February 27-March 4, 2012
Headline News
Pastor’s wife offers first-hand account of the challenging life of foreign spouses in Taiwan
Reported by Chen Wei-chien
Written by Lydia Ma
On the surface, the designation of “foreign spouse” should be a neutral term signifying a foreigner who is married to a Taiwanese. However, mainstream media in Taiwan do not use this term to refer to Caucasian or Japanese women because the term has come to imply exclusively to women from Vietnam, China, or other less affluent Asian countries who came to Taiwan through matchmaking agencies and married Taiwanese men who couldn’t find a suitable Taiwanese spouse.
With this stereotype in mind, it’s difficult to imagine that Chen Liang-peng – a pastor’s wife, a graduate of National Taiwan University (NTU), a manager and programmer – is a “foreign spouse”. Chen is the wife of Pastor Yang Shan-hsiung who currently pastors Tsao-Kang Presbyterian Church near Changhua. She currently has a civil engineering degree from NTU and comes from Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.
Speaking about her experiences studying in Taiwan, she said: “I wanted to find a predominantly Mandarin-speaking environment to study because my Mandarin isn’t very good though I’m of Chinese descent.” She explained that when she was in Vietnam, she worked at a renowned shipping company and helped the company design a program that saved production costs significantly. As reward, her employer gave her a cash award which she later used toward paying for her tuition at NTU.
When Chen and Yang were dating, Yang was already studying in a seminary and preparing to become a full-time pastor. With this in mind, Chen began to prepare herself to become a pastor’s wife as well. In the beginning, one of the main challenges she faced was getting accustomed to living in the countryside. For someone who grew up in a big city and then worked in Taipei, it took her a while to adjust to Tsao-Kang. “In the beginning, I didn’t even know where to go for my grocery shopping. However, my congregation was really helpful and reached out to me. Though I prefer the city, I am willing to follow God’s leading.”
Living in Tsao-Kang, Chen sometimes bumps into Vietnamese ladies when she goes out and she enjoys interacting with them and inviting them to church. ”Some of these ladies are in a difficult situation. They’ve come from poor families in Vietnam to get married in Taiwan only to later discover that their new family expects them to be a breadwinner of the household,” Chen said, adding that many prejudices and assumptions against foreign spouses remain prevalent in Taiwan, which has prompted her to reach out to these women, offer them a listening ear and lend them a helping hand. She urges Taiwanese to listen and help foreign spouses more.
Influenced by his wife, Yang did his Master’s thesis on foreign spouses and has a special burden to reach out to them. However, pastoring a small, rural, and cash-strapped church means that available resources often go to after-school tutoring programs for children from underprivileged families first and outreach ministries for foreign spouses will have to wait. However, that hasn’t stopped him from using examples from the Bible whenever he can to teach his congregation about reaching out to foreigners.
