Coming to terms with poverty
"Some of Taiwan's new poor are alcoholics, drug addicts, or gamblers, or come from broken homes. Most do casual work or are members of single-parent households. Mother Cheng is a classic example," says Chen Mei-li, specialist in the public assistance section of the Kaohsiung County Bureau of Social Affairs (BSA). Such people, with low wages, low skills, living on the margins of poverty and earning just enough to stay alive, with a demoralizing quality of life and no power to become upwardly mobile, do not normally qualify as low-income households according to the government's criteria because they are technically employed.
Mother Cheng and her three daughters now live in a 60-square-meter apartment in Taliao where they moved after spending a year in an old house in Linyuan. With a table and chairs plus a computer table in the living room, guests can hardly even turn around in the place. To survive, Cheng initially held down two jobs as a dishwasher in a couple of restaurants, working over 12 hours a day for only NT$5,000. But she had to pay her three daughters' school costs as well as monthly rent of NT$3,000.
One night, riding home on her motorcycle, Mother Cheng crashed into an oncoming car at a cross street near her home. Because she had jumped a red light, she was at fault. Unable to work, she had also to bear the cost of all her medical expenses. The family's finances hit rock bottom.
How poor were they? "Every time I went to a store, even if it was for a NT$30 bottle of soy sauce, I had to see exactly how much I had on me before I dared go in." She also thought of ways to economize, like in the Japanese movie Gabai Granny (2006): "Going to bed early can save on electricity." For those with no ready money, a dollar saved is a dollar earned. The nightmare of being "hounded to death for a dollar" often startled Mother Cheng awake in the middle of the night.
Fortunately, her three daughters are sensible girls. To save NT$10 on her bus fare, the eldest daughter forced herself to get off two stops before her destination. The youngest daughter was studying in the Cosmetology Department at the private Shu-te Home Economics and Commercial High School; to pay the school fees of NT$20,000 a semester, she rushed off to the Han-Hsien International Hotel right after her classes, with no time out for dinner, to work for NT$90 an hour and lighten her mother's burden a bit.
But no matter how hard you try to bear the bitterness alone, you can't ward off the pangs of hunger. The second daughter, then studying at Kaohsiung Municipal Girls' Senior High School, decided to seek outside assistance. She applied for student aid through the Kaohsiung City Social Affairs Bureau. But because the family's registered domicile was in Kaohsiung County the request was referred to the Kaohsiung County BSA and ended up in the hands of Chen Mei-li. Chen was sympathetic to the family's situation but because financial assistance to low-income households was determined on the basis of household income, personal property and real estate holdings, and Mother Cheng was not yet divorced from her husband, her husband's property and income meant they were not entitled to financial assistance, nor to student aid for her three daughters.
"In practice, many problems arise because of these inflexible criteria, which lead to many people in desperate need not receiving protection from the social welfare network. They are left to cope on their own," says Chen Mei-li.
In addition to the public sector financial assistance under the Great Warmth project, Yang Yu-lin, a staff member of the Philanthropic Association of Kaohsiung County, visits the Chengs each week to offer emotional and spiritual support.