“The [Taiwanese] government provides support for new immigrants, but it is very superficial. It’s just for show. I try to use the camera to tell people our stories, how we feel and what happens to us after we return home,” the director told the Taipei Times.
FROM VIETNAM TO TAIWAN
Born and raised in a poor farming family with 10 children, Nguyen didn’t complete elementary school and started to work in the field at a young age. Soon, she grew into a young woman who yearned for a family of her own, like “the girl in the village who went to Taiwan and came back a happily married woman.”
Photo courtesy of Nguyen Kim Hong
Despite the objections of her parents, who believed that marrying daughters off to foreigners was tantamount to “selling” them, the 21-year-old Nguyen made an arrangement with a marriage agency in Ho Chi Minh City in 2000. Young and pretty, she was quickly “chosen,” meeting her Taiwanese husband two days before their wedding.
“The plane landed in the evening. There were lights everywhere. I had never seen such a beautiful sight in my life. And I remember thinking to myself: this is a place where I can find happiness,” Nguyen recalls.
Her married life in Changhua City, however, turned out to be a nightmare.
Photos courtesy of Nguyen Kim Hong
Pregnant soon after she arrived, Nguyen was left home alone during the day, the daily monotony interrupted by phone calls from banks and loan sharks inquiring about her husband’s gambling debts. When other family members returned, Nguyen felt she was an outsider whose presence was rarely acknowledged. Her life revolved around her room.
“I wasn’t allowed to go out … Or they would ask where I was going and when I’d be coming back, and check if I was actually there. They were very distrustful,” Nguyen says.
In 2008, Nguyen divorced her husband, but her problems didn’t end there. Working two manual jobs to support her young daughter and herself, the single mother had to endure harassment from her divorced husband and his family who often made scenes where she worked, or made threatening phone calls to her family in Vietnam.
Photo courtesy of Nguyen Kim Hong
Meanwhile, Nguyen says that others were prejudiced against her, believing the stereotype that “foreign brides” come to Taiwan “only for the money.”
“A divorced woman with a child? I couldn’t go near men. People would get ideas, fearing that I was up to no good, to steal other women’s husbands,” she says.
Nguyen pulled through the dark periods because of her child. Then she met her current husband, Tsai Tsung-lung (蔡崇隆), a documentary filmmaker and assistant professor at National Chung Cheng University‘s Department of Communication.
Photo courtesy of Nguyen Kim Hong
“When my friends congratulated me on marrying a director, I was like ‘what is a director?’ And I had absolutely no idea what a documentary film was,” the happily married Nguyen says.
SELF-EMPOWERMENT
As it turns out, when it comes to documentary filmmaking, Nguyen is an earnest, inquisitive student and Tsai an “encouraging, patient” teacher. It wasn’t long before the housewife focused the camera on other women from Southeast Asia with similar experiences. The stories of immigrant women often depict the hardship of living with abusive husbands in hostile surroundings. One of the film’s most heart-wrenching scenes involves a little girl who is sent back to live with her grandparents in Vietnam, while the mother struggles to make a living in Taiwan. Wanting to see her mother, the girl shows one of her drawings in front of the camera and explains: “daddy got drunk, pushed mommy to the ground and kicked her in the stomach. And I cried.”
“[Foreign brides] are often despised because people think we marry for money. But like Taiwanese, we, too, want to find happiness,” Nguyen says in the film.
Completed in 2012, Out/Marriage has been shown at several film festivals in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the filmmakers continue to hold public screenings, discussions and lectures across the country.
AN ISSUE OF TRUST
Nguyen says that at every screening, she would be approached by divorced Southeast Asian immigrant women who wanted to share their stories or seek advice and help. These women remain largely invisible in mainstream Taiwanese society, while welfare resources often fail to reach those in need. One reason lies in the fact that the bureaucratic procedures are unfriendly and inaccessible to new immigrants who are “required to provide loads of documents they don’t have.”
“Many of our sisters run into trouble but don’t want Taiwanese to know about it because they are not going to get help anyway,” Nguyen says.
The issue of trust also plays an important role in whether or not the disadvantaged seek welfare assistance.
“Social workers are assigned to help but [our willingness to seek them out] depends on how we are treated. Just think: I am a socially underprivileged person, and I feel afraid and insecure. If you are not sympathetic, I will never come near you,” she says.
Government subsidies for new immigrants are given to organizations and foundations that generally don’t understand what the people they serve need, Nguyen says. Instead of letting the women talk about their experiences, she says, they usually offer courses and invite “professors to talk about a bunch of theories that are of little practical use.”
While Taiwanese society has yet to learn to see things from the perspective of new immigrants, Nguyen has set up a group in Chiayi, where she now resides with her family, for Southeast Asian women and their families.
“Everyone needs to participate and will learn from the process … There is a lot of work to do, and we don’t have the money. But it’s fun. We get together at least once a month. It is important that we bond with each other, rather than being asked to come to a big party once in a while, not knowing each other,” Nguyen says.
The filmmaker is currently working on a documentary project about illegal immigrants in Taiwan. Out/Marriage is now available in DVD format, and the sales proceeds will be mostly used to help underprivileged children. For information regarding screenings, visit the Facebook page for the documentary.
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