Vietnamese Immigrant Mothers in Taiwan: An Investigation of Their Challenges, Adaptation, and Child-Rearing Beliefs

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Integrative Statement

Transnational marriage, in which one spouse immigrates to the other spouse's country, has increased dramatically across Asia since the 1990s. This study focused on Taiwan, where Southeast Asian women have immigrated as spouses and have had to adapt to a new language and culture, and new social roles as wives, daughters-in-law, and soon-to-be mothers.

Scholars have studied transnational marriage and its impact on economic, political, health, and social developments in East Asia and Southeast Asia (Hsia, 2007; Lu, 2005); however, little attention has been paid to the psychological and anthropological aspects of how these immigrants re-socialized themselves into a new culture and society, and how parents in these families socialized their children. This project was guided by developmental cultural psychologists’ approach of understanding human development, self, and language within sociocultural contexts (Miller et al., 1996; Shweder et al., 2006).

The project was ethnographic and longitudinal in design, involving 17 months of participant-observation in two towns with a high incidence of transnational marriage families, yielding 56 participant observation sessions, encompassing 197 hours of video-recordings and 60 audio-recorded interviews. The analyses reported here were based on 30 hours of interviews with 14 Vietnamese women who had 3-8-year-old children. These women felt comfortable speaking in Mandarin Chinese and all interviews were transcribed verbatim in the original language. Systematic content and discourse analyses followed. Field notes provided background and contextual information.

The core of the investigation focused on how these women navigated their new roles as wives, daughters-in-law, mothers, and sometimes breadwinners in this dynamic and new cultural context. Specifically, I examined their (1) life challenges and adaptations; (2) child rearing beliefs and goals for their children; (3) and representations of self during the interviews.

Analyses revealed that the majority of these women faced challenges such as experiencing unsatisfying marriages, encountering conflicts with parents-in-law who lived in the same household, receiving discrimination in the workplace and in the community, and struggling with financial situations within their established and birth families.

In regards to their childrearing beliefs and goals, all mothers chose to use Mandarin Chinese as the dominant language when interacting with their children, and 71% of them wanted to raise their children to identify as Taiwanese (instead of bi-culturals or Vietnamese). However, these mothers insisted on continuing the cultivation of Vietnamese-specific child-rearing goals such as vởng tay (politeness training) and thýõng (affection cultivation) (Fung & Liang, 2008; Fung, 2011).

Discourse analyses revealed frequent shifts among different identities by manipulating the terms “I/me,” “we/our,” and “others” during the course of interviews. At times, they aligned themselves with other Vietnamese women/mothers by highlighting their shared struggles as immigrants. At other times, they sided with their Taiwanese family by describing their shared identity as an intact family. Sometimes they distinguished themselves from other Vietnamese women by emphasizing their special life encounters and unique personal characteristics.

To conclude, this study examined the lived experiences of Vietnamese immigrant women/mothers and how they navigated different cultural systems to re-socialize themselves, while at the same time socializing their children.

Author

• Eva C.-H. Chen, Benedictine College
  Presenting Author