Chinese Association for Foreign Spouses and Labor’s Voice secretary-general Chang Cheng (張正) is calling on “voluntary book carriers to bring back books from Southeast Asian countries to give Taiwan’s migrant workers and foreign spouses more opportunities to read in their own language.
The movement is called “Bringing Back Books That You Cannot Read,” said Chang, who is the former editor-in-chief of Four Way Voice, a newspaper published in several Southeast Asian languages.
Taiwan has about 500,000 to 600,000 migrant workers and 200,000 to 300,000 spouses from Southeast Asia, Chang said.
“While there are books in Southeast Asian languages in a few major libraries in Taiwan, they are not many and they are usually hard to find in big libraries,” he told the Taipei Times.
Chang opened the nation’s first Southeast Asian bookstore in Taoyuan, which also lends out books for free.
Many bookstores, professors’ study rooms and even restaurants that are frequented by migrant workers have joined the initiative, serving as locations for donors to drop books, Chang said.
“Those located in neighborhoods where many Southeast Asians reside have also agreed not only to accept books from book carriers, but also to serve as local libraries for people to read books written in their own language,” Chang said.
A book carrier can be anyone who visits Southeast Asia for tourism, business, studies or volunteer work, and is willing to spare some room in their luggage to transport the books, he said.
“The books could be bought from stores, given by friends or even picked up from the streets,” he said.
Book carriers can leave their name or write something inside expressing their feelings before dropping the books at one of those locations, Chang said.
Visit www.facebook.com/events/731877436919076/?pnref=story (帶一本自己看不懂的書回台灣) for a list of book dropping locations.
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
US climber Alex Honnold is to attempt to scale Taipei 101 without a rope and harness in a live Netflix special on Jan. 24, the streaming platform announced on Wednesday. Accounting for the time difference, the two-hour broadcast of Honnold’s climb, called Skyscraper Live, is to air on Jan. 23 in the US, Netflix said in a statement. Honnold, 40, was the first person ever to free solo climb the 900m El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park — a feat that was recorded and later made into the 2018 documentary film Free Solo. Netflix previewed Skyscraper Live in October, after videos
Starting on Jan. 1, YouBike riders must have insurance to use the service, and a six-month trial of NT$5 coupons under certain conditions would be implemented to balance bike shortages, a joint statement from transportation departments across Taipei, New Taipei City and Taoyuan announced yesterday. The rental bike system operator said that coupons would be offered to riders to rent bikes from full stations, for riders who take out an electric-assisted bike from a full station, and for riders who return a bike to an empty station. All riders with YouBike accounts are automatically eligible for the program, and each membership account
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS