Pastor’s wife offers first-hand account of the challenging life of foreign spouses in Taiwan

["Taiwan Church News" <enews@pctpress.org>]

3131 Edition

February 27-March 4, 2012

Headline News

Pastor’s wife offers first-hand account of the challenging life of foreign 
spouses in Taiwan

Reported by Chen Wei-chien

Written by Lydia Ma

On the surface, the designation of “foreign spouse” should be a neutral term 
signifying a foreigner who is married to a Taiwanese. However, mainstream media 
in Taiwan do not use this term to refer to Caucasian or Japanese women because 
the term has come to imply exclusively to women from Vietnam, China, or other 
less affluent Asian countries who came to Taiwan through matchmaking agencies 
and married Taiwanese men who couldn’t find a suitable Taiwanese spouse.

With this stereotype in mind, it’s difficult to imagine that Chen Liang-peng – 
a pastor’s wife, a graduate of National Taiwan University (NTU), a manager and 
programmer – is a “foreign spouse”. Chen is the wife of Pastor Yang Shan-hsiung 
who currently pastors Tsao-Kang Presbyterian Church near Changhua. She 
currently has a civil engineering degree from NTU and comes from Ho Chi Minh, 
Vietnam.

Speaking about her experiences studying in Taiwan, she said: “I wanted to find 
a predominantly Mandarin-speaking environment to study because my Mandarin 
isn’t very good though I’m of Chinese descent.” She explained that when she was 
in Vietnam, she worked at a renowned shipping company and helped the company 
design a program that saved production costs significantly. As reward, her 
employer gave her a cash award which she later used toward paying for her 
tuition at NTU.

When Chen and Yang were dating, Yang was already studying in a seminary and 
preparing to become a full-time pastor. With this in mind, Chen began to 
prepare herself to become a pastor’s wife as well. In the beginning, one of the 
main challenges she faced was getting accustomed to living in the countryside. 
For someone who grew up in a big city and then worked in Taipei, it took her a 
while to adjust to Tsao-Kang. “In the beginning, I didn’t even know where to go 
for my grocery shopping. However, my congregation was really helpful and 
reached out to me. Though I prefer the city, I am willing to follow God’s 
leading.”

Living in Tsao-Kang, Chen sometimes bumps into Vietnamese ladies when she goes 
out and she enjoys interacting with them and inviting them to church. ”Some of 
these ladies are in a difficult situation. They’ve come from poor families in 
Vietnam to get married in Taiwan only to later discover that their new family 
expects them to be a breadwinner of the household,” Chen said, adding that many 
prejudices and assumptions against foreign spouses remain prevalent in Taiwan, 
which has prompted her to reach out to these women, offer them a listening ear 
and lend them a helping hand. She urges Taiwanese to listen and help foreign 
spouses more.

Influenced by his wife, Yang did his Master’s thesis on foreign spouses and has 
a special burden to reach out to them. However, pastoring a small, rural, and 
cash-strapped church means that available resources often go to after-school 
tutoring programs for children from underprivileged families first and outreach 
ministries for foreign spouses will have to wait. However, that hasn’t stopped 
him from using examples from the Bible whenever he can to teach his 
congregation about reaching out to foreigners. 

********************

Taiwan Church News is published weekly in Taiwan's local languages. 

You may translate and re-use our articles online only if you acknowledge the 
source as "Taiwan Church News" and list the names of the reporter and writer. 
Contact us before reprinting any of our articles for print publications. 

Direct comments and questions about this article to: enews@pctpress.org

Visit our website for more news at: http://enews.pctpress.org/ (English) or 
http://www.tcnn.org (Chinese) 

********************