It is late July, and Meinung's "Literacy Class for Foreign Brides" is being launched. Colorful posters publicizing the event decorate the main thoroughfares of the town, as if announcing some festivity to the community's 50,000 inhabitants.

The classroom, which borders a rice paddy, is on loan from Chungtan Elementary School's activity center. A day previously the class's organizers--the Meinung Fellowship Association--had some enthusiastic students paint a map of Indonesia marked in Indonesian script, which has been mounted on the classroom wall to display the home land of the "foreign brides."

Meinung is reportedly one of Kaohsiung County's leading towns for foreign brides, being on a par with Linyuan Township in terms of numbers. In spite of the "foreign" tag, over 90% of these Indonesian brides in Meinung are actually of Chinese descent.

This being the first class of its kind in Taiwan, the opening address is given by the wife of the county executive, who comes to the town with the confidential secretary of the county government. The occasion is a lively one, with the sounds of accompanying husbands and babies mingling in with the Indonesian chatter of the brides.

37-year-old Ah Chuan, a farmer, left off the booze this morning and is sitting dutifully at the back of the classroom, accompanying his heavily pregnant wife Liu Sai-chu. "A lot of us have married Indonesians in the last couple of years," he says, cracking a crude grin.

Indonesian brides are nothing new to the inhabitants of this small town--just about everyone in Meinung either has an Indonesian bride in their family, or knows a neighbor who has gone to Indonesia to find one. In the absence of official local statistics, however, no-one can say for certain how many of these "Sino-foreign alliances" have taken place. Some say more than one hundred couples, others say upwards of two hundred. In response to the question, Ah Chuan's friend Chiu Jung-tsai crosses his legs and scoffs: "More than three hundred, and two hundred of them already broke up."

By Chinese custom, the couple must fix an auspicious date before they wed.

Gone to Indonesia for a wife

Men from Taiwan have actually been marrying Southeast Asians for several decades now. In the early days it was mainlander soldiers, who were on their own in Taiwan without financial resources and consequently had a hard time finding local women to take them. Matchmakers used to bring groups of Southeast Asian women over to Taiwan, ostensibly as tourists but actually to meet prospective marriage partners. Later, relative economic decline in the countryside led to the urban migration of rural youth, with girls in particular heading for the city in search of work, and husbands. Many farmers, fishermen and other rural workers found themselves deprived of prospective marriage partners, and a new market for foreign brides began to take shape.

Ten years ago, a number of Southeast Asian women were brought to this traditional Hakka community to look for partners among the local widowers and single men, but less than ten of them married and settled in the area, and "foreign brides" remained a rarity. Later, the practice was stopped from catching on when the government began to restrict the entry of single women from Southeast Asia on tourist visas.

Just over two years ago, Chan Sen-lin, a local papaya farmer in his fifties, went to Indonesia and brought back a Hakka wife named Chi-mei. Other bachelors in the town were so impressed by Chan's simple-hearted and industrious wife, who worked scrupulously on the house and orchards and was able to converse freely with her husband in Hakka, that they began to follow his example, setting out for Indonesia in search of ethnic Chinese wives.

According to Ah Chuan's elder brother, who first encouraged Ah Chuan to find an Indonesian wife, "Brides from Indonesia like cleanliness, and are diligent and hardworking." The floor of Ah Chuan's living-room used to be sticky with dirt and as black as a furnace, he says, but since Ah Chuan married his Indonesian wife the windows are sparkling and you can walk barefoot on the spotless floors. "They pamper their husbands too--much better than most of the bossy Meinung girls."

For the foreign brides, studying Chinese is an important step towards fitting in and learning to be independent.

A long way from home

There is a widespread misconception that the Chinese of Southeast Asia all belong to a wealthy economic elite. In fact, outside the charmed circle of leading business families are large numbers of ethnic Chinese whose forebears came as laborers, and who still live at a low economic level with limited educational opportunities, just like the rest of the population. For many young women from this background, marriage is a means of escape from a life of poverty. Meinung's "foreign brides" mostly originate from regions of Indonesia where there are concentrations of Hakka Chinese, such as Belitung and Bangka, or Pontianak and Singkawang in W. Kalimantan, Borneo.

According to David Auw, secretary to the director at Chengchih University's Institute of International Relations and a researcher on Southeast Asian issues, who himself is Indonesian-Chinese, these are relatively undeveloped farming and mining areas where the Chinese community is not well off, and where many young women hope to go to Taiwan.

Chu explains that ethnic Chinese figure sizably among the local population, and over ninety percent of these Chinese are of Hakka origins. Most are the descendants of 19th-century laborers, recruited from Guangdong to work in the tin mines when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony. Originally the Chinese, who were considered reliable and hardworking, had a recognized status, but after independence in 1945, difficulties in transferring technology to the new government sent the mining industry into a decline, and many of the Chinese lost their jobs, instead becoming farmers, general laborers, or fishermen. Subsequent anti-Chinese incidents made it even harder for them to build a career or better their economic station.

Florida State University PhD candidate in sociology Hsia Hsiao-chuan, who is studying the phenomenon of intermarriage between Chinese from Taiwan and Indonesia which has developed during the last three or four years, has spent more than a year in Pontianak and Sinkawang. She points out that many Chinese villagers in these areas live in wooden huts with dried coconut leaves lining the walls, and that daughters tend to work as maids and store clerks to help their families, or train as seamstresses. Maids usually earn around NT$1000 a month, while factory and store work can bring in an income of up to NT$2000-3000. It is little wonder that Chinese-Indonesians regard Taiwan, with its minimum wage of over NT$14,000, as a land of riches.

The growth in business and tourism between Taiwan and Southeast Asia in the last few years has led to a steady increase in the number of Taiwanese visitors and increasing contact between Taiwanese and the local Chinese communities. This has brought out the marriage brokers, who provide the local girls of Chinese descent with the opportunity of marriage to Taiwan or Hong Kong.

Most of the men treasure the wives that they have brought back from so far away. It is common to see them accompanying their wives during the literacy class, holding infants.

Quickie marriages

Chan Sen-lin's experience is typical of those in international marriages. He and ten other single men from Hualien, Su'ao, Ilan, and Kaohsiung, formed a "wife-finding mission," comprising laborers, fishermen, farmers. and one divorcee who ran his own factory. Every member of the group paid NT$350,000 to the marriage broker, covering everything from travel costs to the dowry for the wife's family, and before departure each man also bought a pair of gold engagement rings. Led by the broker, they set out together in a conquering mood. Once in Jakarta the matchmaking began in earnest, with local marriage brokers bringing the girls to the men's hotel. "They brought twenty or thirty seamstresses," recalls Chan, "and I looked them over one by one. I found my wife after viewing ten other women first." Chi-mei, who is taller than her husband by half a head, was 34 years old, and came from a family of eight brothers and sisters. With her father already in his eighties, the family relied on her older brother, a fisherman, to make ends meet. They lived in a wooden hut rented from Indonesians. Her work as a seamstress brought in an average of NT$3000 a month. Chan Sen-lin seemed sincere and kind-hearted to her, and ten days after meeting they were married. The matchmaker paid her family NT$30,000 in dowry, and she set out to begin a new life in Taiwan with her husband.

"Essentially this is a union between marginal people in two places," explains Hsia Hsiao-chuan, "each side hoping to better their prospects through marriage." The same factors apply in the trend of the past few years for marriages to women from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: the male uses his economic clout to obtain a spouse, while marriage gives the female a means to ensure her economic well-being.

"These marriages are something of a gamble," admits Chung Chuan-hui, another of Meinung's recent bridegrooms, who helps his family work their fields and doubles as a taxi driver. The year before last, the 33-year-old Chung decided he wanted to start a family of his own, but thought that most of the modern young women he met were too picky, and didn't want to marry someone from the countryside. Feeling that it would be "quicker" to go to Indonesia, he signed up with a nine-man matchmaking tour and set out for Pontianak.

The local marriage brokers brought women to their hotel every day, and as soon as he set eyes upon the beautiful 23-year-old Yeh Mei-na it was like seeing an angel. It didn't matter that she was Chaozhou Chinese, and not Hakka as he had originally wanted. It was enough for him that they could converse together in Fukienese. For her part, Yeh's first impression of Chung was also favorable. Chung being eager, and she clearly willing, the matchmakers from both sides strongly encouraged them to get together. By the third day they were engaged, and seven days after meeting they were married.

"These days young people in Taiwan want love before they think of marriage," remarks Chung, "but it isn't possible in this situation. The matchmakers saw we were attracted to each other and decided to bring it to a rapid conclusion--there was no time for the luxury of romance, getting to know each other and falling in love." The matchmakers prefer a swift campaign too, he explains, since their costs go up with every added day. From meeting to marriage, the whole process usually takes around twenty days. As for love, that can be worked on later.

This type of union doesn't always deliver love, however, being built on weak emotional foundations and joining people with such disparate backgrounds. There are often stories in the news telling how the "good man" the bride thought she was marrying turned out to be an alcoholic, a gambler or a wife-beater, or even unable to support his family. Equally, the wife's mercenary motivation for marrying in the first place, along with differences in language and way of life, often wreck the marriage or drive the woman to run away.

Since the arrival of Chi-mei, Chan Sen-lin's papaya orchard has been kept in scrupulous order.

A good man in Taiwan?

The Indonesian-Chinese are of course well aware that men who come so far to find their mates are no tycoons. Most of the young women simply hope to find a decent-looking guy who is reasonably well-off, has a good temper, and knows how to take care of his wife.

It doesn't sound like much to ask for, but the experience of many of the young women suggests otherwise. "They are either scrawny, or bucktoothed, or have some kind of physical handicap, or else they are not quite right in the head and just sit there dumbly," comments Yeh Mei-na. "Marriage is for life, so you need to be sure you've made the right choice," she adds softly. Yeh lost count of how many Taiwanese men she had seen with the match-makers before she met Chung Chuan-hui.

Intermarriage between ethnic Chinese and Indonesians is not common in Indonesia. This is partly due to the "Greater China mentality" of many Chinese families, who hope for marriage partners with the same cultural and ethnic background, and the same faith in Buddhism--an important distinction in Muslim Indonesia. Another factor is that Muslim law and custom permit a man to have more than one wife, which means that it is not uncommon for wealthy men--both Indonesian and Chinese--to keep several wives and concubines. But women do not want to have to share a husband, which further reduces the pool of potential partners.

After subtracting Indonesians and wealthy Chinese from the equation, Indonesian-Chinese women are left with their own economic and social peers to choose from. But the women often want to steer clear of these men on account of their lifestyle. Yeh Mei-na says that many of the young ethnic Chinese guys have picked up the laid-back ways of the region, and squander their meager wages on girl-friends, motorbikes and flashy outfits, which raises doubts over their ability to support a family when they are married, not to mention raising and educating children. This is why the women prefer to undergo repeated attempts at matchmaking, looking for a "good man" from abroad.

Chung Chuan-hui points out that the Indonesian wives who have remained in Meinung are all ones who married into financially sound families. "Their basic motivation for marrying someone from Taiwan is to improve their economic situation, so if the husband can barely even support himself they don't hang about for long."

Lin Chan-hua, Meinung's international marriage broker, drops by at one of his "client's" homes for a chat. He says he has principles in his business: he doesn't take slackers or junkies.

You don't know until you get there

Many of the brides started out with similar fantasies about marrying a Taiwanese: he would be a businessman, they would live in the city and enjoy the comforts of middle class life, and she would send money to support her family in Indonesia. When introduced to a prospective partner, their conversation is often straight to the point: Where do you live? How many people are there in the family? What is your occupation? Do you drink or gamble? The bolder ones actually ask the men their monthly income.

Despite careful questioning, however, the real situation only becomes apparent back in Taiwan, since the men tend to "finesse" their answers in their haste to find a wife. The first big surprise often comes on arrival at the little rural town of Meinung. "He said he lived in Kaohsiung. Over there we all know about Kaohsiung, a big city. I never realized I was coming to the middle of nowhere," complains "Hsiao Mei" (assumed name), who lives in a traditional courtyard-farmhouse surrounded by fields and banana orchards. It is a far cry from what she had imagined, and there is nothing to do for entertainment. She often takes the baby and goes for long rides on her scooter. disappearing for the whole day.

Disappointment with the material environment of their new lives is often just the beginning. Back home in Indonesia the housework was done by aboriginal domestics, and it never occurred to them how much work was involved in being a housewife in Taiwan.

Yeh Mei-na, for example, comes from a family of fruit sellers in Pontianak, and used to work at the foreign exchange counter of a bank. At home, the cooking and cleaning was done by an aboriginal domestic, and she little imagined such chores would be hers in Taiwan, let alone that she would be working in the fields. The tobacco crop was being harvested when she arrived in Meinung the winter before last, and without any time to get acclimatized she was thrown straight into a day-long routine of gathering tobacco, and feeding and washing the hogs, until her whole back ached. In Indonesia, Chung Chuan-hui had simply told her that his family "had a farm," but there was no mention of her having to work in the fields. Naturally, there were arguments between the couple during their first six months together. "It can't be helped," admits Chung. "If you were too honest, you'd spend three months there and still not come back with a wife." It is even harder to prevent frictions between the bride and the rest of the family. Having met more than a hundred Taiwanese men, "Fei Ling" (assumed name) finally settled on her present husband. During their initial interviews she had ascertained that he did not smoke, drink or gamble, and that after they were married they would not live with his mother. Unfortunately, Hakka family tradition proved too strong in Meinung, and her husband changed his mind once they were married. There were frequent upsets between her and her female in-laws, and her originally loving husband began to hit her, to the point where she is now in tears several times a day. "I would never have come to Taiwan if not for the hardship endured by my parents, who grow fruit," she laments.

Some men fund their trips to Indonesia with cash from private loan associations, and it is only on arrival in Taiwan that the bride finds her husband doesn't have a penny to his name, and can barely even support himself. In some cases, the man disingenuously tells his future wife that he just takes "a little drink now and then," but she will later learn for herself that he gets plastered every day. Other hazards, like a man who gambles, or is irresponsible when it comes to family, or has an incompatible personality, are even harder to determine during those few short days in Indonesia when the couple are getting to know one another.

It is for such reasons that many brides who leave Taiwan on the expiry of their first spousal visa never return to their husbands, and become "runaway wives."

Hui-fang left senior high school to marry Chang Chi-hsiung, whose family owns a motorcycle business, and now she helps out running the store, acting like one of the guys.

Missing wife

Last year, Chang Man-chin, owner of two motorcycle stores in Meinung, advised his 31-year-old son to go to Indonesia to find a wife. "My son is deaf in one ear" explains Chang. "In plain language: since he couldn't find a wife here, he had to go way over there." Chang's daughter-in-law, Chou Hui-fang is still under twenty, and was a sophomore at senior high school when she was introduced to his son. Without staying to graduate, she married and came across to Taiwan.

Chang considers his daughter-in-law clever, capable and beautiful, and he often buys imported durians to give her. Although everyone gets along well together in this family, he is disturbed by the stories of "runaway wives," and when Chou had to make a return trip to Indonesia in September on the expiry of her visa, Chang urged his son to go with her in case she didn't want to come back. "Taiwan and Indonesia have no official ties. What could we do if she didn't come back? The marriage brokers wouldn't do anything about it."

Two examples of what Chang is worried about can be found nearby. One is his cousin's son, who came back from Indonesia with a wife who did nothing all day but complain that she wanted to move house. No-one dared to make her do farm work, and all she was asked was to take good care of the house. Nevertheless, at the end of six months she took the gold jewelry she had been given at the wedding and left, never to return. Later she phoned from Indonesia demanding the money for her plane ticket, which still rankles with Chang's cousin.

The other example is the neighbor's family. Not long after arriving in Taiwan from Indonesia, the new bride began yelling that she and her husband were not meant for each other. Then she sneaked out through the sugar-cane field and ran away to Taichung. The neighbor had the bride's mother come over to Taiwan to mediate, but the girl stuck to her guns and in the end the neighbor had to simply let them go back together.

"Now my cousin tells me not to give my daughter-in-law any gold jewelry or cash," says Chang Man-chin. "Some girls take it and are gone." Some families, afraid the bride will run away, are careful never to give her cash, and will send someone along if she has to go out and buy something. In some cases they even stash away her passport. The people of Meinung hold conservative views about relations between the sexes, and it never occurs to many of the men on the matchmaking tours that the women they meet may have been married before or have lived with a previous partner. The wife's family may even be raising her children by a former husband, which dumbfounding fact is not revealed until the couple are back in Taiwan, when it dawns on the bridegroom that all is not as it should be--some times resulting in the wife being sent straight back home.

When they were first married, Chung Chuan-hui and Yeh Mei-na argued and fought, but during the last two years they have grown closer and closer. With baby Chia-yuan, the whole family is often seen together.

Making a happy marriage

Married life is never without friction, but a particular problem in the case of these international marriages, contracted after such a short acquaintance, is that both parties often end up accusing each other of lying.

The course of marriage maybe never runs smooth, and outsiders are particularly skeptical about international marriages, but the goal of a happy marriage is nevertheless as dear to the hearts of the partners and their families as in any other type of marriage. "The main thing is how the husband behaves, and whether or not both sides give it all their heart," says Chung Chuan-hui, who feels that he and his wife have come to cherish one another more and more over the last two years. Chung has read many books on Indonesia to help him learn about his wife's background and improve their relationship, and he also bought bilingual dictionaries in Jakarta, which he uses whenever they run into trouble communicating. His depth of feeling about the relationship is reflected in the name he gave their nine-month-old baby daughter--Chia-yuan, or "happy marriage."

The Indonesian-Chinese brides are almost completely dependent on their husbands to look after them, coming to Taiwan alone, without their families to back them up or friends and relatives to offer support. On top of this, they can only read Indonesian and speak Hakka, and don't know the first thing about Mandarin or Chinese characters. They can't venture out of Hakka towns like Meinung, and even need someone along to help just going to the post office or having pre-natal checkups at the hospital. After months of this, sometimes even the husband's family gets annoyed.

Having spent a great deal of time together with these women, Hsia Hsiao-chuan knows their needs. It was in order to facilitate their early integration into society that she launched her Chinese classes, which have received financial backing from the county government.

Although both are "Chinese," twenty or thirty years of upbringing in different countries inevitably leads to occasional breakdowns in communication. The conscientious husband uses a dictionary to help both sides fully under stand one another.

My home in Meinung?

Whether their marriages are flawed or fine, these ethnic Chinese brides, so far from their homes in Indonesia, are now laying roots in Meinung. In the classroom, they read aloud with the teacher--while also learning to write--the phrase: "I live in Meinung." For these women, learning Chinese means joining society and overcoming their present limitations.

After class is over a few husbands turn up holding infants, coming to bring their wives home to cook lunch. The longest that any of the women has been in Taiwan is two years, but the next generation is already present in numbers. Marriage is for life, and they still have a long road ahead of them.

[Picture Caption]

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A marriage that bridges the miles! Joyous wedding photographs mark the start of an international marriage fraught with risk and rich in dreams. (photo courtesy of Li Chih-chuan)

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By Chinese custom, the couple must fix an auspicious date before they wed.

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For the foreign brides, studying Chinese is an important step towards fitting in and learning to be independent.

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Most of the men treasure the wives that they have brought back from so far away. It is common to see them accompanying their wives during the literacy class, holding infants.

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Since the arrival of Chi-mei, Chan Sen-lin's papaya orchard has been kept in scrupulous order.

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Lin Chan-hua, Meinung's international marriage broker, drops by at one of his "client's" homes for a chat. He says he has principles in his business: he doesn't take slackers or junkies.

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Hui-fang left senior high school to marry Chang Chi-hsiung, whose family owns a motorcycle business, and now she helps out running the store, acting like one of the guys.

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When they were first married, Chung Chuan-hui and Yeh Mei-na argued and fought, but during the last two years they have grown closer and closer. With baby Chia-yuan, the whole family is often seen together.

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Although both are "Chinese," twenty or thirty years of upbringing in different countries inevitably leads to occasional breakdowns in communication. The conscientious husband uses a dictionary to help both sides fully under stand one another.

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After class, husbands take their wives home to cook lunch.

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Most of the brides were not used to worshipping ancestors or heaven in Indonesia, but in Taiwan they learn how to perform these rituals.

After class, husbands take their wives home to cook lunch.

Most of the brides were not used to worshipping ancestors or heaven in Indonesia, but in Taiwan they learn how to perform these rituals.