope that her story and his Taiwanese perspective can help them serve as a bridge between the two cultures for their viewers.

As an illustration, Hang notes that when Taiwanese people learn she’s from Vietnam, their first assumption is often that she was a mail-order bride. After she explains that she came over as a foreign student, they then assume that since she’s married to a Taiwanese man, they must have gone through a matchmaker and he must be old and ugly.

At first, this was a constant source of anger for Hang, but over time she realized that even in Vietnam when people heard she had married a Taiwanese man their first response was often that she had done it for money. Breaking down these prejudices and stereotypes became the core mission of their videos, out of a sense of responsibility to society.

When she hosts big events, the organizers will generally introduce her as a “new resident from Vietnam” or an “Internet celebrity from Vietnam.” “Those are both me, but the one I really don’t like is being introduced as ‘Vietnam’s Tzuyu’ [referring to the Taiwanese member of Korean girl group Twice]. I hope that when people get to know me, they can just take me for who I am, and call me ‘Nguyen Thu Hang, from Vietnam.’”

Here shows Hang’s book Vietnamese Starter!, which teaches Vietnamese pronunciation, even explaining differences between northern and southern accents. (photo courtesy of Nguyen Thu Hang)

Nguyen Thu Hang’s mother Luong Thi Hong Nhi (center) struggled on her own in Taiwan for 14 years so that she could provide Hang and her sister Nguyen Thi Huyen Trang with the chance to come to Taiwan for university and graduate school. (photo courtesy of Nguyen Thu Hang)

Nguyen Thu Hang and her junior high school friends back in Phu Tho Province in northern Vietnam. (photo courtesy of Nguyen Thu Hang)

Nguyen Thu Hang hosting the 2016 Vietnamese Migrant Workers Culture Carnival. (photo courtesy of Nguyen Thu Hang)

Hang chats about Taiwanese and Vietnamese cultures with Minister of the Interior Hsu Kuo-yung at a press event hosted by Hsu to express Chinese New Year wishes to Southeast-Asian immigrants. (photo courtesy of Nguyen Thu Hang)