By the end of September in 2018, near four hundred thousand Southeast Asian female migrants reside and work in Taiwan, with roughly 253 thousand legitimate workers in the social welfare sector and 146 thousand legitimate spouses9. Perceptive readers may have noticed that as Taiwan manages to spot “illegal” runaway workers among migrants, “illegal” immigrant wives cannot escape the distinction as such, though they foster closer ties with Taiwan in terms of enhancing racial, ethnical or religious diversity of its population. Being a “legal” spouse means to engage in a
“real” marriage instead of a sham one. In addition, to be granted Taiwan’s identity card, migrant spouses need to renounce their original nationalities. Under the current Nationality Act, new immigrant women are prone to institutional harm especially during a “stateless” period, which takes place after they renounce their original nationalities and before they are entitled to Taiwan’s identity card. It is no exaggeration to say the cross-border marriage not only decides new immigrant
women’s happiness but also their political status. Still, financial condition propels the new immigrant women to build their life-long happiness in Taiwan. New immigrant women can be wives, mothers, caregivers, and even workers in numerous families and workplace, while it is their duty to attest their legitimacy of playing these social roles in Taiwan. In this regard, transnational marriage unfolds a biopolitical discourse which Separation guides readers through how a family may leave migrant mother a figure of homo sacer and the invisible affective labor.
Separation demonstrates that the power mechanism does not only function through the hierarchical structures in governmental regulations, manpower service, and employment, as shown in Escape, but also operates through the family, the basic
9 See the statistics on the official website of the National Immigration Agency, Ministry of the Interior.
<https://www.immigration.gov.tw/lp.asp?ctNode=29699&CtUnit=16434&BaseDSD=7&mp=1>
48
and private social units “which while being a constitutive part of the city…is constitutively excluded from political life (or, if you like, included through its exclusion)” ( The Use of Bodies 198). I propose that the family, where the affective relationships are most likely to burgeon and whose biological function of reproducing the potential citizens, can be understood as a form of state of exception in which laws suspend its efficacy for the sake of protecting citizen’s privacy but meanwhile
determining the family members’ citizenship. I read family both as a physical space to sustain one’s biological life and as a political regime to prove one’s legitimate
identity.
As Escape breaks down the social stigma of runaway workers, Separation demystifies the presumption that new immigrant women get married merely out of coveting their Taiwanese spouses’ property. In accordance with Our Story and Global Cinderella, Separation showcases that most new immigrant women marry the blue-collar natives in the countryside. Even if new immigrant women view cross-border marriage as a feasible way to improve the original family’s financial condition, most of them still face financial pressure in the Taiwanese families and manage to pursue happiness in both families. In Separation, the divorced new immigrant spouses undergo separation from the families at least twice. Firstly, they are separated from their original families and secondly from their Taiwanese families―some escape their Taiwanese husbands and some lose their child. In what sense are they separated beyond spatial distance? To what degree can they be dependent of their families? It is essential to acknowledge new immigrant women’s will to maintaining family with both families by playing different roles, but unfortunately new immigrant women are oftentimes instrumentalized by the dual sides. That is, a new immigrant woman might be a reproduction tool for her Taiwanese family and a cash cow for her original family. Written anonymously, the chapter “Exile” outlines a Vietnamese woman’s
49
heart-wrenching journey of pursing love on the island. The woman’s short-lived marriage with her first Taiwanese husband ends with the husband’s expectation of having a baby girl. Her husband steals her baby boy and sends it to his ex-girlfriend.
“My husband told me if I had turned in the baby, I would have been given a good fortune” (40). The woman finally keeps her child and leaves her abusive husband. The divorced immigrant spouse encounters the same difficulty for her children to be accepted by her next Taiwanese lover. Suffering domestic abuse, the woman seeks to commit suicide. She cries out,
“If you don’t allow me to go, kill me then, for I will live as if I were dead.
Before I met you, I had told you I got a child. But after we lived together, you only cared about your child and never mine. You are selfish because my child is not yours!” I shouted. “I do not want to live in the world anymore. I will kill myself if you don’t!” He said he would and then drag me upstairs with a knife. (46)
In “Just a Shadow,” Đ. Trang describes her misery as a wife to cover her husband’s secret affair with his sister-in-law. Đ. Trang does not even bear children because her nephew is her husband’s child. Đ. Trang’s grave loneliness and desperation result from her family’s disregard:
I am always alone. I do household chores alone. I watch TV alone. I sleep alone…as if a shadow in the family. I face questions without answers. Why did he marry me then? Why did he treat me this way after he decided to marry me? After all, I am a human. I have and I need feelings. I am not a bought robot. He never bought me any clothes, neither did he ask me what I need. (64)
The anonymous writer’s and Đ. Trang’s experiences indicate that new immigrant women can be the real victims of the “sham” marriages, the marriages without
50
autonomy and respect, the marriages needed by Taiwanese men who want only a child or only a wife, the marriages that prove a young woman’s life-long decision to be a failure. In short, a new immigrant woman is a part of the family but does not belong to it. Moreover, concerning the baby’s gender, Taiwan’s long-standing son preference can also impinge on new immigrant women’s social status. For instance, in “The Returned Mother and Daughter,” Du-shou Zuo and Yu-ying Yang describes that A-Jane is bounded in a nominal marriage most likely because her Taiwanese husband and her mother-in-law cannot accept the granddaughter and she feels ashamed to face her original family in Vietnam: “For A-Jane, her husband’s family is nothing but a building to live….It is said that if she[A-Jane] wants to go home, she can bring her daughter back, but if she had given birth to a boy, the grandson must stay in Taiwan”
(110). Worse still, narrated by Trần Duy Hưng from the third-person point of view,
“Tears of Heart” illustrates the exclusion of a “disposable” new immigrant from a family. The woman imagines she would be loved by her husband’s family since she gives birth to a baby boy. Nonetheless, she is expelled from the family:
After the birth of the grandson, the whole family treated her like trash, no better than a dog. Her once respectable husband and seemingly temperate mother-in-law told her off, “Who do you think you are? It is we who bought you. You are nothing but our maid. Get out of our family today.”
Like a lemon, she was discarded after being squeezed. (68)
By and large, the above passages delineate that new immigrant women enter the marriages without love and the families without emotional support. The economic disadvantage puts new immigrant women in a power inequality situation, and then the ambiguous, unapproved national identity deters new immigrant women from leaving terrible families or Taiwan, and their beloved sons or daughters may be utilized to evaluate the “worth” of the new immigrant mothers. Facing the misfortunate
cross-51
border marriages, new immigrant women have few choices to make. Be it escape or stay, as runaway workers in Escape, new immigrant women are caught within a series of indistinction between a family member and a domestic worker, a foreign (mother) and a Taiwanese (mother), a wife and a womb, homes and shelters and so on. For instance, they are mothers so it is their responsibility to shoulder the household chores and to reproduce children, but in effect they are reduced to robots or maids when the other family members turn a blind eye to new immigrant women’s affective,
emotional devotion and efforts behind the laborious work and romantic relationships.
The new immigrant women are included in the family as unpaid menial laborers.
On top of the suppression of the Taiwanese households, the new immigrant women’s original families could also serve as a source of oppression. In “Brave Hai-yen,” Yun-chang Liao, the associate editor-in-chief of 4-Way Voice, narrates the journey of a young female migrant Hai-yen. To cover the medical expenses for her father, Hai-yen is forced to drop out of high school. She gets married in Taiwan at the age of 16 and experiences divorce, work, repatriation to Vietnam during three years and more. Hai-yen’s family could not accept her divorce and her mother even blames her, “How silly you are! Why do you come home empty-handed?” (120). Moreover, although Hai-yen has strong motivation for returning to school, her family rejects her request and asks her to help alleviate the household financial burden. Liao feels perplexed about Hai-yen’s condition,
Whenever I bring up yen’s suffering, it fuels my anger. How could Hai-yen’s family treat her this way? Even though Vietnam is a patriarchal society, I still cannot understand why Hai-yen’s sacrifice was taken for granted so assuredly? Why did every member of her family ask her to be sympathetic while no one sympathizes with her? She has exchanged her youth for sustaining her family in Vietnam. However, when she wants to pursue her
52
dream, her family becomes her biggest stumbling stone. (121) Hiếu Lê, one of the editors of 4-Way Voice, records a story virtually according to the
“voice” of a Vietnamese wife on the phone, for the immigrant wife is illiterate and does not have any friends to help her. The woman could not help but wonder whether she counts as her mother’s daughter:
When she got married in Taiwan, she found her husband’s family to be her salvation, pulling her out of misfortune in her original family. Everyone in her husband’s family showed kindness. However, her family in Vietnam pressed her to send money back. Once she failed to do it, they would relentlessly denounce her….
“I misses Vietnam dearly but whenever I return home, my mother would make excuses to abuse me. I miss home but I dare not go back.”
Though her sisters also married in Taiwan, the financial burden of her original family was loaded on her alone….Nonetheless, she had never received any cordial words. (78-9)
The passages undeniably expose a horrifying family tragedy that a woman is utilized by her kin through a cross-border marriage and that family can constitute the most violent form of humiliation, suppression and exploitation. Family correlates closely with nation-state in the sense that division of labor and financial stability are required to sustain itself. If we advance Agamben’s notion of bare life beyond the scope of politics and into the private sphere, we can discern the self-justifying characteristic of power remains palpable in the family. Hardt and Negri also notify that in the society of control, the intensive and extensive power of institutions ruptures the boundaries between public and private. The force of patriarchy such as “family values” can still exert its influence over other aspects of society (Empire 196-97). By uncovering how easily the appalling maliciousness could spread in an unbridled manner and inflict
53
substantial mental or physical harm in a family, I do not attempt to blame on the identifiable, immediate culprits. Besides, I suggest that the submission of immigrant woman as wife, daughter, mother and mother-in-law should not be legitimized as the inevitable oppression stemming from intra-familial structure. I seek to point out that power mechanism is always internal to some social relations. For instance, economic factor could prevail over familial attachment because of the premise that it is family members’ duty to satisfy the basic needs, but the power to decide labor division in a family is in itself autonomous. Separation starkly reveals that new immigrant women often become agents affectively excluded from but economically included by the families home and abroad.
On the whole, my focus on new immigrant women’s status in Taiwan’s and Vietnam’s families intends to problematize the lurking divides within this putatively inclusive and affective social net. I also recognize that giving birth, a bodily and affective experience peculiar to women, could be abusively utilized. It is possible that a migrant spouse’s child is not hers but belongs to her husband or the husband’s family. A new immigrant woman’s boy child is her husband’s, and girl child hers. A child born by a Vietnamese mother is a Taiwanese child not a Vietnamese one. It is likely that a daughter becomes parent’s cash cow through a cross-border marriage by the idea of “sacrificing one’s happiness in exchange for the whole family’s
enjoyment” (90). The precarious conditions of new immigrant women expose how the economy-driven culture can bring about more divides within a family’s power
structure and exert forms of violence over new immigrant women’s corporeal and affective dimensions of everyday life.
III. Regarding the Pain of the Migrant Other
The subtitles of Escape and Separation, “Our Formosa, Their Prison” and “Our
54
Trading, Their Life” act as less a summary than the ethical punctum that articulates the problematic issue of boundary-making. How can we transform our Formosa into theirs? How can we ensure that the value of their cross-border marriage with us manifests their meaningful life? What can we do after reading their stories? Who are we at all? Reflecting on how the horrifying representation of warfare influences the uninvolved, Susan Sontag’s insight enables a profound self-reflection before we envision any ethical concern for the migrant Other. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag picks up Virginia Woolf’s slight touch on “we” when Woolf is confronted with the question of how can “we” prevent war. As Sontag critically points out,
No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.
…That “we” would include not just the sympathizers of a smallish nation or a stateless people fighting for its life, but a far larger constituency those only nominally concerned about some nasty war taking place in another country. (8)
For Sontag, “we” also include unsympathetic onlookers who disregard the Other’s pain. Along with the journey to the heart of the migrants through Escape and Separation, I propose that equally noteworthy are the images of reporters, editors, interpreters, and the officials, that is, the social networks of migrants, or “our” images in Sontag’s words. In what follows, I address the complicated affective responses to the pain of Others to demonstrate how others can either undermine or fulfill the
“potential for revolution” of “the set of all the exploited and the subjugated, a multitude that is directly opposed to Empire” (Empire 393).
Escape shows that the interpreters in the manpower agencies play an ambivalent role in managing migrant workers in Taiwan, for some interpreters are themselves Vietnamese. In “The Island of Gold,” Đ. Trang recollects two cases when she works
55
as an interpreter in a manpower agency specifically dealing with the cases of runaway workers. Vietnamese runaway domestic worker A-Hua successfully deceives the police officers about her identity at work but feels repentant and scared. When A-Hua returns back to the agency, Đ. Trang secretly opens the door for her despite the Taiwanese employer’s disapproval. Reflecting on her rebellious escape from the arrest, Hua breaks forth into violent lamentations:
“Oh my Lord! What is money? Why does money torture people like this? I do nothing wrong, but why do I need to run like a criminal? Am I a slave in this country? The manpower agent merely utilizes my labor for profits and refuses any help when I ask for it.”
…
I blame myself for inability to offer some words of consolation. What used to be inappropriate when I first entered the company now becomes too
“common” a thing. It takes simply a few months for my heart to be stiffened by witnessing numerous sufferings of my own Vietnamese fellows and cases beyond all reason. (84-5)
Đ. Trang’s helplessness is also expressed through the other case of Anna. When Đ.
Trang first meets Anna, Đ. Trang passionately invites Anna to give her a call anytime.
However, as Đ. Trang recalls, “Anna does not contact me anymore and gradually I forget her as well” (86). As a Philippine “legal” worker, Anna is forced by the Taiwanese agent to run away since her slight figure gets her unqualified for performing domestic work effectively:
The circulation of job changing goes on. Sometimes Anna serves as a cleaner in hotels, and sometimes a caregiver in the care centers. She seeks different jobs to do. A month later, my boss informs Anna that no one is willing to hire her but if she runs away, he can help, or she is going home! The indifference
56
of my employer makes me embarrassed to look at her. (86)
Đ. Trang’s experience as an interpreter draws readers nearer to how power mechanism could be affectively propelled. Although Đ. Trang neither alters her employer’s will nor interferes with the migrant workers’ future, we can still see that given the language and ethnic affinity, the interpreter takes up a position that can engage in a face-to-face or phone contact more easily than the employer. Đ. Trang’s self-reflection is less a judgment about her work than a revelation of a sense of guilt and above all, the difficulty of resistance for her fellow. This is why we cannot belittle the
overwhelming power of acquiescence to the structural evil either. The passages do not explicitly identify what deters the interpreter from taking action to ameliorate migrant workers’ condition, but it reveals the affective detachment from “the exploited and the subjugated” when the interpreter tends to reduce the cases of runaway migrant
workers to similar occurrence and fails to see each of them as individuals with different life experiences. In another case, the situation becomes worse when the interpreter adds insult to injury. In “Chase,” A-He and her friends are awakened at three in the morning to be repatriated to Vietnam without a warning. In the presence of the interpreter, police officers and a few Taiwanese standing outside the dorm, A-He argues with the interpreter,
“Last week you just asked us to sign the contract for the third year. Why do
“Last week you just asked us to sign the contract for the third year. Why do