Crossing the Sea to Be Together --The Children of Cross-Strait Marriages

This is not a comic scene from a Hong Kong movie, but a Taiwanese father with his mainland son.

Cross-strait marriages have recently been a constant focus of media attention, attracting congratulations, sympathy and sarcasm. But while adults are still struggling to adjust in all kinds ways, the fruit of those marriages--the children--have still quietly been being born, growing, and beginning to wander back and forth between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.

What young and defenseless children need most is stability, but the children of cross-strait marriages, which have only made their appearance since Taiwan authorized visits to mainland China, face an uncertain and complex situation. With no previous example to follow, it is not hard to realize that every step in the process of their growing up breaks new ground, and is also the real touchstone of whether cross-strait integration is possible.

Statistics show that over 10,000 spouses currently have applications for residence in Taiwan pending with the Chinese Refugees Relief Association (CRRA), and this number is growing far faster than the government had expected. Such a large number of cross-strait marriages is certain to produce quite a large number of children anyway. But in addition, the conditions for mainland spouses to apply to come to Taiwan are that they "must have been married for two years or already have children," and this undoubtedly encourages the attitude that "a mother is valued for her children": people hurry to have a child as soon as possible, to get their names onto the waiting list. "Almost everyone with a spouse also has a child," says Li Chin-lien, vice president of Come Travel Service, which is well known for organizing cross-strait travel.

Even if the children of cross-strait marriages are born on the mainland, they still count as Taiwanese children, and if they go through the proper formalities they are entitled to come and live in Taiwan at any time. But things are much harder for their mainland mothers (or in a tiny minority of cases, fathers). If they want to come to Taiwan, they must patiently wait their turn in the quota of 50 mainland spouses per month, or 600 per year. This year, the number of applicants has rocketed. Those who applied at the end of October will have to wait until May or June of the year 2001 before they can gain resident status. In other words, no matter how much time and money they spend travelling back and forth on visits, these couples will have to wait at least another six-and-a-half long years before they can be together permanently!

If their mothers cannot come to Taiwan, then should these young children come or not?

The number of mainland-born children now resident in Taiwan is estimated at something over one thousand. Applications to the CRRA for children to come to Taiwan are currently running at an average of around 180 each month. This figure is small compared with the more than 600 applications per month from spouses wishing to come to Taiwan, and seems to indicate that in many cases, because the children are still young and need their mothers' care, parents are in no hurry to send the children to Taiwan before their mothers get permission to come and live here.

Nonetheless, Li Chin-lien has noticed that many Taiwanese families still bring their children over first whatever the difficulties. "If the children come over, they can get identity cards as Taiwan residents immediately, and in the future can come to Taiwan at any time." She explains that what the fathers of these children fear most is that "the situation may change." The painful lesson of 45 years ago left behind many tragedies; who knows if communications across the Taiwan Strait may not suddenly be broken off again, leaving loved ones separated as if on opposite sides of the world?

"Of course the children should come," says a mainland wife, herself coming on a short visit and bringing her three-year-old daughter to live in Taiwan. But in her case, it is to escape the shackles of traditional patriarchal attitudes. She says waveringly that these few years since she has been married, living with her child in her parents' house, she has found the gossip around the neighborhood almost unbearable. "I still have to wait my turn to come to Taiwan, but the child is not a bastard and she's not going to take my family name, so she'll be better off here with her father."

After these little ones make the long journey to Taiwan and get their identity cards, they become the object of their Taiwan relations' curiosity and congratulations; but in fact their problems are just beginning.

In Taiwan, even the cheapest nanny will cost over NT$10,000 a month. On the mainland this same NT$10,000 will not only buy a nanny and servants, but also the best food and clothing for the wife and children. Here in Taiwan, if the child's grandparents are willing to help one can just about manage, but for the father to try to look after the children alone seems too risky. Many mainland children who have come to stay in Taiwan have turned round and gone back to the mainland to live with their mothers.

"While the children are small the main pressures are financial and the question of who will look after them, but in just a few years we have to consider their education," says Li Chin-lien, putting her finger on the uncertainty which faces the children of cross-strait marriages.

For many parents, the biggest shock comes when they discover that once their child obtains a Taiwan identity card, its resident status on the mainland is automatically terminated. Though mainland born, the child now becomes a little "Taiwanese compatriot," and on returning to the mainland has to leave its territory once every three months. Small children cannot travel by air alone, so the adults have to take turns to accompany them. This is least troublesome when the father is a Taiwanese businessman who also has to leave the mainland every three months, but quite apart from the cost of plane tickets, for a man to have to take a child with him wherever he goes is certainly a strain.

"Just what arrangements are best for these children? To be honest, no-one has experience, everyone is asking everyone else. More flexible and capable parents may be able to avoid a few dead ends. Sometimes the consequences of one wrong move can be frightening." Thus when Li Chin-lien heard that some people who have left their children in the care of their mainland grandparents as "foster children" are able to get visas which only need renewing once a year, she was surprised and excited; but will this solution work everywhere in mainland China? She cannot tell.

We don't know what becomes of the children who return to the mainland, but what of those who stay in Taiwan? When asked about this, Professor Chen Hsiao-hung of National Chengchih University's Graduate Institute of Sociology, who is currently conducting a survey of mainland residents coming to Taiwan on behalf of the Executive Yuan's Mainland Affairs Council, observes that because the phenomenon of cross-strait marriages has only emerged in the last six or seven years, these children are all below school age and have not yet entered the formal education system. Thus the problem of their education and adjustment has not yet been formally discussed. For the moment, they are growing up hidden away in their own homes. It is hard to know what they are feeling, for in many cases the children are not articulate enough to express their emotions, and many adults have no time to concern themselves with them.

Professor Chung Szu-chia, chairman of Chengchih University's Department of Psychology, points out that under normal circumstances young children are highly adaptable. Free from adults' rigid ways of thinking and social habits, it is easy for them to adapt to new surroundings.

"It is not the children who have problems. The ones with problems are the adults around them," says Chung Szu-chia, perhaps identifying the nub of the issue.

Looking at many cross-strait marriages, their problems are just normal family worries, yet comparisons like "Those mainlanders..." and "We Taiwanese...," appear in everyone's language. And the children, as the only unbreakable link between the two clearly defined family camps on each side of the strait, may have to cope with both visible and invisible pressures.

Firstly, any disharmony in cross-strait marriages strikes directly at the children.

Contrary to most people's belief that "the marriages of Taiwanese businessmen on the mainland can easily end up on the rocks," in fact "if the father is a Taiwanese businessman with a good level of education, economically well-off and of decisive character, and his mainland bride is a woman of equivalent education and ability whom he meets in the course of his work, then any difficulties can be overcome." Li Chin-lien has noticed that problems are more likely to occur in marriages where the Taiwanese partner went to the mainland specifically to find a spouse.

In the television serial The Xiamen Bride, the autistic son of a rich family, who cannot find a wife in Taiwan, marries an innocent, beautiful mainland girl from Huian. Such dramatic stories may be rare in real life, but there really are quite a few men who are not well placed in the marriage stakes in Taiwan--because of their age or low incomes--who go to the mainland in search of a wife. "Although we cannot say such May-September alliances are purely mercenary, when the young wife comes to Taiwan and finds out how things really stand, her feeling of having been 'tricked' is particularly acute," says an official at the Mainland Affairs Council who feels deeply about such tragicomic cases.

Wang Meiyue (not her real name), who came to live in Taiwan just this September, is an example.

Five years ago, when visitors from Taiwan were still a rare sight in the countryside of Guangdong Province, a friend of Wang Meiyue's father introduced her to the man who is now her husband. He is not an articulate man, and is 17 or 18 years her senior, but she did not mind. Not long after they were married, she heard that there was very little chance for wives to come to live in Taiwan, and so she pressed her husband to put his money into building houses on the mainland. They built a four-storey house for themselves to live in and a three-storey-house to rent out, which were the envy of the neighborhood for quite a while. But she hadn't realized that the RMB●200,000-plus (around NT$700,000/US$27,000) which it took to build these two houses had been her husband's entire savings.

This June, just a few days after arriving in Taiwan with her children for her first visit, Wang Meiyue received a letter from the ROC Bureau of Entry and Exit granting her permission to reside in Taiwan, and she took her children back home to deal with the formalities. But surprisingly this authorization, which had been so long in coming, brought her no joy. For she had discovered that her husband, who she had thought of as well-off and capable, in fact only rents a dilapidated two-room flat of less than 20 ping (65m) in an industrial zone in a small Taiwanese town. And his monthly salary of something over US$600 (around NT$17,000), which on the mainland sounded astronomical, in Taiwan is barely enough to pay their NT$5000 rent and NT$7000 in kindergarten fees for their two boys. After calculating this way and that, Wang Meiyue bit her lip and left her nine-month-old daughter in the care of her older sister, only bringing her two sons to Taiwan. In the end the family reunion she had looked forward to for so long was incomplete.

"Back on the mainland people looked up to me, but here in Taiwan my status has gone down a good many notches," says Wang Meiyue, giving vent to her frustration. "When I'm feeling down, everything gets on my nerves ." Always a cheerful, loving mother in the past, nowadays she sometimes takes her anger out on her children. Her frequent arguments with the children's father and the pressure of their lack of money have brought previously unseen wrinkles to her face, although she has only just turned 30.

"I wish I could take the children back to the mainland, but I don't have the money!" she says, all the while rubbing the corners of her eyes so as not to let a stranger see her tears.

In the face of these disappointments, her greatest motivation to keep up the struggle is her children's future. Wang Meiyue spends over NT$3000 a month each to send her two boys to a large "bilingual kindergarten" in their little town, on the one hand wishing to give them the best education, and on the other making time for herself to attend hairdressing classes in the hope that she can quickly find a job and start earning money.

"Back home, you have to go to the county town to find a kindergarten. Education here really is way ahead of the mainland." Although Wang Meiyue is a stranger to the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, the complex-form Chinese characters and the English conversation which the kindergarten teaches, and so cannot give her children any help with them, when she sees her four-year-old eldest son come home and hurriedly take out his exercise books and start writing and reading, and her two-year-old second son prattling away beside him, she feels that coming to Taiwan has been worthwhile after all.

Compared with Wang Meiyue, Fu Xiaomei and her son, who came to Taiwan from Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province over two years ago, have gradually adapted quite well to life here. Fu Xiaomei still remembers how when her son Wei Chi-hao had just arrived, when he saw the water of the Chingmei Creek in Taipei's Mucha District, he would excitedly shout "West Lake! West Lake!" and how at the kindergarten he used Hangzhou dialect to tell his teacher that he wanted to go to the toilet, to his teacher's mystification and to everyone's amusement.

It is amazing how quickly children change, and after two years of life in Taiwan, today little Chihao is a healthy five-year-old, and all his memories of Hangzhou have long since faded away. Instead, his mind is filled with "The Train is Flying Along" and "How are you?" taught at the local kindergarten, the ice-cream cone his mother buys him every day at the corner shop they pass on the way home, and Echo Publishing Company's exquisite children's encyclopedia.

Fu Xiaomei's husband is a retired colonel with quite a good pension, and Fu Xiaomei works as a seamstress at home. After paying their sky-high Taipei rent and NT$10,000 a month for their son's kindergarten, money is a little tight. but in their free time they take the child out everywhere, and life is pleasant and full.

When mainland wives and children come to Taiwan, they are sure to need some time to adjust, but many mainland brides arrive mentally quite unprepared for the shadow which their relationships with their parents-in-law can cast over their lives. If a child is caught in the middle, the situation almost inevitably develops into a quiet war spanning the Taiwan Strait and three generations, which expresses itself in all kinds of ways.

Come to speak of it, Taiwanese spouses' parents who suddenly find themselves "blessed" with the title of "Grandpa" and "Grandma" also have their own grievances to relate.

"What's there to be happy about in getting a grandson, when my son and his wife are apart?" asks an old gentleman surnamed Tu who lives in eastern Taipei. At first he was unwilling to embark on this family tale of woe, which he has already had about as much of as he can take, but once he gets the bit between his teeth there is no stopping him: When my son wanted to go to Shanghai to study Chinese medicine or something, I had him agree to a few simple ground rules in front of his mainland guarantor, one being that for three years he was not to take a girlfriend. But before three months were out, there he was saying he wanted to get married!"

But despite all his anger, the old man reckons that "if my son did one thing right on the mainland, it was giving me this good little grandson." When he talks about his grandson, the old man's vexed tone softens and a smile brightens his face: "Last year when he came to stay, I took him to get his photo taken for his passport. The owner of the photo studio said what a fine-looking young fellow he was, and he specially enlarged the photo and hung it in his window along with all the pictures of the stars. He kept it there for over a year."

Old Mr Tu has only one son, and this grandchild is his oldest grandson. His daughter-in-law, who is currently in Taiwan on a family visit visa, is about give birth to her second child.

"He's such a lovable grandson, what a pity there's no-one here to love him!" says the child's father Tu Wei-lun (not his real name), the leading male character in this story. Caught in the middle of the three generations, he has taken to letting off steam with jokes. But his Shanghainese wife says repeatedly that the boy's grandparents look after him best. Although she is about to give birth in Taiwan. and it would seem the most obvious thing for the newborn baby to stay in Taiwan, on the one hand the child has to be suckled, and on the other she is afraid that the burden might be too great for the old couple, so she has decided that after her second child is born she will take it back with her to the mainland.

The thoroughly well-to-do Mr Chang, a trader, also found it hard to forgive his usually well-be-haved eldest son for marrying a 20-year-old mainland girl, especially due to the embarrassing circumstance that "she was having a baby, so we couldn't refuse."

"I always tell my daughter-in-law she must have sharp eyes to have married my son and not some old man." Now that his daughter-in-law has been granted permission to take up residence in Taiwan, this thoroughly authoritarian grandfather cannot help constantly comparing his eldest grandchild, who came to Taiwan some time ago, with her younger brother who has just arrived here with their mother.

"My granddaughter came when she was just over a year old, and now she's four, she's very well behaved, not like my two-year-old grandson--if you give him a little smack he hides behind his mother and cries, and she protects him too." And again: "They have bad habits, when they the change the nappy they don't wash it, they just hang it up to dry and then use it again...."

All in all, this Taiwanese grandfather is thoroughly dissatisfied with his mainland daughter-in-law: "Now that she's going to stay in Taiwan, I want to use the next two years to teach her a thing or two. If she can't get used to it, it's fine by me if she goes back, but the boy stays here!"

"The superior attitude of the in-laws sometimes really can be very hurtful," says mainland bride Zhang Lanzhen (not her real name), who has now finally moved out of her husband's family's home to set up her own household with her husband and daughter in a rented flat. In the extended family home, relatives would often criticize mainlanders in her presence as poor and lazy or say, "Everyone must have been really jealous of you coming to Taiwan." and hint that she ought to be grateful and should work harder. They would even scold her four-year-old daughter by saying "If you're not good, we'll send you back to the mainland!"

Perhaps "sending her back to the mainland" meant the child wouldn't be able to eat at McDonald's or go to an English-language kindergarten any more, but for a small family who "just want the whole family to be together, never mind where," such things are really not important. The American company which Zhang Lanzhen and her husband work for is planning to set up a branch office in Guangzhou next year. Guangzhou is where their daughter was born, and in the future might be the place where the couple again build their career, or so Zhang Lanzhen hopes.

"Many people think that Taiwan has better education and more opportunities, so the children should definitely stay and make their lives in Taiwan. But in fact that's not necessarily so," says Yen Ma-lung, who has just wound up his English evening school in Taiwan. He has bought some property in Shanghai and is planning to move his business activities there to be with his wife and children.

Yen Ma-lung's wife Feng Jie was "the first mainland bride from all Shanghai to come to live in Taiwan." but today what Yen Ma-lung is most proud of is that "my two sons are now the first pair of Taiwanese children [with Taiwan identity cards] in all Shanghai!" Feng Jie had always been very homesick, and in June of this year, as soon as her two years of initial residence in Taiwan were up and she got her full ID card, she hurried back to her old home in Shanghai with her children.

In Shanghai, perhaps the material standard of living really is twenty years behind Taiwan, but Yen Ma-lung and Tu Wei-lun, who are both married to Shanghainese women, believe that Shanghai is full of people of talent and offers great opportunities. Even more interestingly, both feel that their parents-in-law are highly educated, enlightened people, and have no qualms whatsoever about giving their children into their care; and both mention the elementary school set up in Shanghai by the Soong Ching-ling Foundation, and intend to send their children to school there....

Whether in the future they become "mainland children in Taiwan" or "Taiwanese children on the mainland," let's hope that what cross-strait marriages give these children is not friction and uncertainty, but more choices and a wider outlook!

[Picture Caption]

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In cross-strait marriages, when children born in mainland China come home across the sea, as well as joy they also bring their fathers and grand fathers a few headaches. (drawing by Tsai Chih-pen)

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Yen Ma-lung, who two-and-a-half years ago welcomed his wife to Taiwan asthe first bride to come here from Shanghai, has now sent his wife and sons back there. Our photo  shows Yen Ma-lung with his wife and his eldest son Yen Tsun-jui. (courtesy of Yen Ma-lung)

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Having come from Hangzhou's West Lake to Mucha's Chingmei Creek, five- year-old Wei Chi-hao has long grown accustomed to life in Taipei, and the family of three are happy to be together.

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The legal service center of the Straits Exchange Foundation, which deals with cross-strait document verification, often sees grandmothers and grandfathers, anxious to see their grandchildren, making many visits to complete the children's entry visa applications.

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These mainland wives and children arrived in Taiwan with jubilation, but after two-and-a-half years of settling in, one can say that for every happy family, there's also an unhappy one.

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Traditionally, responsibility for bringing up the children has fallen mainly on the mother, but if she cannot come to Taiwan or does not understand the content of Taiwanese schooling, this must have some effect on the start these children get in their education.

Yen Ma-lung, who two-and-a-half years ago welcomed his wife to Taiwan asthe first bride to come here from Shanghai, has now sent his wife and sons back there. Our photo shows Yen Ma-lung with his wife and his eldest son Yen Tsun-jui. （courtesy of Yen Ma-lung）

Having come from Hangzhou's West Lake to Mucha's Chingmei Creek, five- year-old Wei Chi-hao has long grown accustomed to life in Taipei, and the family of three are happy to be together.