Countering Prejudices with Uncanny Strangeness: Taiwanese Children’s Books About Southeast Asian Marriage Migrants in Taiwan

Abstract

AbstractSince 1970, an increasing number of women from Southeast Asian countries, particularly Vietnam and Indonesia, have immigrated to Taiwan through marriage to Taiwanese men. Now known as “marriage migrants,” these women used to be referred to as “foreign brides,” a pejorative term associated with ridicule, prejudice, and discrimination. Thus, marriage migrants often suffered from social stigma and bias. A series of social movements and demonstrations were strategically conducted by many NGOs to protest unfriendly legislation concerning immigrants. As a result, the quality of life of these marriage migrants has greatly improved. As part of the social discourse, publishers of children’s and young adult literature in Taiwan have released literary works about marriage migrants to help young readers and the public at large understand the lives and experiences of these women. This study looks at four Taiwanese children’s books that tell the stories of marriage migrants and their experiences in Taiwan. Understanding these books relies on being familiar with the concept of the “uncanny strangeness” described in Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves. Kristeva’s Freud-based psychoanalytic concept is defined as an unconscious dynamic in which one’s mental response to another person’s presence is a compulsive tendency to fight that second person. The reaction arises from the discomforting or frightening feelings that the second person triggers in the first’s unconscious. The first wants to ignore or forget such feelings, or as Freud suggests, to repress that part of his/her psyche. In this way, to fight the other person is to fight the self. Only when we recognize the other in ourselves and ourselves in foreign nationals can we embrace the latter. Therefore, this study aims to demonstrate how the Taiwanese customs and social norms portrayed in these books play important roles in constructing the marriage migrant characters as they are. In their own distinctive ways, each book fights the prejudices and discrimination against marriage migrants. Ultimately, the books strive to convey how these “others” from abroad are an essential part of Taiwanese society; in other words, they are just as irreplaceable in Taiwan as Taiwanese people themselves.KeywordsMarriage migrantsUncanny strangenessTaiwanese children’s booksSoutheast Asian countries