Tran Thi Hoang Phuon, a lecturer of Vietnamese at National Chengchi University, has been working to bridge Taiwanese and Vietnamese societies by promoting cross-cultural understanding through language classes, as well as television and radio programs.
Tran, who also goes by the Chinese name Chen Huang-feng (陳凰鳳), has a degree in law from Vietnam National University. In 1995, she married a Taiwanese man who was working in Ho Chi Minh City at the time.
Tran and her husband moved to Taiwan in 2001 for their two kids’ education. She took on work as a volunteer translator at a hospital’s maternity ward to help Vietnamese patients.
Photo: Wu Po-hsuan, Taipei Times
Tran said she decided to become a language teacher for Vietnamese immigrants and Taiwanese at a community college after hearing about Vietnamese spouses committing suicide due to loneliness and isolation from Taiwanese society because of the language gap.
“I wanted to realize the dream I had when I arrived Taiwan, that is, to leave behind a place where my children’s generation can thrive and be happy,” she said.
In 2003, Tran became a Vietnamese language instructor at the university’s Center for Public and Business Administration Education, began teaching classes at the university’s Foreign Language Center in 2005 and became a full-time faculty member in 2013.
Tran hosts several language education programs on National Education Radio and the Chinese Television System, teaching language skills to Vietnamese immigrants and Taiwanese.
Taiwanese society’s perception of new immigrants is becoming more positive, Tran said, adding that to facilitate cultural exchanges between the two nations, she last year helped found the Taiwanese-Vietnamese New Immigrant Cultural Heritage Association, which serves as a platform for introducing people with Vietnamese-language skills to employers who need them.
“Many highly educated new immigrants stay at home, because they cannot find employment, even as many educational institutions struggle to open Vietnamese-language courses because of their inability to identify qualified instructors. I help both parties,” Tran said.
Civic groups have been working unaided to maintain the growing ties between Taiwan and Vietnam, she said.
“From that perspective, President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) ‘new southbound policy’ is well-timed,” she said.
However, academic training for Vietnamese-language fluency has lagged behind the growing demand from private companies, she said, adding that the few institutions of higher education with a Southeast Asian studies department depend on private sources of funding.
In addition, Taiwan’s immigration policies make it difficult for students from Southeast Asia to stay and work in Taiwan, Tran said, calling on the government to deregulate policies to retain trained professionals and to encourage cultural pluralism and toleration by creating an appropriate university curriculum.
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