A chance to work in media
According to the Ministry of the Interior, in Taiwan there are 150,000 long-term immigrants from Indonesia (many of them women married to Taiwanese men) as well as 700,000 Indonesian laborers on foreign worker visas. When you add in the children of immigrants, that brings the total to some 1.1 million. As Su Ling-yao, a Southeast-Asian news producer at Public Television Service (PTS), says “We have a duty to speak to them in their own languages, so that they can understand what’s going on in Taiwan and abroad.”
The station’s Southeast-Asian-language news broadcasts, which kicked off in April of 2018, represent a breakthrough. Media outlets such as Radio Taiwan International (RTI) and 4-Way Voice (a monthly magazine with a website) had long been providing radio broadcasts and printed news in Southeast-Asian languages, but audiovisual news broadcasts were almost entirely lacking.
This dearth of accessible news made a particularly deep impression on Tony during the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003. He was working at the Taipei City Government at the time, and at the first possible moment he printed information about SARS in six languages—Chinese, English, Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian—on 3000 sheets of A4 paper, which he widely distributed. Although he did everything he could to spread the word, news came from the Taipei City Hospital Heping Branch that three Indonesian caregivers had contracted SARS and died there on the third day after the hospital was sealed off and placed under quarantine.
The news of the workers’ deaths hit Tony hard. When Taiwanese were wearing face masks, checking their own temperatures, and taking preventive measures, foreign workers had not even heard about the SARS outbreak. “Whether on television or radio or in print media, the news was practically all in Chinese!” Likewise, when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck the following year, Indonesians in Taiwan found it difficult to get news about how the disaster had affected their homeland.
Consequently, Tony went on to work at various media outlets, from hosting Indonesian-language shows on RTI, to founding INTAI, Taiwan’s first Indonesian-language magazine, to serving currently as an Indonesian news anchor at PTS. Step by step, he has been broadening the reach of Indonesian-language news in Taiwan.
Taiwan’s Public Television Service was the nation’s first TV company to air news broadcasts in Southeast-Asian languages. From left to right, journalists for its Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese shows. (courtesy of PTS)