The number of Vietnamese women marrying Taiwanese men plummeted this year, mainly because of the resumption of the individual interview program by the government, a liaison source in Ho Chi Minh City said yesterday.
Because of a regulation requiring Vietnamese women planning to marry Taiwanese men to visit Taiwan's liaison office in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi to be interviewed individually, the number of Vietnamese woman marrying Taiwanese men declined by 70 percent to 3,461 in the first 11 months of this year from 12,202 last year, said Chen Shan-lin (
Taiwan withdrew the individual interview regulation in 1999 and allowed potential Vietnamese brides to be interviewed in groups, resulting in a record high 13,863 marriages between Vietnamese women and Taiwanese men that year.
The figure averaged 12,000 annually between 2000 and last year, Chen said, adding that the Taiwan office in Ho Chi Minh City approved a total of 90,215 Vietnamese women to go to Taiwan after marrying Taiwanese men between 1995 and last month. The total number exceeds 100,000 if approvals issued by Taiwan's liaison office in Hanoi are included, he added.
Under the individual interview system, the average period between a Vietnamese woman filing an application and departing for Taiwan is about eight months, Chen said, adding that the average wait for an interview in Ho Chi Minh City is about six months because of the large number of applicants.
Consequently, marriage brokers have since this year begun to encourage potential "Vietnamese brides" to submit their applications in Hanoi instead of Ho Chi Minh City to accelerate the process, Chen said.
The average wait for an interview in the Vietnamese capital is only between one and two months, Chen added.
According to Chen, potential Taiwanese husbands usually fly into Vietnam on the weekend, and arrangements are made for them to meet with their potential brides. If the couple hit it off, they usually get married on Saturday or Sunday and then jointly file applications with Taiwan's offices in Vietnam for entry into Taiwan on Monday or Tuesday.
About half of the Taiwanese men marrying Vietnamese women are between 30 and 40 years old, while about 23 percent are aged between 41 and 50. By comparison, some 77 percent of the Vietnamese women marrying Taiwan men are between 20 and 30 years old, while some 14 percent are under the age of 20.
Nearly 67 percent of the Taiwanese men marrying Vietnamese women have a junior high school level education, and about 20 percent have a senior high school education. By comparison, 63 percent of the Vietnamese women have an elementary school education, and 28 percent have a junior high education, according to Chen.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,