A community in limbo

Driving through Chungho, Taipei County, along the Hsinnan Road, you probably wouldn't even notice it, but just a couple of hundred meters on from the Nanshih Jiao MRT station is a little piece of Myanmar, a kind of Little Burma not dissimilar to the Little Italys and Little Spains scattered about major Western cities. It is not a particularly big community, and apart from a small number of somewhat dilapidated restaurants with signs in the Burmese language and a once-a-year Water Festival in the plaza outside the Nanshih Jiao MRT station, they do little to highlight their difference from locals.

"My ancestral home is in Kuangtung Province," said Yang Kuang-kuo (楊光國), secretary general of the ROC Overseas Chinese from Burma Association (中華民國緬甸歸僑協會). The title of the association, the only officially recognized body representing the Burmese community in Taiwan, is instructive.

"We are not Burmese," he said, "We are Chinese. Coming here is like coming home." Home it may be, but restrictions have recently been placed on the number of ethnic Chinese from Myanmar who can enter Taiwan.

In the days immediately following World War II, Chang said that they were able to immigrate to Taiwan relatively easily. "We were regarded as refugees," Yang said, adding that the overseas Chinese all over Southeast Asia had made an enormous contribution to the KMT's war against Japan.

Now quotas have been imposed, and the Ministry of Interior said that only 15 people each month were permitted to immigrate to Taiwan on the basis of family ties. While Chang said that there were no official figures for the number of ethnic Chinese from Myanmar who lived in Taiwan, Yang estimated that there were as many as 40,000 in Taipei County, mostly concentrated in the area of Chungho and Panchiao cities. "When we first came, this area was mostly paddy fields," Yang recalled, a fact hard to imagine looking at the tightly packed houses and seething traffic. "There are already too many people here," he said, "so we are no longer so welcome."

The Chungho community formed largely as a result of the electronic firm Texas Instruments, which has a large plant located there. People went to where the work was, and after that, cultural feeling brought others to the same area.

This was back in the 1960s and, according to Leu Chin-wen (呂鎌文), who left Myanmar as a teenager and now works as an architect in Taipei, little has changed since then. "I still go back often," he said, "Even if it is just to eat the food. The tastes you acquire as a child never leave you." At the same time he admits that despite being unable to speak Chinese when he first arrived, he has now lost virtually all command of the Burmese language.

For people such as Lee Aizu (李愛祖), who came to Taiwan eight years ago to work as a doctor, the Burmese community of Chungho is something he has sought to leave behind. "It has a lot to do with education," Lee said, saying that now the Chungho community tends to service those with fewer advantages.

"For many of these people, human contact is very important. If someone wants to visit you for the day, it is not really possible here. But in Myanmar, many people lead a much more leisurely lifestyle, and spending the day chatting is quite possible," Lee pointed out, adding that Chungho is very much a ghetto of this older lifestyle. Young men like him have long followed job opportunities to inner city Taipei, where they are virtually indistinguishable from locals.