Eight foreign spouses of Taiwanese men in Chiayi County jointly opened a take-out restaurant last Thursday and invited Chiayi County Commissioner Chen Ming-wen (陳明文) to try out their food.
The eight women — from Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia and China — opened the restaurant to sell boxed lunches and meals typical of Southeast Asia. They set up their business with the assistance of the county government’s Department of Social Affairs.
To celebrate the restaurant’s opening, the women staged a catwalk fashion show in which they displayed traditional clothes from their respective countries.
They also introduced various ingredients used in preparing traditional Southeast Asian cuisine, including lemon grass, coconut milk and prahoc — fermented fish paste that is unique to Cambodian food.
Chen said the take-out restaurant represents a new partnership between the local government and the county’s “new residents.”
He said that there were about 13,000 foreign spouses in Chiayi County, making it the third-biggest administrative area in Taiwan in terms of the number of foreign spouses living there.
Chen said that since 2006 the county government has operated a foreign spouse service center to give advice to the foreign spouses.
Over the past four years, the county government has helped 1,351 foreign spouses obtain motorcycle licenses, three acquire licenses to work as professional nurses and helped eight obtain licenses to work as chefs in Chinese restaurants, he said.
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