Because even though they weren’t originated from here, they still deserved our respects!!! Translated…
For all of friends over age thirty, you may all have the memories of the few weird and “magical” T.V. stations toward the back of the channel numbers, “Taiwan Arts” “Hwa-Wei”, “Ou-Peng” etc., etc., etc., during the daytime, the regular programming in Mandarin would be broadcasted, but in the depth of the nights, these few channels became adult entertainment channels, with the hotties dancing almost nude, splashing water on each other, playing games, and other than the 0204 adult telephone entertainment services numbers as ads, the most eye-catching are those with the foreign brides for “marriage”.
These commercials found some exotic-looking ladies, some dressed up as girls next door, others, in their bikinis, the women started, flirting with the screens, with the captions of “finding love in China”, “Relationship with a Vietnamese Woman”, followed by a long series of digits of phone numbers. On those lonely nights, heaven can only know, how many lonely bachelors had, phoned in, trying to find the chances of them, being married.
But, think on it, if you want to find a bride using this measure, it’d cost money, as the agencies would charge the males huge sums of money for the match made, then, fly the men who are interested to China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other Southeast Asian nations, to find the younger generations of women who hold their fantasies of marrying away from their home countries, and if they’d, clicked, then in a short couple of the days, the weddings are, done, as the men returned back, they have their wives by their sides. And, because the fees the men had paid for the matchmaking services will be forwarded partially to the families of the women they marry, and, there would be the gossips of how these women were “brides, bought from foreign lands”.
Based off of views, this sort of monetary trade for a marriage is a ticking time bomb, and there are, many instances where the husband and wife didn’t get along afterwards, and ended up divorced. Plus the media had, shown all the news on marriage as a false front, to sell for sex here in Taiwan, it’d caused the descriptions of “foreign brides” to have that negative tone to them, and the status of “foreign bride” became, equal to discrimination.
Gladly, back in 2009, the government here already banned this sort of a matchmaking forum, returning the basic forms of marriage back to what it was, but the long-term stereotype, made the members of the public discriminate the foreign women who married to Taiwan as “foreign brides”, whether it be intentional, it’d troubled a lot of these women.
And because of this, some decade ago, the scholars urged the usage of “foreign born spouses”, “newly migrated”, “new Taiwanese”, to take the place of “foreign brides”, like the book, by Professor Xiao-Juan Hsia that was written in 2005, “Don’t call me foreign bride anymore”, was made into a film by director, Hsiu-Shen Liang into “Don’t Call Me Foreign Bride Anymore”, both hoped to alter the society’s perceptions, to help the public accept the migrated ladies who’d set up their new roots in Taiwan.
And how would the ladies who had come from abroad to live view the term, “foreign bride”? One of the sisters simply believed, “as people talked of ‘brides’, they think of younger women, but we’d been married over here for a decade, two decades already, and became, ‘old ladies’, and they’d still called us ‘foreign brides’, it’s, kinda funny!”
Learn to respect another culture, stop referring to people from that culture using stereotypical terms, let the term, “foreign wedded brides”, get washed away by the waves of histories now.
And, we were, referring to these women who’d married over from foreign places so naturally that we’d not realized that that was, discrimination, and these women are having a hard time, finding their equal places in this society as is, and yet, by calling them “foreign brides”, we are actually, unknowingly, discriminating against them, maybe we think it is a term of endearment, but it really, isn’t!
Life, the Obstacle Course 