Migrant Wives and Imagined Borders
In Chapter 2, when talking about commodity and power, I quoted the definition of sex work in The Social Order Maintenance Act –“any individual who engages in sexual conduct or cohabitation with intent for financial gains” (J.Y. Interpretation No. 666 2009)). I stopped and asked a question there about whether wives could be included in this category. Obviously, not all wives marry men “with intent for financial gains,” however those brides that are purchased from an agency overseas—so-called “mail order” brides—are absolutely in this category (more evidence for this will be revealed in the following sections as well). In the first film that is
analyzed in this chapter, the migrant wife is not a mail order bride (that is, she was not purchased through an agency), however the woman in the second film is a mail order bride from Vietnam.
What is interesting about analyzing these two films is the similarities in their power constructions.
The above Social Order Maintenance Act is currently the law governing prostitution in Taiwan. It still applies as stated in the above quote, but with the change that in 2011, in order to make the law constitutional (as it punished women for prostitution but not men for being clients), an amendment was added to make sex work legal in special areas. None of these areas exist, which is another interesting product of power adapting to resistance, but the discussion of that is outside the scope of this thesis. What is interesting is the idea that control of the sex worker commodity is based on location. She is legal, in a specially controlled location “an appropriate distance” from schools, temples, churches, kindergartens, and other public buildings “of this
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kind.” Prostitutes would also need to be licensed, HIV free, and get regular health checks (社會 秩序維護法 2011). These regulations are virtually the same as those of licensed prostitution in the martial law period, but on a smaller scale—in special areas. Before, these regulations were motivated by an imagined moral superiority of the nation and its citizens as well as an attempt to control those morals through hygiene. In this law, the idea of moral superiority can be seen in the placing of the special areas away from public buildings and the hygiene can be seen in licensing and health checks. Since this law is based on location and coincides with the present day in which the economy is accommodating ever-increasing numbers of immigrants, there is a strong message of moral legitimacy based on location.
Foreign-born residents in Taiwan have grown from around 30,000 in 1991 to around 500,000 in 2006. Of these, about 18 percent have entered Taiwan through marriage. 90 percent of these cross-border marriages are from Southeast Asia and China (Ministry of Interior 2009, cited in Chuang and Lin: 1). At around 75,000, Vietnamese made up Taiwan’s largest population of non-Chinese nationals in 2007 (humantrafficking.org 2007). In 2003, David Wu, director of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Ho Chi Minh City, said, "In 1995 there were only 1,476 Vietnamese women married to Taiwanese husbands. The number now is more than 60,000" (DinhThanh Lam 2003). By 2009 this number was up to around 100,000 (Tang and Wang 2011: 430-440).
Clearly, there is an increasing trend of immigrants, migrant brides, and “mail-order”
brides, and the reason for this trend is economic. The brides are pushed out by financial
difficulties, such as unpaid debts, jobless family members, bad harvests, or the chance for better lives in general (DinhThanh Lam 2003; humantrafficking.org 2007). On the Taiwanese side there is economic pull. The first factor is that men are willing to pay for wives—as much as
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$10,000USD (DinhThanh Lam 2003). Another factor is employment. Southeast Asians make up virtually 100 percent of foreign domestic and care workers (Lan 2008: 834). Housekeeping and private nursing are undesirable jobs for Taiwanese nationals, and so there is a demand vacuum to fill these positions (Wang and Bélanger 2008: 97).
The idea that, politically, there is a remnant of nationalism in the present day surrounding the morality of location which drives the discouragement of migrant brides is clearly evident in some unfortunate political statements. In fact, the lines that separate sex worker and immigrant are blurring in the modern period. Some of the same regulations and stigmas apply to both. In the context of Taiwanese policy pushing women to have children “if you love Taiwan” because of low fertility rates, Vice Minister of Education Chou Tsan-Te made a discouraging comment about the reproduction of immigrant women: “In a national education conference, Chou expressed his worry about the ‘low quality’ of immigrants and said that ‘foreign brides should not have so many children’” (Lan 2008: 841-842). Aside from being seen as producing low-quality offspring, migrant brides have also been stigmatized as having disease: “According to Chen (Chien-jen Chen, Director General of DOH), the seven issues [for AIDS prevention] the DOH will target are male homosexuality, the online sex industry, the sharing of needles in drug use, foreign brides and abortion, students from the fifth grade through middle school, conscripted servicemen, and people with HIV…” (Huang 2005: 1, emphasis added). This is a clear
manifestation of the same hygiene regulations that attempt to control the commodity body objects of sex workers.
The stigmas go beyond governmental nationalism. Migrant brides have a presence in the media, and their portrayal is not a positive one. “The Taiwanese media construct the ‘foreign brides phenomenon’ as a social problem. The brides are portrayed either as passive victims or
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materialist gold-diggers, and prone to committing crimes, while the bridegrooms are portrayed as the ‘socially undesirable,’ including physically or mentally disabled, and morally inferior” (Hsia 2007: 55).
Concubines, Wives, Prostitutes
This link between sex workers and brides is not actually surprising once the historical and societal reasons are traced back. Ding Naifei provides an excellent explanation in her essay,
“Wife-in-Monogamy and ‘The Exaltation of Concubines.’” She demonstrates the genealogy of the technologies of control over sex workers and wives with a simple metaphor she borrows from McMahon and expands upon: The effects of Chinese polygamy still linger when talking about Chinese marriage, just as the history of slavery still impacts race relations in the U.S.
(Ding 2007: 220).
Her essay explains what this means in the third section, where she examines the conflict of Chinese custom with British common law. Essentially, British judges interpreted Chinese polygamy to be similar to the more familiar Islamic polygamy, and thus legally treated it the same. This was not completely accurate, however, because in Chinese polygamy there is a primary wife, who is analogous to today’s “wife-in-monogamy” and then there are secondary wives, who aren’t actually wives at all but concubines. The issue with treating them all as wives, as British law came to do, was that they were originally not all treated equally within that
cultural practice. Ding points out a fact that was mentioned in Chapter 1—that concubine status was essentially that of a family servant, and she was not the primary wife’s equal (Ding 2007:
231). Ding gives an example that a ruling in a British court might say all of the wives have the right to equally divide an inheritance (which before would belong solely to the primary wife) (Ding 2007: 232). Clearly the struggle to adapt to this modernization of marriage would cause
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conflict—suddenly the previously inferior concubines are seen as “gold-diggers,” thus a connection between sex-objectified women and money formed, and this would condense into a stigma that applied to women outside of monogamous marriage—sex workers among them.
The title of Ding’s second section, quoted from Gayle Rubin, says, “‘[A woman] is no more a helpmate of man than gold is in itself money’” (Ding 2007: 224). This is a reference to the idea that women are trafficked, but there is no inherent or biological reason for it. An
interesting twist on this concept, however, is Ding’s idea that “giving women in marriage” is the highest and most valuable form of this trafficking, while concubines are merely “bought and sold”
(Ding 2007: 227). Concubines, mistresses, and prostitutes are a lower status, being talked about in the language of economy. I would add to this the role of mail order bride, who is also bought and sold, but the link between the two (sex workers and mail order brides) does not end here.
Ding points out that this language of woman trafficking has evolved through U.S. based globalized feminism, especially when talking about Asia, to signify sex slavery (Ding 2007: 225-226). The state-sanctioned, lawful, heterosexual monogamous marriage has been separated out of this idea of human trafficking, and is seen as the only decent and proper alternative. Everything other than monogamy has become human trafficking and sex slavery. However, mail order brides are again an exception—humantrafficking.org, a resource created by the US State
Department, has articles devoted to migrant brides, and Taiwan is pointed out as a destination of these brides.
Ding also asks, “What are we saying, what do we mean when we say that polygamy has never gone away, or that a certain figure is ‘fated’ to be a concubine/mistress, or that she has the
‘no-heart’ of a prostitute (biaoziwuqing)?” (Ding 2007: 221). Ding is saying certain women in Taiwanese society are labeled as concubines and prostitutes because of their personalities and
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actions, even when they do not literally fill these roles. But in actuality, to say that these only relate to personalities and actions is false—they also relate once again to imagined morals based on location. The first “location” is the space of monogamy, outside of which sex needs to be controlled through laws governing sex workers (and again, they need to be contained with the location of specially designated areas). The second location, it appears from all of the above statements and laws as well as the films below, is Taiwan established as the location of morally superior Chinese culture.
And what of the wife-in-monogamy? Ding points out the marginalization of society’s
“concubines,” but the “exaltation of the concubine” also raised an inferior woman to the status of wife, and this was condensed into the monogamous role. Is the wife-in-monogamy now seen as part domestic servant (part concubine)? Furthermore, if morality is dependent on location, and sex work is sanctioned within special areas, does marriage make a woman a contractual lifetime sex worker? Is marriage itself a sanctioned sex work area?
For all of these reasons, immigrants are especially applicable to the modern Taiwanese question of sex workers. It is probably no coincidence then that the two films about the present day in this thesis are about immigrants. However, the title of this chapter which says “Migrants and Sex Workers” is an intentional irony. These two stories are not categorically the same, and the “Sex Workers” part is actually posed as a question. The first film contains a migrant bride who also happens to occasionally engage in sex work. The second film portrays a mail order bride who does not engage in sex work per se, but is included because of the above description.
Both are also included because of their status as commodity body objects, and the similarity in the way power treats them confirms that if neither or one of them is literally a “sex worker” (if there can ever be a single definition of “sex worker”), power constructions have applied this
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label to them anyway.
Migrant Chinese Brides: Mothering Across the Impassable Strait In Chung Mong-Hong’s (鍾孟宏) The Fourth Portrait (第四張畫, 2010), the child protagonist, Wen-hsiang (Bi Xiao-Hai), faces loneliness and poverty after his father dies.
Eventually, he goes to live with his mother and stepfather, who provide such a cold environment that the scenes from the beginning of the movie, in which Wen-hsiang rides down a slide and washes his school uniform without a single other person in frame, seem preferable.
A major aspect of the role of the inept mother, Wu Chun-lan (Hao Lei), lies in the fact she is a migrant and a hostess at a jiudian (酒店). This is made explicit when Wen-hsiang’s teacher asks to meet with Chun-lan about his behavior in school. After a few sentences, the teacher asks where the mother’s accent is from. She replies that she is from China and works in a jiudian while Wen-hsiang’s stepfather works a night market stall.6 When the teacher shows the eerie picture the boy has drawn of his lost brother, Chun-lan lights a cigarette in the classroom, signifying her status as lower-class (because of her unawareness of areas where smoking is not allowed), as outside the institutional etiquette of Taiwan, and signifying that she is conflicted about the question of her children.
This scene shows certain expectations placed on Chun-lan. Her migrant status is immediately brought up in a meeting where her parenting is being questioned, and her
explanation contains clues about the social commentary of the film. Her husband (Leon Dai Lap-Yan) sells small live fish in a night market, a job that brings in very little income. The portrayal of her job as a jiudian hostess highlights the working-class nature of the job and the clients.
6All translation for this movie is my own.
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Aside from this, there is the implication that the parents cannot take care of the child easily because the stepfather is gone in the evening and the mother is gone all night, drinking with customers, and sleeping during the day.
After Chun-lan lights her cigarette, she takes out her Taiwan ID to show the teacher. She says that she coveted the ID for a long time, thinking it would bring a better life, but once she got it she knew that wasn’t true. Shortly after she received her ID, her oldest son went missing, and it is later revealed that Wen-hsiang’s stepfather beat him to death and hid the body. This is, in one aspect, a comment on the challenges Wen-hsiang faces as an impoverished child. Hsueh and Ku (2009) speculate that turmoil within the family is linked with the stagnating economy of Taiwan.
Aside from this, there are also familial challenges for migrant spouses. The marriages of migrant workers may be built on shaky grounds because of the motivations of citizenship. A migrant woman in an abusive marriage may have no way out, and the expectations because of her immigrant status may impact the marriage as well (Friedman 2012).
Certainly throughout the film the stepfather exhibits emotional problems. At first he seems to be quietly depressed, but in two particular scenes it is shown that he is struggling to control his rage, which is clearly his only means of trying to assert that his masculinity is not impotent. In one, Wen-hsiang has told the police that he had an older brother and his stepfather kicks him in the chest, sending him to the floor, and makes threats about telling family secrets. In another, he confronts his wife for giving Wen-hsiang new clothes and a school bag. She replies that she doesn’t know what to do to make him happy; she will do whatever he says, she moved when he said he wanted to move and she let him be jobless when he said he did not want to work.
Here she again mentions his lack of an ability to provide—a subtle attack on his masculinity from her feminine standpoint. She is saying that she has allowed him to control her as a feminine
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object despite his inability to fulfill the traditionally masculine side of that expectation. It is revealed throughout the film that this is the only real form of resistance Chun-lan has against the powers of masculinity. In a calm monotone, her husband continues to say that he is not unhappy, but it is clear from her words and the dark scene lit only by the fish tank that his anger is silent and dangerous. He realizes that his masculinity failed to solve problems when he killed her other son, but there is a clearly a cognitive dissonance between this and his expectations. His threat to explode at any minute is thus palpable. This scene succinctly highlights the role of Chun-lan as a migrant, who has no option but to defer to one representative of power relationships in her situation—her husband.
A viewer can easily and naturally read this idea of him being a representation of power through the symbols of the movie, but why is it so clear? And what does he really represent? It is not just a blanket statement of “patriarchy.” One answer is of course his use of violence to try to control those around him. The other answer, simply put, is that he is her gatekeeper into Taiwan.
Being married to him is the reason she is not sent back across the strait and therefore, aside from being the head of the family, he represents the network of legal and symbolic power which Taiwan maintains over migrants.
Chun-lan’s work serves to highlight her situation, especially for those unaware of the plight of migrant brides, and that will be discussed below, but even without the factor of her work her situation is helpless. Without her husband, she does not belong in Taiwanese society and that takes precedent over any abuse she faces. Friedman (2012) articulates this particularly well. She says that when migrant brides face domestic violence, a gap between laws protecting women and immigration law becomes painfully clear. This is due to a disparity between
“Taiwan’s commitment to women’s security and well-being, on the one hand, and the country’s
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intense anxiety about immigrants from China and the ‘authenticity’ of cross-Strait marriages, on the other” (Friedman 2012: 225). This statement not only implies a pervasive nationalistic fear of immigrants seen in the first section of this chapter, but also a widespread suspicion of migrant brides using marriage to immigrate. These sentiments correlate closely with the law: “Faced with spousal abuse, many Chinese women feel trapped by an immigration regime that emphasizes border regulation and national security over individual rights to physical, emotional, and
psychological safety” (Ibid: 225). Therefore, in this situation, power favors a strong border over allowing for the smooth integration of outsiders—and this is quite obviously related to the Communist regime as enemy since the formation of the ROC government, however much this position has evolved.
Furthermore, the scene which expresses her psychological turmoil presents other
problems for her. It is not said whether or not she knows that her husband beat her oldest son to death—each of them explain that he ran away and nobody ever found him—but she certainly knows he used to get angry and beat her son. It is also unknown whether her husband ever beats her (it is a good guess that he does, but it is not mentioned in the film itself), so her concern is over her younger son. The man expresses his cold, dangerous hatred for the child by questioning why she would go upstairs to see him at all, and then questioning her decision to buy him
problems for her. It is not said whether or not she knows that her husband beat her oldest son to death—each of them explain that he ran away and nobody ever found him—but she certainly knows he used to get angry and beat her son. It is also unknown whether her husband ever beats her (it is a good guess that he does, but it is not mentioned in the film itself), so her concern is over her younger son. The man expresses his cold, dangerous hatred for the child by questioning why she would go upstairs to see him at all, and then questioning her decision to buy him