Of the three foreign-born community workers at the Juridical Association for the Development of Women’s Rights in Ping­tung (JADWRP), Sie Li Li, who hails originally from Indonesia, has been working here the longest. Several years ago she happened to receive a flyer printed in both Indonesian and Chinese that described classes taught by JADWRP teachers­ and sponsored by the county government’s Service Center for Foreign Spouses. But it wasn’t until her youngest daughter­ was three that she was actually able to take a class. She never expected it to prompt her to take a variety of courses at the center before finally ending up as a member of JADWRP’s staff.

Sie and her colleagues To Ngoc Anh and Ho Thanh Nhan are sisters of circumstance—each a foreign woman married to a Taiwanese man. They are all fluent in Mandarin and Taiwanese and boast a variety of talents. At the association they have several responsibilities, including teaching classes in multiculturalism at different schools, offering advice to foreign workers and foreign spouses on legal matters, providing assistance when foreign spouses have traffic accidents or face other crises, and making presentations at conferences.

“My three daughters all say, ‘Mama is so awesome. When I grow up, I want to be just like her,’” says Sie. “And when people ask them about their mother’s nationality, they all proudly respond: ‘My mother is Indonesian.’”

JADWRP has really pushed to make its presence felt at the community level. It uses games and other lively methods to interact with elderly people.

Tsai Shun-jou, JADWRP’s director, says that when confronted with society’s invisible wall of discrimination, “Our foreign-born staffers must be strong of heart and mind.” For instance, when they go to community center classes for the elderly to talk about multiculturalism, before they even start to speak, they get asked, “Did you just marry into Taiwan for the money?” or, “Why is it that children of Vietnamese mothers always steal stuff?” When the foreign spouses working at the association encounter attitudes like these for the first time, they typically feel like crying, but gradually they become inured to it and are able to keep their cool and respond with great composure. It’s a process that each of them has had to go through, and the association provides them with all the support it can muster and encourages them to recharge their batteries by taking professional development courses.

In the process of providing service, JADWRP partners come across many heartrending cases that only reinforce their conviction that society’s attitudes must change and that in the meantime the association must serve as an unwavering light in the darkness.

Ho Thanh Nhan relates that once in a remote area of the Heng­chun Peninsula, they visited an elementary school where a teacher asked them to look into the case of a Vietnamese woman named Ah-Xia who had married a local and was suffering domestic violence.

Because the family Ah-Xia had married into was known to be tough and overbearing, the JADWRP workers pretended to be tourists, going incognito to the small eatery where Ah-Xia worked. They were first struck by the odd fact that she was wearing a heavy jacket on a hot day. It turned out that she was physically exhausted and her mental state had become dazed and confusued. The JADWRP staff discovered that for every day of the 10 years she had been living in Taiwan, she worked extremely hard for her husband’s family, yet she couldn’t even speak any Chinese. All the money she earned at the small eatery she gave to her mother-in-law. She never had any spending money, and both times she gave birth she wasn’t given the traditional month of rest.

Ah-Xia was often beaten by her husband. One day their nine-year-old son couldn’t stand it anymore and picked up a knife, warning his father not to get near her. It was only after that scene that teachers and social workers became aware of the problem. But when social workers visited their home, they were barred entry by the mother-in-law. The women of JADWRP could only secretly visit Ah-Xia at work and give her support on the sly.

One night, when Ah-Xia was once again locked outside by her mother-in-law as punishment for some transgression, she finally left for good with the support of relatives from home who had likewise come to Taiwan. Her son ended up telling his mother: “Don’t come back, but don’t change your name, because when I grow up I will find you!”

Ho sighs that there are many similar situations existing out of sight in society’s shadows. Only with widespread and penetrating social support networks can society in Taiwan prevent foreign spouses and their children from suffering abuse.

JADWRP has really pushed to make its presence felt at the community level. It uses games and other lively methods to interact with elderly people.

JADWRP is organizing activities and courses with two goals: (1) to help Taiwanese open their minds and re-think attitudes about immigrants, and (2) to teach immigrants practical skills to fit in. For example, JADWRP is offering multicultural summer camps for families, open to everyone, whether the family includes an immigrant or not. Also, because rural communities are aging and therefore more foreign domestic workers and live-in nurses are being hired, classes are being offered to rural elderly Taiwanese to introduce the cultures and customs of foreign workers and to teach basic principles of treatment that employers should be expected to observe toward them. JADWRP’s classes for immigrant women themselves include driver’s education, training for a Class III chef’s license, and courses aimed at self-development. Both types of courses are getting high praise.

Tsai suggests that with the trend toward cooperation and the sharing of resources, when government departments and agencies implement plans aimed at assisting immigrant spouses, they should hire more immigrant spouses to help carry them out. For instance, immigrant spouses are ideally suited to carry out home visits under the National New Immigrant Torch Plan. And more public agencies and government departments ought to hire immigrant spouses as interpreters so as to gain a better understanding of immigrants’ true situations.