Lighting up her daughter’s future
One particular video, “My Mother the Foreign Domestic Helper,” touched many viewers. Hang’s mother’s time in Taiwan came to an end in 2018. When they went to see her off at the airport as she headed back to Vietnam, everyone was weeping, no-one more so than her now former employer—everyone, that is, except for the elder Nguyen. A lot of viewers were puzzled: why didn’t she cry too?
“Actually I felt quite sad for my mom! Before she came to Taiwan she was fragile, and whenever something painful happened she would dwell on it and cry to the point she’d almost pass out,” explains Hang.
After 14 years of working in Taiwan, though, she had become as strong as steel and much less openly emotional. “She swallowed all the loneliness and homesickness she felt and the hardships of her work, and by the time she left, she had no more tears to cry. She just went straight to Customs and never looked back,” Hang says, welling up.
After a moment’s hesitation, Hang then reveals, “Later on I found out that when my mom had just arrived in Taiwan, her employer would only let her have one boxed meal a day, half for lunch and half for dinner!” Even when Hang’s grandmother passed away, her mother couldn’t attend the funeral because of her work in Taiwan. All Hang could do was read out the eulogy sent over by her mother, which brought all the family members in attendance to tears.
Hang’s mother hoped her daughters could marry into good families, but after returning to Vietnam at the end of her first stint working in Taiwan, she realized that the family was still living in such poor conditions that it would probably hurt the girls’ prospects if any interested party should visit them at home. To solve this, she borrowed money from relatives to build a house and get her daughters educations, and then set off back to Taiwan to earn money and pay back the debt.
Nguyen Thu Hang works as a teacher of Vietnamese pronunciation and is very popular with her students. (photo courtesy of Nguyen Thu Hang)