Those “Expelled” from Two Shores

Before her, a dozen women from Ningde were able to reach Taiwan through “fake marriages.” Most of them came from coastal fishing villages. In Ningde’s traditional fishing industries, women did not have the advantage of physical strength over men and had little control over the finance of their households as they had no income or assets of their own. At the turn of the millennium, the fishing industries suffered from the pollution of the seawater. As a result, the husbands of these women lost their source of income and started to gamble, drink heavily, and engage in domestic violence. These women decided to support their families on their own. The fastest way to do it was to go to Taiwan and find work there. 

Since the resumption of civilian exchange in 1987, cross-strait marriages have been legalized, and the number of such marriages has soared. Coming to power in 2008, Ma Ying-jeou amended the regulations on mainland spouses, such as shortening the number of years to obtain an official ID card and relaxing the conditions for their right to work, among other measures. The number of cross-strait marriages reached its peak in 2011 (about 165,000 pairs). The business of fake marriages became even more prevalent. Single Taiwanese men put their names down on the roster of the snakeheads, took a cut of the introduction fees, and received money every month from mainland women. A business relationship was thus formed. Over the years, a steady stream of women from Fujian Province has followed this route of underground sex economy to massage parlors and karaoke bars in Taiwan. They have kept in touch with their mainland husbands and children. Their income in Taiwan has flowed back to their families on the other shore. 

This is a group that deserves to be written about in depth, but I have never seen any articles about them. In the news report, they have been portrayed as criminals or just numbers that have highlighted the rampant human trafficking business of the snakeheads. Relevant sociological and legal materials have only taken a look at their lives from the outside. Over the years, their faces have only appeared vaguely in public discourses.  

This is a main theme that has grown out of my body and life experiences. My low self-esteem during childhood and my resentment toward and misunderstanding with my mother have had everything to do with it. People of my generation have experienced the same kind of loss. These stories may resonate with the readers. 

Meanwhile, these women, displaced through their border-crossing journeys, have been living between two shores, pressed between familiar and new environments. On the surface, they seem materially rich, but in reality, they are ashamed about their work and suffer violence, exploitation, and gender oppression from their families and workplaces. They face both physical and mental abuse. With the rise of the mainland economy, Taiwan is no longer attractive for young women anymore. But for my mother’s generation, it was a reprieve to be able to be temporarily away from families and become relatively independent individuals. Once back in the mainland, these women must cross the gap of a decade to re-adapt to a society that they no longer recognize. 

Compared with the recent past, women’s destiny has been drastically different in the last ten years that have seen the defining moments of the political race between the pan-Blue and pan-Green camps in Taiwan as well as the Covid-19 pandemic. As women have been repatriated to the mainland in the past two years, the gates of borders are slowly closing, and “fake marriages” between the two shores of the Taiwan Strait are coming to an end. This article is a small “rescue” of cross-trait historical memory. 

To write about these women is to write about how history casts long shadows on marginalized people. 

1.      Landing on the Island

“How did you and your husband meet?”

On April 19, 2012, the plane landed in Taoyuan. In the interview room on the second floor of the airport, an officer asked Wu Lishan the above question across the table. The atmosphere was somewhat tense, and by the corner of the table, another person in police uniform was scribbling with a pen. The cramped interview room made her anxious with cold sweat. 

Then the officer in front of her threw out a series of questions: “Has your husband ever given you money for living expenses? Did he give you betrothal money? Did you have a wedding banquet? What are your jobs? What’s your financial situation? Do you plan to live in Taiwan for a long time? Have you taken him on any trips?”

As for the “husband” mentioned by the officer, Lishan only had a vague impression: His name was Ah Tao. He wore a pair of black and white framed glasses. He was a bit bald and seven years older than her. And that’s all she knew. 

A few months ago, Lishan spent nearly CNY 50,000 to “purchase” a Taiwanese husband through a snakehead. At this moment, she was trying to enter Taiwan on a Join Family Resident Visa, with her fake husband in the next room undergoing a similar interrogation. If their answers didn’t match, she would be deported right away. 

Her not-so-legitimate intention caused Lishan to fidget, her body frozen in her seat. As for betrothal money, souvenirs, engagement rings—information that had long since been matched on the phone—she still stumbled over her words. She was forty-three years old, her cheeks already a bit saggy and her crow’s feet deep, which were mercilessly exposed under the dry white light in the interview room. For this trip to Taiwan, she had her hair re-straightened and dyed brown, and bought a brand-new leather jacket. She wondered uneasily whether the guy next door would give the pre-matched answers or take the opportunity to talk nonsense. 

Soon after, the officer informed Lishan that she had not fully passed this interview but was allowed to temporarily enter Taiwan, “In three months, there will be a third interview.” This next interview would be critical. 

Out of the interview room, Lishan once again met her fake husband Ah Tao. They stepped aside, like two students who had just finished an exam and were eager to go over the questions and answers. On the question about traveling, their answers didn’t match. Lishan couldn’t help but blame him in her mind for being stupid, “How could going to a park in the city be considered traveling?” 

In any event, she finally had the possibility of living on this strange island for the time being. 

Instead of going home with Ah Tao, Lishan dragged her luggage to her friend Yang Yi’s place in Taoyuan, where she was crammed into a 215-square-foot room with other women from her hometown, who had succeeded in entering Taiwan. 

Her carry-on suitcase was filled with toothpaste, feminine pads, foot wipes, zha cai, and only a few pieces of clothing. The prices in Taiwan were high, so it’s always a good idea to bring more daily necessitates. Zha cai would go well with porridge, thus saving money on groceries. She had no cash on her as she was determined to start making good money from the moment she landed. Yang Yi assured her that she would have work as soon as she left the airport, “Whatever, just go out and see what happens.” 

Before coming to Taiwan, Lishan knew very little about this island. She was born in Village A, Ningde, Fujian Province. In her village, she once saw a strange sight. Hydrogen balloons from Taiwan floated in the sky, collapsed on the ground, and exposed beef jerkies, pamphlets, and cassette tapes of Teresa Teng’s “When Will You Return”—a small footnote to the three-decade-long cross-strait “balloon war.” Lishan imagined Taiwan to be “a place like a palace,” with soaring high-rises, ornate and organized streets, and gold dust floating in the air. Someone once described to her that the streets of Taiwan were filled with banknotes stacked so high that they passed people’s knees.  

Many stories about migration always begin with the myth of wealth. In the countryside where Lishan lived, there was a quiet flow of dreams, big or small, of Taiwan. 

Before her, a dozen women from her home village and some of her friends were able to reach Taiwan through “fake marriages.” It was said that a woman had worked at a local karaoke bar for barely a week before someone was willing to give her NT$1,000,000 in cash right away for her to follow him to the mountains to plant bamboos; another woman hid in Taiwan for ten years and after she made enough money and her grown-up son was ready to marry, she surrendered herself to National Immigration Agency with a plane ticket for the return. 

How easy was it to make money? At karaoke bars, clients would exchange tens of thousands of dollars for 100- or 200-bills and lay them on the floor. The ladies would strip naked, rub a layer of oil on their skin, and roll on the floor. They got all the bills stuck on their bodies. For a good run, one could earn up to ¥‎40,000 to 50,000 a month. 

Women’s bodies have become boats, carrying a steady stream of resources for the mainland families from the golden dreamland. When Lishan arrived in Taiwan, the other ladies lamented, “Lishan, you’re really late. Had you come five or ten years earlier, you’d be rich.”

2.      My Mother

Eleven years later, as Lishan and I talked face-to-face at the dinner table, both of us already knew the end of her journey—She hadn’t gotten rich. Her hair had turned gray. Her arms were tanned from long hours outdoors on her moped. She was wrapping xiaolongbao that she would be peddling on the streets the next day while telling me about her trip to Taiwan. With a hunched back, she was squinting hard, her presbyopia already severe. 

Lishan is my mother, and I am her daughter. In the twenty-eight years we have been mother and daughter, she was absent for ten years. When I was eighteen, she divorced my father, proceeded to become the nominal wife of a Taiwanese man, and started to live across the border on the other shore. 

I cannot recall exactly what year or season she left. I only remember that before she left for Taiwan, she sat by my bedside, hugged me, and warned me, “If people ask you where your mother has gone to work, don’t ever say Taiwan.” In Ningde, and even in the entire eastern Fujian region, “going to Taiwan” is tantamount to “prostitution,” an open secret. 

She swore to me that she would never “work as a prostitute” and that she would find other kinds of work. It’s a long time before I felt how eerie the conversation was. How embarrassing and humiliating for a mother to make such a vow to her own daughter! My cousin made it a point to call me and advise me “not to let your mother go, as she would be looked down upon, and so would you.” Of course, I knew this matter was already set in stone. My mother just told me her plans. 

How should my mother go to the other shore? I heard people say that she had arranged for a fake marriage with a fake husband. My mother told me that her fake husband Ah Tao had come to the mainland in order to go over some formalities and take some photos. But as far as I can remember, I’ve never seen Ah Tao. My mother hardly mentioned his name as she wanted to keep me out of her fake marriage.  

I kept my promise with her. Whenever people asked me what my mother did for a living, I would carefully package her identity, “She works as a chef elsewhere.” I thought I didn’t lie because Taiwan could be called “elsewhere.” Sometimes, she stir-fried small dishes for the clients at the karaoke bar, which could qualify her as a chef. In my heart, I begged others not to question further, so that I could save my mother’s last bit of dignity. 

At the same time, I felt guilty not to be willing to face my mother’s true face and admit that she was a person who had exploited a loophole in the system and gone to Taiwan to sell her body. Was it because I was ashamed of my mother from the bottom of my heart and became an accomplice in stigmatizing those women who were like my mother? 

Such confusion and pain plagued me for a long time. Subconsciously, I refused to understand any attributes of Lishan other than “my mother.” She had a job on the other shore across the border. She’s my mother. She earned money for me to spend. She left me and my younger brother in the mainland. Ant that was it. 

I once googled her real name, which showed up on the webpage along with a string of court judgment numbers. After her fake marriage was reported, her behavior was defined as “affecting cross-strait relations” and “disrupting social order.” In the news reports, she melted into the large number of fake marriage investigations. 

She and other Taiwan-bound women were called “mainland girls,” “Big sis” and “26 gals.” Tough clients would use even tougher terms, “deadass mainlanders.” (She once taught me that in Taiwanese, it was pronounced as “426.”) In the late 1980s, “mainland girls” were “poor victims” who were coerced or lured into becoming jackpots for Taiwanese snakeheads. Nowadays, it refers to greedy and lowly “gold diggers” from the mainland. These women have chosen this destiny on their own, so this term of “mainland girls” carries a mocking sense that they deserve it. 

This was the trace that Lishan left behind in Taiwan: a criminal and a woman greedy for money. 

In 2021, Lishan was repatriated back to the mainland, her life transplanted back to her hometown. In 2023, I quit my job and came home to spend a full summer with her. 

One morning, I helped her pack up old things in the house and found in a corner medicines made in Taiwan, almost all of them expired. I threw them in the trash, and she picked them back up and set them on the table, unwilling to throw them away. Along with the medicine bottles, there were old perfume bottles and unopened face creams, which looked like a row of small monuments. She missed her life in Taiwan, as if her days there were a still, crystalline lake that had never vanished. 

I decided to put aside my own denial and ask my mother how she had spent the last ten years. I wanted to find a way to disassociate myself, as if the pain would alleviate when I turned to a more macroscopic perspective and saw her as an integral part of some sociological subject. 

“There’s no story to tell.” At first, she rejected my proposal. Even if mother and daughter were on close terms, there was a secret zone that could not be crossed. During those days, we often went out after dinner, took off our shoes, and walked on the trestle bridge in the seaside park. Since she left for Taiwan, we have rarely been so close. One walk after another, she came to realize that our conversation was not a daughter’s judgment of her mother, but an opportunity to reach some understanding. She agreed to my request. 

Toward the end of summer, I sat in the backseat of her baby blue moped and followed her to visit the women, her “sisters” on the other shore, who traveled to Taiwan for fake marriages during the same period. Her moped raced through the streets. I leaned against her back, both of us basking in the baking sun, and for a moment, I thought she was brave. 

I remember my mother as having a loud voice. She was strong, tenacious, and impossible to be crushed by life. But listening to her accounts of the moment after the plane landed in Taiwan, I sensed she was beginning to experience belated aging. 

3.      The Right Ear

Lishan’s right ear buzzed from time to time. 

Sound reverberated deep in her cochlea, muffled, and mingled with life’s other noises. From the outside, there was nothing special about this ear, which tucked away under her hair. But those close to Lishan knew that it had been badly damaged. In the summer of 2007, she hit her head on a closet and briefly lost her hearing in her right ear during an argument and fight with her husband. The doctor diagnosed that the eardrum in her right ear had been perforated and that she had a mild concussion. 

Similar violence was innumerable in this marriage. 

It tended to happen late at night. Though separated by two walls, I could still hear them smashing things, sometimes accompanied by a muffled thud, which was the sound of a human body hitting on furniture. I was so scared that my mother, who had no advantage of physical strength, would be beaten to death that I ran out of my room. I saw blood around her mouth. I was so scared that I fell to my knees and begged for her. When morning came, I swept the broken pieces of beer bottles into the trash can before walking on the sticky floor and grabbing my backpack to school. My younger brother was still young. He coped with it in the most childish ways, such as stepping on a stool to put kitchen knives into a deep corner of the refrigerator. 

The fact that all the violence took place in the old house made me think that it had festered from our family’s move, when it, in reality, had manifested itself long before and was more lasting than I had imagined. 

My parents, both fishermen, had owned a dozen or so cages for big yellowtail offshore of the fishing village. They had worked together for seven to eight years. Lishan was strong as a woman. Every day, she plunged her hands repeatedly into the fishy feed bucket, grabbed fist-sized portions, and flung them at the fry. My parents had their share of arguments, but my father never made a violent move as he needed his wife’s help. 

After giving birth to her second child at the age of thirty, Lishan began to gain weight around her waist, which went from being flabby to solidly plump. Without a chance to lose weight, her body blew up like a balloon. She was 5'6” and weighed 144 pounds, with a wide jaw and a sightly bloated nose. After cooking in the stuffy kitchen, she wore a layer of shiny oil on her face. Her husband often laughed at her, “You’re as fat as a sow.” 

After moving to the city, her husband continued his fishing business, and she became a housewife, taking care of their two children. She secretly tried diet pills, but after taking them, the constant diarrhea often left her on the verge of collapse. She also tried a kind of vibrating belt cinched around her waist, which shook her belly numb and made her body itch. Her husband’s taunts became frequent: “sow,” “stupid pig,” “uneducated,” “ignorant,” mostly such words. She was furious and fought back with even uglier words, which led to a physical confrontation. A slight, shrill tinnitus in her right ear reminded Lishan of these humiliations. In 2010, unable to cope with the violence, she divorced her husband by mutual consent and took her daughter with her while leaving her son to her husband. Yang Yi, who had lived in Taiwan for many years, suggested that my mother might as well follow her and make money together in Taiwan, otherwise how could a woman with a child survive? My mother subconsciously refused because she didn’t want her children in the mainland to be stigmatized. 

According to their agreement, she moved out of the old house and rented a two-bedroom apartment with her daughter. The apartment was not well-lit and had no dining room. They ate in the staircase. Late one night, she heard her young son shouting outside her window. Missing his mother, the son snuck out from his father’s place and cried her name over and over again downstairs. My mother decided to take him into her care. 

Knowing nothing but fish, the only job she could get was gutting fish at the seafood market. She had to deal with fish every day again, scraping off the scales with a sharp knife, cutting open the bellies, and taking out the insides. By the time she got home, she carried a fishy smell that could not be washed off, her palms covered with deep and shallow cuts everywhere. She earned ¥‎80 per day.  

After their son was left in her care, her husband acted as if he was off duty and only occasionally gave her a few hundred (CNY) for living expenses. At this rate, the more than ¥‎100, 000 she had received from her divorce would soon be used up. She took the initiative to ask Yang Yi whether she could find her a fake husband. 

Most of the women who have come to Taiwan for fake marriages have similar traumatic stories. They are either saddled with family debts and responsibilities of raising their children or are hiding from domestic violence. Such stories are very common. 

Before the battery research and development company Ningde Times set foot in Ningde, the local economy was at the bottom of the ranking in the province. Ningde was one of the country’s eighteen areas of concentrated poverty, known as the “fracture zone” of China’s southeast golden coastline. At that time, there was a large gap between the economic development across the strait. After becoming part of a supply chain for European and North American industries, Taiwan was experiencing thirty years of fast development. By 1991, Taiwan’s GDP had grown to US$184.9 billion, and its per capita GDP had reached US$9,016. It was not until 2017 that the mainland got close to this level. 

Surrounded by mountains on three sides and the sea on the other, Ningde was anchored by the marine economy. Fishermen often took out loans to farm the year before and then pay back when the fish were sold the following year. At the turn of the millennium, the farming and fishing economy suffered from unorganized farming and marine litter, and the fishermen were not able to fill the big hole of debt in their cash flow. These years saw the peak of fishermen selling their equipment and going to the city for work. Every six months, the area of fish farming in Village A shrank a little.

An even more deadly cause of destroying a fisherman’s family was gambling. The fishing islands were somewhat isolated from the outside world and had had gambling stalls of various sizes for a long time. During festivals or at the end of the fishing season, the fishermen formed a “human hill” around a circular dustpan and bet furiously. The lucky gamblers moved into the city while the unlucky families became heavily indebted. 

In the past, women possessed no advantage in physical strength and had little control over the finance of their families as they had no income or assets of their own. Now, they decided to support their own families, by going to work in Taiwan through fake marriages, earning a big difference in income on the other shore, and remitting it back to their husbands and children in the mainland via underground banks. Among other things, it was much easier to make money at karaoke bars and massage parlors than doing manual labor. 

“During those days, people in the village believed that only incompetent men would let their wives go out to do such things. Knowing that their wives were determined to cross the strait, the men turned a blind eye, afraid of being looked down upon and that their wives would never return. But the husbands simply couldn’t pay the debts, so the women had to carry the burden.” Lishan recalled. 

4.      New Home

The fake brides did not land in this strange island out of nowhere. Prior to that, a group of people provided relevant services. 

I met Weng Bi at a dried seafood store. Lishan said that Weng Bi should be among the first group of women to arrive in Taiwan. We sat opposite each other in front of a wide tea tray. She wore a low ponytail. She elegantly made the tea, her posture at total ease. She has lived in Taiwan for more than thirty years and first entered the island as a stowaway. 

In 1992, nearly a decade after the thaw in cross-strait relations, Weng Bi boarded a boat to Taiwan at the age of twenty-five. The boat left at night and had to sail until the next afternoon. When they entered the territory of Taiwan and saw the patrol police, the snakeheads drove them into a dark cabin. She was crammed into a cabin with forty to fifty other people, half of whom were women from Ningde and Fuzhou and spoke eastern Min dialects. The boat rocked violently. After a day without food, Weng Bi nearly vomited up the bile. 

She had spent nearly ¥30,000 to get on the boat. The cost included the boat fare and the bribe. After pulling up to the dock in Yilan, the women escaped the inspection and made their way ashore, where more than twenty of them were lined up to be driven to construction sites or farms. 

Those who made it to Taiwan were the lucky ones. Some suffocated to death in the dark cabin due to heatstroke while others jumped to their deaths in the sea after being inspected. When I asked Weng Bi why she risked so much, she told me, “I used to make clothes in Ningde. I was told that a month of work in Taiwan could be worth a year in Ningde. I was so enticed by what I heard that I didn’t even think about the consequences. So, I just went.” 

The women from eastern Fujian, who were smuggled to Taiwan in the same batch as her, were scattered in Taipei and Yilan. Most of them worked in the textile industry while others worked in hospitals and beauty salons. Before the business chain of fake marriages emerged, the women, who had no connections and safety nets to fall back on, carved out their own world almost out of thin air. One after another, they sent news from their new world to fellow women in the mainland and helped to pave the way for the fake brides’ subsequent visits to the island. 

Later, Weng Bi married a man from a fishing village in Yilan and set up a tailor store in her home, earning more than NT$10,000 a month. In 1994, her daughter was born, and she sent a wedding photo of herself holding the baby to her hometown folks. 

After she got her resident ID card, she voted every time, “Whether it is to elect a major, a council member, or some kind of county governor. I’m going to vote for the party that’s favorable to us.” In 2008, Weng Bi checked Ma Ying-jeou’s name on the pink ballot. 

The help and support from fellow villagers were an essential prerequisite for fake brides’ journey to Taiwan, who were like shrews, biting each other’s tails and linking up to cross the wildness in search of food. 

After settling down, Lishan moved from Taoyuan to Hsinchu the following year, where there were more karaoke bars with open mic soirees. She lived in a reddish-brown and beige apartment building on Freedom Road, home to the largest number of migrant women from eastern Fujian, who lived in apartments on both sides of the road. If new “cousins” just arrived from the mainland, one of the apartments became their temporary residence, where they all crammed into one bed until they found a proper place to live. 

The age of the women was a dividing line in the distribution of jobs for them. Women from the age of twenty to thirty-five worked in hotels while those over thirty-five worked in traditional karaoke bars in the alleys. 

The women built their own alternative identities with nicknames: Xiaoli, Xiangxiang, Xiaohong, Lele. Except for those close to them, no one else knew their real names. These pseudonyms made them feel safe at night in Hsinchu. They used their Ningde dialect as secret codes to communicate, telling each other whether a client would give a tip and if so, how much that would be. If a client found out, they would say, “Leave us alone, we are speaking Ningde dialect. Are you talking to me?” 

The residents in the same building rarely hung out with each other—after working all night, they desperately needed sleep during the day—except when they needed help to color their hair. Hair dye was in short supply here as women in their forties and fifties had to contend with gray hair that popped up from time to time. In venues of entertainment, gray hair killed the joy. 

The apartment building had individual studios, each equipped with a cooking table, a refrigerator, and a bathroom. The rent was NT$5,000 per month. The necessary fixtures of life were crammed into a small space. Lishan inherited the flower-patterned bedspread from her long-time neighbor upstairs, who did not want it. Lishan washed it several times, sterilized it with alcohol, and used it for many years. She got her shoe cabinet and pots and pans from the street on the way home from her night shifts. The furniture discarded by others was put together to shape her home in Taiwan. She often shopped at second-hand stores in Hsinchu to buy clothes, which cost as little as NT$50 to 100 per piece. 

Lishan’s apartment building was close to the karaoke bar where she worked, only about a hundred meters away. She lived on the fifth floor. To get to Azure Karaoke, she only had to go downstairs, turn around a corner, and then cross an alley. In Hsinchu, her world was a narrow L-shape, sandwiched between Freedom Road and Central Road. Like a spinning top, she spun back and forth within it. 

The wind was the deepest impression that Hsinchu had left on her, “No matter where you go, the wind blows in your face.” In winter, the monsoon wind in Hsinchu was fierce and dry, which crossed the mountains and pouched on the city. Lishan had to bury herself in the wind and struggle with small steps. In summer, she would sit on the staircase around the corner to take a break when tired, and the wind gentled touched her ears. 

5.      Paradise and Hell

After she reached Taiwan, Lishan realized that it was not as gorgeous as she had imagined. It was filled with low houses, and the dimly lit venues of entertainment were tucked away in the bellies of dilapidated tin shacks. 

During the first few days after arriving in Taiwan, Lishan was asked to help Yang Yi with a Taiwanese client who wanted dinner company. Yang Yi said, “I was scared to go by myself.” At the center of the dinner table was an impressive king crab, weighing almost eight pounds. Happy with the meal and the company, the Taiwanese man took out his leather wallet and gave each lady NT$2,000 to 3,000. The ladies around the table called each other “cousins,” and introduced themselves as “relatives” to others, so that the client would give all of them the customary “meeting gift.” 

Seeing the chubby Lishan, clients’ first reaction was often this: “You can be a ‘lady’ like this?” They pushed her out the door and wanted someone else. Sometimes, she just sat down at one of these tables without saying a word, and they shooed her away, “Go go go, go to another table.” Some friendlier clients dismissed her with NT$200 to 300 to keep her out of the room. 

She had worked in two karaoke bars. The first one had more local women workers, who ostracized women from elsewhere. The local ones told clients not to tip the mainlanders, “They are very practical and just want your money.” The mainland ladies needed to occasionally drink for the local ones, “drinking to death for just NT$100 to 200.” The women even fought for tips. 

Lishan eventually found her way to the second karaoke bar. It was Azure Karaoke where she had worked for five to six years. 

This karaoke bar was located on the second floor of an old building with a purple sign. It was open every day from 5pm to 2am. Upon entry, one saw a stage with a red carpet on the floor and neon strips hanging from the top. There were brown leather sofas set up in circles in the hall, like in a restaurant. Here they followed the old tradition of ordering songs: Clients were seated at different tables and ordered songs from the jukebox or songbooks at the side of the stage while DJs took turns to play songs according to the table numbers. 

Such a karaoke bar with open mic provided more opportunities to Lishan, who did not have the advantage of good looks. More importantly, the owner of Azure Karaoke had a girlfriend from Ningde, so the mainland women were taken better care of. 

This system had its own language and rules. 

The karaoke bars did not pay wages. The ladies’ income consisted entirely of tips. Tips were called “shares.” When a client came to have a drink, it would be put on a lady’s tab and be counted as “opening” her “share.” From the NT$1,000 for drinks, a lady took a cut of 200. There were also “public shares,” meaning every lady at the bar got a tip. 

Karaoke bars were usually divided into two areas: the hall and the private rooms. The private rooms were closed spaces, where clients picked a designated lady to serve them. The hall was the place for open mic. Every client paid an entry fee of 300 for three bottles of beer and unlimited karaoke hours. 

The ladies’ work attire was made up of a hip-hugging skirt, a handbag, and leather boots. In order to put their tips away in a timely manner, they kept the straps tightly around their wrists. If they changed seats or forgot to bring their handbags, they tucked the bills into their bras or boots. Once back in their apartments, the first thing they did was to count the bills in their handbags. They stacked the colorful dollar bills on the table before taking off their boots and clothes and shook out any bills stuck on them. 

Hsinchu was a major city for global high-tech industries. The clients were mostly middle-aged and elderly residents of the nearby communities, who worked mainly manual jobs in the factories. Their clothes were shabby, and if one took a close look, one could see pills after pills on their sweaters. The first day of the month was when they got their paycheck, so the business was usually very good during the first week. Afterwards, fewer clients came. Some clients even borrowed money from the ladies and paid it back after they got the next paycheck the following month. 

Clients had different habits. Some liked their drinks on the rocks; others wanted a set dose of icy water. If they made a mistake mixing the drinks, clients would curse at them in Taiwanese Hokkien, “Fuck you, go to hell.” Like arranging flowers, clients took turns to stuff bills into the ladies’ clothes, usually under their collars. 

When it was Lishan’s turn, she ducked out of the way. The client asked her whether she wanted the money. She said yes. He said, “Then come over and let me shove it in.” Lishan always wore a high collar, which was tight under her armpits. If clients could not tuck the bills under her collar, she would not make any money. 

She didn’t know what to talk to her clients about. She just sat there gawking. The other ladies already knew how to talk to clients. Lishan relied on them to speak up for her and get her tips.

Sometimes, the palms of a client’s hands sneaked their way up Lishan’s thighs, causing goosebumps all over her body as it tensed up. She then made an excuse to go outside and cry in secret. The manager sometimes bumped into her and asked why she was crying. She didn’t want to show her real feelings and said, “I miss my children.”

Another time, she had to explain herself after the client touched her thighs and she ran out. “Stupid ass,” the manger scolded her, “Would you lose a piece of flesh when someone touches your thighs?”

She shook her head. 

The manager continued, “If you let it, would you have more money in your pocket?” 

In winter, they played an undressing game. They threw dices. If a client lost, he gave 100. If a lady lost, she took off a piece of clothing. By the end of the game, each lady could earn 2,000 to 3,000. When it came to Lishan, she was stripped only to a T-shirt and panties and couldn’t play anymore. Thus, she hid herself in the bathroom, too ashamed to come out. The manager tried to persuade her outside the stall, but she felt embarrassed to death. Her job in the past was to deal with fish in the nets or on the counter. Now she herself had become a chubby fish. 

Xiaoai, who came from Sichuan, was in her sixties. She had especially undergone a breast-enlargement surgery and dyed her hair before coming to Taiwan. She would put the clients’ hands on her full breasts. Cousin Xiaoyao came to Taiwan together with Lishan from their home village in Sandu, and they were “childhood buddies.” In the beginning, Xiaoyao lifted cement and picked oranges in the south of the island, earning a low income. After she found her way to the karaoke business, her financial situation improved. “I remember she was such an innocent girl.” But now, she sat on the lap of clients, calling them “my dear” or “hubby.” Lishan thought she was in a trance. 

She once met an eighteen-year-old Taiwanese indigenous girl. The girl said she had been working since she was sixteen and had long since disconnected from her family. The girl was “very bold,” and sat on the men’s lap and let them touch her breasts. When she got a tip, she would coax the client to give other ladies 200. The girl called Lishan “aunty.” Seeing her made Lishan think of her own daughter. Both girls had the same young face: “Every time I saw her, my heart ached.”

Why would women make themselves lose dignity? She resented “the way” they made money. Meanwhile, she had to paradoxically learn how to play the game. 

When a client shooed her away, she would slowly approach again and ask him, “You want to touch tits today? I know someone who can show you her tits.” She asked for a referral fee of 500 from the clients. Lishan explained to me that she felt helpless, “I had no choice but be the go-between to make money.” 

Two or three years later, she became a familiar face there. She had learned how to speak to clients in a pouty tone, “Big brother, looks like you are in a good mood today. How old is your child? Do you have a girlfriend at this karaoke bar?” 

When there was hardly any client, the women from eastern Fujian got together to drink, confide in each other about their homesickness, and weep while smoking, as if they wanted to wash themselves with their tears. 

Some got so drunk that they fell to the ground and cried, “You believe Taiwan is heaven? Once in Taiwan, don’t you know it is hell?” Yang Yi said to Lishan drunkenly, “For money, people go to hell.” 

6.      Echo

It was usually noisy in the private rooms, with no space for nostalgia. After Lishan came back home in the middle of the night and showered, it was usually close to 2am. If she was not drunk, she would feel lonely lying in bed. Wearing high heels had left her calves chronically edematous, which she massaged and pressed, causing little dents. 

There were many red dots for unread messages in her WeChat. Her young son sent her messages, saying he had a cold or injured himself, “Mom, my body aches.” He was still in middle school, and his tone sounded so aggrieved that her tears kept falling as she read his messages. Except for the Spring Festiva, she missed both children’s birthdays and other festivals. She agreed with Yang Yi that Taiwan was indeed hell, but she had to stay. She vowed to earn enough money for an apartment no matter what. 

Like a migratory bird, Lishan came home and stayed for a week or so during Spring Festival and summer holidays. Even when she was home, we didn’t have much time to talk. In summer, she rode her moped to look at ads on the street to find a place to rent for the next year. After the old house was sold, we never had stable housing for the past ten years and bounced between rentals. My textbooks were constantly packed or discarded. The drivers of the moving vans just casually threw the boxes of books on the cement floor. And the landlords often came to warn us to be quiet. 

Every time she came back, she brought a different brand of pineapple cakes. I almost never shared these cakes with my classmates. One must explain the reasons for a gift, and it was hard for me. I hid these pineapple cakes in my school bag until there were crushed. I never took them out.

Lishan always left at 3am or 4am. Before leaving, she touched her son’s face at his bedside. My brother was too sleepy to wake up, so all her last words of worry were stuffed into my ears. 

After my mother left for Taiwan, I took her place and became sort of a caretaker for the family. My brother and I were five years apart. I was in high school, and he was in primary school. If we ran out of living expenses, we took the bus to my aunt’s house to get the money she wired, part of which I gave to my brother. Because of the absence of both parents, I had to take on the responsibility to “raise” my brother, overseeing his studies, keeping his company, and educating him. This caused me to resent my mother. Why could the responsibility of being a mother be reduced to a lump sum of money or a box of pineapple cakes? Why could she take for granted that she could remotely fulfill her motherly duties and shift the burden onto me? 

But the resentment soon gave way to my moral responsibilities as a daughter and an older sister. After all, I should be more tolerant and understanding of my own mother. In the face of my mother’s suffering, I, like any other child, issued a rebuke to myself: Wouldn’t my mother’s life be happier without us? I didn’t dare to make myself too comfortable and wanted to suffer with my mother to alleviate my sense of guilt. 

I often felt exhausted and came to violent arguments with her. In an effort to cut ties with the family, I decided to stop getting financial support from her. Once, I left her a message, “I don’t want money from you anymore. I’ll pay back all the money you’ve spent on me.” I probably wouldn’t say such things now. But back then, I always wanted to sharpen my words to sting my mother and put guilt on her shoulders. I got my way. She cried for days after receiving that message. 

I learned later that at that time, my brother was going through a breakdown, which was even worse than mine. We had no idea how to get along with our mother on the other shore across the border. She was at a loss. When there was nothing to talk about, the most she did was to take pictures of her daily meals and show them to us, which were usually a pot of fermented tofu and leftovers that had been stewed for so long that one could no longer tell the colors of the original ingredients.

When she found out that I was bored with school, she scolded me in a derisive tone, “I eat leftovers for you two. I am so frugal because of you two. You still want to make me suffer. If you don’t want to go to school, then come to Taiwan and work here like me.”

Like tidal waves, these intense conversations surged violently and then fell slowly. In the morning, I received her drunken voice message, “Baby, hurry up and go to sleep. It’ll be brighter tomorrow. You know what, who cases, we’ll have a brilliant future.” My brother and I didn’t end up having a brilliant future, but she had done her best to raise us.

When things were going smoothly on her side, she wanted to “raise” more people. Before August 1, 2019, when visas for individual visits to Taiwan were discontinued, she had brought several of her nieces and cousins to Taiwan on tourist visas. She let them stay at her place and “work” with her at night. At the time, the gap in cross-strait economic development had narrowed. Young women who were reluctant to go through fake marriages took advantage of the repeat use of 15-day tourist visas to make quick money for short periods of time. 

I put quotation marks on the word “raise” because such support could only count as a rather helpless choice in my opinion. My cousins, without exception, had their own children to raise, including one who discouraged me. As a result of such support and the gradual improvement of our family’s financial situation, the “Taiwan-bound” Lishan now had a say in the extended family and became the one on whom everybody relied. 

During college, I read books on feminism and became conscious of gender issues. When I was about to apply for graduate school, my father was strongly against it, and his rationale was direct and absurd: Girls didn’t have to do too much school. I never received any financial support from him. The only person who supported me through graduate school was my mother who was making money in Taiwan. 

In a way, my mother was one of the least feminist women ever. Her work was vague and ambiguous, subjecting her to the male gaze and abuse as well as to her contacts through which she made money. On the other hand, she never gave up on raising me and pushed me with all her might to wider horizons. 

I was embarrassed when we talked about how she “sold” another lady’s “breasts” to her clients. What pained me was not how to digest the resentment of her leaving us behind but the collapse of her image as a mother. The authority of the mother image disappeared and instead, a complex female figure emerged. In the past, I was able to naturally utter this to Lishan, “I’m not you and I’m not going to be you.” Now there was no way for me to say that. 

I grew up from her suffering. Money formed a river that flowed from the leather wallets and pockets of Taiwanese men to my mother’s bra and leather boots, and then from the hands of countless others to us. It fed us and shaped our views and perspectives. It was an echo from that dystopian paradise, which the mass of people unintentionally struck. 

7.      Identity

When I met Yuhua, she was drinking tea, seated in front of a bright floor-to-ceiling window. She was elegant and tall, with reddish-brown eyebrows, resembling the female singer A Duo. There was a wig and newly purchased hair dye on her bathroom countertop. Her peach-colored hair was demarcated from her gay hair, the length of the latter marked the time she had left Taiwan—two years.  

She was Lishan’s friend in Taiwan. Unlike Lishan who was always frowning, Yuhua was cheerful and relaxed. She spoke as if she were firing off cannonballs, full of reckless vigor. 

Yuhua went to Taiwan twice through fake marriages, the first time in 2021. Not pushed by distress, she chose to go there of her own accord. 

For her, Taiwan was a “new world” to be explored. She pointed to the bright street scene outside the window and said to me, “It’s not like now. At the time, there was trash everywhere in Ningde. In the evening, there was drinking and fights. I heard that Taiwan was much more open than the mainland, with a good climate and health insurance for everyone, and that the Taiwanese were well-educated. Even though there were work-related conflicts, you would still be respected there.” She flipped through her photo albums to show me what she looked like before she left home. I imagined that the stylishly dressed young girl in the photos was excitedly making her way to the new world.

Around 2000, there was a serious proliferation of fake marriages. Yuhua remembered that when she went to apply for her documents at the time, the customs hall was bursting with long lines, “There were one or two thousand people getting married every day.” The vetting process was not strict and very simple. First, the two parties should register their marriage by the designated authorities in the mainland; then, the Taiwanese husband should write a letter to his mainland wife, expressing his wish for her to visit; finally, the mainland spouse should apply for an entry permit and a travel permit for Taiwan with the letter. The mainland spouse could go there after the application was accepted, and there was no interview required at the landing airport. 

According to the relevant regulations in Taiwan at the time, the mainland spouse needed to be sponsored by her Taiwanese husband or a relative with a household registration in Taiwan. It was known as “counter-guarantee.” Because of this, fake brides relied on their fake husbands who often took the opportunity to “rip them off” by demanding NT$5,000 to 10,000 per month on top of the introduction fees, or else they would go to the police to report them. 

Fake husbands, known as “marital heads,” were often single men who could not find a partner or were long divorced, disabled, poor, intellectually challenged, or were tramps on the streets. The snakeheads in Taiwan often went to parks, squares, and other public places to look for scruffy and ragged men and convince them to enter fake marriages. The lucky women could find an older “old taro boy” (a popular term for veterans), who received a pension and wouldn’t make things too difficult for the fake brides.

It took two years after arrival in Taiwan for mainland spouses to be granted work permits, but there were no such requirements for foreign spouses from Southeast Asia, thus placing mainland spouses at the “bottom of the racialized immigration system.” Two years were too long for a group of women in desperate need of an income, and almost all the fake brides would choose to work under the table. 

To prevent fake brides from leaving when they went to work, some fake husbands kept them captive at home. Before obtaining their ID cards, fake brides became the objects of their husbands’ close monitoring when it came to sex and their bodies. 

Worried about issues of liability, Yuhua’s fake husband was no longer willing to sponsor her when she arrived in Taiwan. Once the six-month initial visa expired, she went “illegal.” 

As for the days when she had to hide from the police, she said she was “getting sick of it.” Whenever she went downstairs to take out the trash and heard a police car, she raced upstairs, put her phone immediately on silent mode, and shivered under the quilt. Once, Yuhua saw a police car from afar and was so frightened that she turned into an alley. The lights were dim, and she accidentally broke into a duplex house, tripped on the staircase, and fell. She flipped out her cellphone to shed a light on her legs, which were badly bruised with blood. With no time to take care of her injuries, she just cowered in the corner and waited for the police car to leave before racing out of the alley and flagging down a cab to go home. 

Yuhua then went to Taichung and later to Pingtung. She lived with her cousin in an apartment that six women shared. Without a work permit, she lived in fear of being arrested every day. She didn’t dare to go outside. She could do nothing but wait. The other women went to wash dishes at a hotpot restaurant and stole some meatballs and noodles for her, which could cover two meals. 

Unable to bear the fear of hiding around, Yuhua decided to go home, which meant that this journey of discovery came to an end. Knowing full well that she would surely be detained at the airport, she still booked a plane ticket to the mainland. As the plane took off, she kept shedding tears as she was escorted to the police station. 

Yuhua stood up and started to speak quickly, “In the basement of the detention center, I slept all night. It was like years in there. The days were so long. I’m still scared when thinking about it. They messed up my statement. When I took a look, they had written down that I ‘worked in a hotel,’ meaning prostitution. I was so angry. I wasn’t prostituting myself at all. How could they write down things like that?!”

In 2002, the Chen Shui-bian government attempted to extend the number of years for mainland spouses to obtain local Taiwanese ID cards from eight to eleven, much higher than the four years for foreign spouses of other nationalities but failed to implement it. Two years later, Taiwan introduced an interview process upon entry. In 2008, after KMT returned to power, Taiwan enacted one legislation after another to improve the interview process and safeguard the privacy and rights of incoming spouses. The conditions for cross-strait marriages had improved. Couples no longer needed to be insured against each other. The period for mainland spouses to obtain ID cards had been shortened from eight to six years. The mainland spouses could obtain the right to work and receive health insurance immediately after reaching Taiwan. 

The Ma Ying-jeou era had opened up a crack of survival for women who were eager for an income. Under the relaxed policies, fake marriages peaked again. In 2011, after six years in the mainland, Yuhua, unable to resist the temptation, came to Taiwan again through a fake marriage and met Lishan in Hsinchu. 

Even though Yuhua and Lishan quickly obtained long-term residence permits, they still feared police inspections. 

The second floor of most karaoke establishments in Hsinchu were usually equipped with surveillance devices. As soon as a police car passed by, the alarm would sound. Upon hearing the alarm, the receptionist immediately went to the bar counter to press a button, which was connected to all the rooms. When the bells rang at the same time, all the ladies would rush through the backdoor. Seeing this, Yuhua and Lishan followed without saying a word. 

Unable to run away, Lishan and others sometimes hid under the kitchen stairs. There was not enough room there, so she was left out and caught by the police. “Why are you trying to hide? How dare you come to work in a place like this after you arrived to join your family?” The police questioned her. She panicked and said, “I’m here to visit and hang with my former classmates.” 

Each fake bride had her fair share of escapes. If caught, the police would look into why they worked there. If there was no match with the information from their fake husbands, they’d be in trouble, which would make it harder for them to obtain an ID card. When they could, running away was the rule of survival.

Another rule of survival was not to talk about politics at the karaoke table. The “ladies” were just ornaments and had no social status. They were expected to be agreeable. Yuhua would take note of which client supported DPP or KMT, “The supporters there are very loyal. With the KMT supporters, you can relax a bit. But when you run into DPP supporters, you have to be extra careful.” 

Beneath swinging identities, hidden aggressions did take place. A women named Ruirui at the bar spent the tips she earned on her Taiwanese boyfriend she was dating, only to be beaten up by him. Yuhua and Lishan felt sorry for her, but they didn’t come forward to stop the boyfriend. As outsiders, they believed they didn’t have a say in anything, “We set foot on another place to make money and we didn’t have the right to speak.” Lishan said. 

Another friend of Lishan’s, Xiaopei, remembered staying at a lady friend’s place. One day, the husband of her friend saw her and came over to hug her while chewing betel nuts. She was so scared that she rushed back upstairs and hid in the bedroom. She didn’t know whom to turn to and didn’t dare to call the police or open the door to go use the bathroom, so she took care of her needs in the bedroom. 

The ambiguous nature of their work meant that they were often identified as “girlfriends” of their clients. “Even though these guys were already sixty or seventy years old, they still magically believed in love. They would say that they fell head over heels with someone or wanted to date someone or take care of someone. They would spend money on them, even if money was tight for them.” Lishan said. The ladies couldn’t talk back but endure. They needed such ambiguous relationships to give a shelter for their survival. 

One evening, Lishan couldn’t help but ended up hitting someone. The money she had asked a Taiwanese male friend to wire to her sister was gambled away by him at the Paramount Game Shop. In front of the shop, she fought with him. When the police arrived and asked about their relationship, she didn’t know how to explain and burst into tears. In the end, she had no choice but to make something up, “He’s my employer and he owes me wages!” 

The women obsessively counted the number of years it would take them to get an ID card. By then, they would have the legitimacy to live in Taiwan. 

At Yuhua’s place, I met Xiangmei, a friend she had known for many years. She was about fifty but looked much younger than her actual age. When we talked, she sat on the sofa, quietly listened in the corner, and never participated in the conversation. When a question fell on her, she just nodded her head or answered vaguely, unwilling to reveal more information. This was the self-protective stance of most women in fake marriages from the mainland. 

When the topic of “identity” came up, the quiet Xiangmei suddenly turned to me and whispered, “I don’t actually want the ID card that much.” At that moment, a small window gently opened in Xiangmei’s heart. 

After divorcing her husband, Xiangmei raised her son all by herself. The financial situation of a single mother made her choose to come to Taiwan in 2014. Missing her son much, she split her time between Taiwan and the mainland, half a year here and half a year there. 

She said, “I applied for the ID card just to get my fake husband off my back.” Whenever they met in private, he tried to touch her body and hug her. When Xiangmei refused to live together with him, he came to knock on her door and harassed her, threatening to report her, “I’ll beat you up once I see you.” She asked the police to issue a restraining order against him, so that he could not come near her within a 100-meter radius. 

Six years later, Xiangmei was able to meet the timeline required for obtaining an ID card. Before that, she and her fake husband needed to meet again to lift the restraining order. Every day, she was afraid to hear him knocking on her door. Whenever he called, her heart clenched. 

Xiangmei confided in me her years of nightmare, and her voice trembled. I was indignant. She turned to comfort me, “In fact, you can’t blame them. We were also using them.” She said, “We were just using each other.” Ashamed of the impropriety of her fake marriage, Xiangmei accepted his occasional harassment. 

A year ago, Xiangmei got her Taiwanese ID card. On that day, she didn’t feel any excitement or elation but a brief moment of calm. The first thing for her to do was to get a divorce from her fake husband. 

After obtaining her ID card, she was given the right to vote. I thought she would take an active part and give herself and her circle a bit more possibilities. But she shook her head. She had never participated and was never interested. In a distressful situation, one was already lucky to be able to let out a long breath. 

Through her work in Taiwan, Xiangmei had saved nearly ¥2,000,000. During the past two years, she had paid in full for an apartment in a coastal village in Ningde. Now she had a place to call home. She planned to work in Taiwan for another year or two before returning to the mainland for good. With a Taiwanese ID card, it was still troublesome to travel back and forth across the strait. As for her retirement, she didn’t want to stay in Taiwan, “I will definitely come back. I can still make money now. But once I am older, how should I live? I will be very lonely.” 

I sat between the three women and felt the dilemmas unfolding before me. Lishan and Yuhuan on the right side had longed for an ID card so that they could stand on their own feet. Xiangmei on the left side agonized over how to give up her Taiwanese ID card and escape the siege. 

8.      Sky and Earth

With each passing year, I had to welcome a different mother. 

It was hard for me to say what fundamental changes had taken place in Lishan. Some details could serve as examples. She would call “security guard” as “security keeper,” or “trash” as “garbage,” plus a few words of Taiwanese Hokkien that slipped off her tongue and that I didn’t understand. When we ate outside, she used public chopsticks and lowered her voice. 

We discussed cross-strait policies and political parties. She described the voting procedures during Taiwan’s previous elections and how people naturally talked about politics. 

I remember in the past, whenever I sought her advice at the dinner table, my father just brushed her aside, “Don’t ask your mother. She doesn’t know anything.” Naturally, my brother and I formed an alliance with our father, seeing her as intellectually incompetent and leaving her out of the conversation. After her fights with our father, she also had to face my criticism, “You knew he was going to hit you. You shouldn’t have talked back.” My brother would follow suit, “Yeah, Mom, just hold your tongue.” We chalked up our mother’s being beaten up to “She’s too stupid to know how to survive.” I even warned myself not to become an incompetent housewife like her.

My mother, who grew up by the sea and had only a junior high school education, now looked as if she had gone through serious trainings of civilities. She had become unfamiliar but more fully alive. Instead, I had become that more provincial person. 

In order to broaden her “horizon” beyond her appearance, she taught herself Taiwanese. On a marble tabletop, she used her fingers to spell the lyrics of the song “The Beloved Announcer” for me: Bo was “ㄅ,” like two hooks; yin was “一ㄣ”, curves and twists; and yuan was “ㄩㄢ”, like the Chinese characters “山” (mountain) and “马”(horse).

Learning Taiwanese began with two clients, Mr. Kuo and Mr. Yang, at the karaoke bar. When they learned that Lishan didn’t know how to sing Taiwanese songs, they graciously taught her, carefully correcting her line by line. When she returned to her rental apartment, she would look up the latest Taiwanese songs on her cellphone apps, write down their pinyin in her notebook, and practice with the jukebox while jotting down the characters stroke by stroke. As soon as a new song came live, she could sing it the next day, updating faster than the jukebox. Many clients were eager to sing new songs with her. 

The owner of the karaoke bar allowed her to use the kitchen as she pleased after she requested it. For a bowl of noodles mixed with soy sauce and scallions, she could earn 200 or 500 in tips. As soon as clients arrived at the bar, she went up to them immediately and asked, “Have you eaten? Are you hungry? Shall I get you a bowl of noodles?” From then on, she got her nickname “Mama Li.” She couldn’t fulfill men’s fantasies of a “girlfriend,” so she played the role of a “mother.” 

Finding her niche, she started to earn NT$40,000 a month, then it went up to 100,000 a month. One night, she made more than 9,000 in tips. 

Lishan had also made her own Taiwanese friends. A woman in her sixties came to Lishan every Wednesday to sing together. Wherever Lishan went to work, this woman followed her. There was another Taiwanese lady friend Liansiou, who was twenty years her senior. She took Lishan on family trips and even introduced her to other family members. When she learned that Lishan’s children were still going to school, she felt sorry for Lishan and supported her with tips. 

Once, Lishan came out of the bathroom to find a Taiwanese couple who owned a noodle shop waiting in the doorway for her. They wanted to make sure Lishan got their tips. 

A truck driver took her as an older god-sister and often invited her over for drinks. After drinking for an hour or two, he slipped out 2,000 for her. She pushed the money back, “I’ll take it when you come to the karaoke bar to have a good time. I work there. But now we are just friends.”

In her situation, the word “friend” had a different interpretation. It didn’t mean being honest and close to each other, rather, it was more about taking care of each other. It was limited to the karaoke bar and could not be crossed or offended. 

One mid-autumn evening, Yuhua dragged Lishan out of the karaoke bar and flagged down a taxi. They went all the way to Qing Cao Lake. Halfway up the hill, they drank coffee and chatted. The lake was glittering. Looking up, they saw a big round moon. On that day, Lishan posted in her WeChat Moment: “Lifting my head I gaze at the moon / Lowering my head I think of home.” Unlike when they first arrived in Taiwan and felt nervous and anxious, the ladies slowly got used to the life here and had learned to breathe during their off-hours. 

There was a 7-Eleven convenience store not far from Lishan’s apartment building. When she was alone, she would go to the store and order a cup of black coffee. The aroma of coffee calmed her nerves. Before coming to Taiwan, she had hardly ever drunk coffee. The only coffee she had tried was her daughter’s instant coffee. After a client or a friend took her to a coffee shop a few times, she learned that freshly ground coffee was more aromatic. The coffee beans were roasted, ground, and pressed. With a cup of coffee, one could have a relaxing conversation. 

Yuhua and Lishan planned to travel to different places like Penghu, Little Liuqiu, and Hualien. Yuhua’s happiest trip was attending the fireworks festival in Penghu. She saw the boats sailing out to the sea and launching fireworks into the sky. When the fireworks cracked, everyone shouted, “Ahh…How exciting! How magical!” Taiwan’s seawater was blue with a bit green and gray, very different from that of Ningde. 

Since they got married, the women had never been prettier than during their time in Taiwan. Around Christmas, the ladies must wear Christmas suits and furry hats. The boss, dressed as Santa Claus, carried a big bag, and threw out tips. To celebrate the New Year, the boss treated the ladies with chicken soup with shiitake mushrooms and chicken in sesame oil and hosted a party for Weiya at an upscale restaurant. 

“It was a very happy place,” Lishan recalled. Those were her exact words. I asked her what she meant by “happy,” considering how much she had obviously been through. Lishan couldn’t answer that question. For her, happiness was real, so was pain, and the neon lights and music meshed the two together. 

On her 49th birthday, the karaoke bar threw a party for Lishan. She sent me a video. In the video, she was holding a huge bouquet of flowers. She wore a polka dot dress and swayed her body from side to side for the camera while laughing happily. After a while, someone smeared a layer of whipped cream on her face, and they jostled together. She left a comment to the video: “I was so happy that day. The first time I have had such a happy birthday.” 

I replied to her, “Mom, you looked so cute.” From the bottom of my heart, I thought the bouncy Lishan was adorable. I remembered her as bulky, chained to the kitchen and the laundry chute. My brother and I remembered that our father’s birthday was on the fourth of September, but no one remembered hers, let alone celebrated it. She had found her less burdened self in Taiwan. All I could think was that my mother should never come back. 

Besides Yuhua, Xiaopei was another friend who often dragged Lishan “out of the karaoke.” 

Xiaopei was two years younger than Lishan and was lively and fun. On the day we met, the fifty-two-year-old Xiaopei was dressed in a sailor suit with a shiny satchel. She took us out for a walk. Her hand and Lishan’s were clasped together. Like girls, they swung their clasped hands back and forth in the air. 

Xiaopei’s ten years in Taiwan were a period during which her life unfolded again after being folded by childbirth and marriage. Before marriage, she followed her sister and was in the textile and tailor business. Soon after, she got married and became a housewife. 

After giving birth to her son, Xiaopei suffered from severe postpartum depression. It felt like there was always a rock pressing on her chest. She couldn’t stop crying every day. The nights were even worse. She took a dozen kinds of medications to help her sleep and control her depression. At her worst, she lay in bed at home for ten months. When her condition didn’t improve, she was admitted into a mental hospital. She had tried to slit her wrists and hang herself. During this time, her husband divorced her, and their son was left in his care. 

All by herself, Xiaopei longed for a change of environment. At the time, the policies were not strict. “I was just idle then. Why not follow others to Taiwan? So, I went without knowing much about it,” she laughed and quickly explained her reasons for going to Taiwan. There might have been other reasons, but she was unwilling to reveal more. She just told me that it was at the age of forty that she really had her own income and her own independent life. Her new life gave her the courage to slowly recover from depression. 

Xiaopei arranged “vacations” for herself, taking three days off per week from her work at karaoke bars. During her vacation time, she traveled around the island with her backpack. Everywhere she went, she worked at a local karaoke bar to earn money for her living expenses. When she had enough money, she would go to another city. From north to south, she had traveled to almost every small city. During her travels, she made new friends, met fellow villagers, and promised to visit them later. 

“At the time, I felt that destiny had given me a mission of making good use of this life.” She said while swinging her arms.  

Lishan and Xiaopei met in Hsinchu. One spring, Xiaopei convinced Lishan to leave work and go to Taitung for a visit to the hot spring. The two rode the train all the way to Taitung. They put on light pink and blue yukatas and stayed in a small Japanese-style house. They took a lot of pictures on that trip. On the lawn, they smiled with squinty eyes, their backs leaning against each other. Only in these more relaxing moments could Lishan not think about the future. 

More objects piled up in her rental apartment. She had more solid friendships. Lishan realized she had already established another version of life on this island, one that consisted of coffee, hot spring, and the Taiwanese language. She even thought about the possibility of living forever in this golden dreamland, “As life became better, I started to feel I couldn’t come back and leave my friends behind.” 

Lishan’s favorite place was Yehliu. It’s a headland where the Datun Mountain extended into the sea, about a two- or three-hour drive from her place in Hsinchu. The local rocks had been subjected to sea erosion and tectonic movement, resulting in large and small wonders. The rock formations looked lonely and boundless. She stood on the rock formations and spread her hands, her hair waving high in the air.  

After spending too much time at a cramped and dimly lit karaoke bar, she longed for a place with wider horizons. 

9.      Expulsion 

On a morning in May in 2016, Tsai Ing-wen, dressed in a white suit and black pants, walked onto the stage in the Ching-kuo Hall of the Presidential Office Building and was sworn in. Her election aroused anxiety among mainland spouses. Many ladies at karaoke bars muttered, “This demoness is now in office. It is no good.” 

Tsai has rebuked the 1992 Consensus throughout her tenure. The cross-strait relations have dropped to a freezing point. The amendments to Article 17 of The Act Governing Relations Between People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area were proposed in 2012, reducing the number of years for mainland spouses to obtain an ID card from six to four. They were overturned by the DPP legislators in 2016 due to flaws in the proceedings, and a verification exam was added to the procedures. Under Ma Ying-jeou’s administration, the number of mainland spouses reached 12,034, as the most populous group that accounted for 58.4% of all foreign spouses. Since then, the percentage of mainland spouses has been declining, dropping to around 1,000 a year, including the mainland, Hong Kong, and Macau. 

Things were heating up. Airport interviews had become more difficult. The local police stations around the island were cracking down on “fake marriages” with much tougher investigations. In 2016, a single Taiwanese man was introduced by Yuhua to a mainland woman for a fake marriage. But after a month, he quickly divorced her and looked for a new mainland woman. This alerted the police, who investigated Yuhua as the matchmaker. 

In order to reduce the penalty, the snakehead named “Big Head” admitted that he had arranged fake marriages for a number of mainland women and “delivered” all the names of the couples he had handled, including Yuhua and Lishan. 

After receiving a call from the National Immigration Agency, Lishan thought, “This is the end.” 

The prosecutors combined Yuhua’s and Lishan’s cases. The testimony of “Big Head” left them with no chance of winning. As soon as they received the summons from the court, they couldn’t sleep at all at night, and their hearts kept pounding. When they met “Big Head” at the karaoke bar, Lishan ran to him and tried to beat him but was held back by the people around her. Her fists swung helplessly in the air. 

But Lishan was unwilling to easily let go of the life she had built with all her strength. She hadn’t expected that such a life could be so fragile and that it could break with a gentle twist. “That was the saddest thing about my long trip to Taiwan. When I first went there, I was clumsy and didn’t know anything. By now, I’ve learned a lot but don’t have a chance to make money anymore. My daughter and son haven’t graduated yet. How should I continue to support them? I don’t own an apartment, nor do I have much money.” 

In a helpless situation, everything could be blamed on a lack of “luck.” Some snakeheads had done more than two hundred fake marriages. As long as the brides bit the bullet and refused to admit fake marriages, they could survive all the investigations. “Why couldn’t I do this?” Lishan sighed and felt that she had already been lucky to enter Taiwan in the Ma Ying-jeou era, “If DPP were in power then, we couldn’t even pass the airport interviews.” 

The inspections tended to focus on the bed, the bathroom, and the closet. In an effort to conceal her fake marriage, Lishan went to Ah Tao’s home and stuffed into his cramped apartment another set of toothbrush, towel, slippers, underpants, and dresses she no longer wore, disguising his apartment as if the two of them lived there. These remedies didn’t work. According to a later verdict, the inspectors raided Ah Tao’s home late at night and found that her toothbrush, mouthwash cup, perfumes, and skincare products were covered in dust and dirt, ruling that they hadn’t been living together for a long time, which led to the conclusion of a fake marriage. 

Yuhua and her fake husband Ah Yuan met each other through their fake marriage. After arriving in Taiwan, Yuhua lived together with Ah Yuan for two years and developed feelings for him. She once took her mother and Ah Yuan on a trip together in Taiwan and took many pictures. Yuhua recalled that the judge didn’t accept her explanations, “I know you two are affectionate toward each other and you may have developed feelings for each other later, but your original intension was a fake marriage.” 

She raised up her voice in anger, “When I was wronged, I didn’t know whom to turn to except him. I did live with my husband for two years. We were together every minute of these years!”

Mei-Hua Chen, a scholar at the Institute of Sociology, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan, who has been researching the means of detecting “fake marriages” for many years, mentioned in her paper “The ‘Fake Marriage’ Test in Taiwan: Gender, Sexuality, and Border Control”: “According to cross-strait regulations, the purpose for which mainland spouses are permitted to come to Taiwan, or the legitimacy of the status of ‘mainland spouses,’ by definition, is based on the gender roles of being a wife and mother fulfilling her maternal and familial duties. For mainland spouses, the acquisition of the right to work is not based on universal human rights, but rather on such gender roles. Therefore, once caught in engaging in activities other than what’s expected of them, they face the destiny of being repatriated.” 

She also wrote, “As a result of the linkage between the acquisition of ID cards and sexual politics, the authenticity of marriage is no longer the focus of border control; what really matters is whether the sexuality and bodies of Chinese immigrant women belong exclusively to their husbands, and whether these women are subject to the traditional order of sexuality and gender.” 

Depending on the focus of the persecutors’ interviews and investigations, women in fake marriages have prepared a set of “tests” about love stories, shared living, proof of both parties’ financial resources (in recent years, whether the man’s the owner of apartments has become one important criteria), phone records, age, family planning, etc., which have become the coordinates for judging the authenticity of marriages. 

Lishan couldn’t figure out what kind of marriage could be considered real. 

Compared to other fake husbands, Ah Tao was considered “a good guy.” He never threatened to report Lishan for more money or harassed her physically. Although he liked to brag, Lishan understood that it was a sign of loneliness and low self-esteem in a life of hardships. 

Ah Tao was born disabled. His shoulders were uneven. When he walked, they bobbed up and down, one higher than the other. His ex-wife cheated on him and took most of his money. The barbecue restaurant he had run for years had to close. Because of his physical disability, he had been working odd jobs as a security guard or a dish washer at the night market, as he struggled to survive at the margins of the society. He introduced himself as a university graduate to Lishan, but when asked seriously if he had a university diploma, he immediately went silent. 

He was seven years older than Lishan. Lishan regarded him as her “brother” in Taiwan. In the second year of her trip to Taiwan, Ah Tao caught sight of her birthday on her permit and quietly bought her a cake to celebrate. She once borrowed NT$20,000 from him for an emergency. He helped her pay her monthly health insurance premiums without asking for a fee. They kept their distance and got along peacefully for five years. 

In 2017, Ah Tao met a woman online who lived in Hong Kong but claimed to come originally from Hunan Province, the same as Ah Tao’s ancestry. Ah Tao enjoyed chatting with her. Lishan warned him that the other woman might be cheating on his feelings. He didn’t believe it and insisted on sending her money and arranging a meeting with her. 

“Since you like her, why don’t you marry her?” Lishan said. 

Ah Tao refused. Earlier, when he went to the mainland to do the formalities, he temporarily stayed at Lishan’s second eldest sister’s place. Worried that Lishan would be bullied in a foreign country, this sister took extra good care of Ah Tao and pleaded to him that he should help Lishan to obtain a legal status in Taiwan no matter what. Ah Tao felt respected then. He told Lishan, “Since I promised your sister, I will definitely wait for you to get your ID card.” 

He bought a plane ticket for Hong Kong. Upon arrival, the woman was nowhere to find. Ah Tao realized that he had been cheated. After his return from Hong Kong, Ah Tao’s pent-up depression erupted. He repeatedly revealed to Lishan that he was unable to withstand the emotional blow and the pressure of multiple court sessions. Every night, Ah Tao took a handful of sleeping pills. 

Once, he thought of killing himself and swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. Lishan brought him to the ambulance, and he was saved. After being discharged from the hospital, Ah Tao often locked himself up in his bedroom for a long time. Lishan couldn’t bear to see him like this, so she came to cook for him and take him out to cut his hair. 

When Ah Tao appeared in court for the last time, he was disheveled and hung his head low. The judge asked him, “Why do you look so bad?” He braced himself and replied, “I’m scared that you, the judge, will deport my wife, and I feel terrible.” 

Half a month later, Ah Tao, ravaged by depression, chained his feet to the post of a gazebo, poured gasoline all over his body, and set himself on fire. He died in late spring 2018. 

Whenever we talked about Ah Tao’s death, Lishan quickly changed the subject. She was happy to describe everything that had happened at the karaoke bar but was never willing to recall more details about Ah Tao. The night Ah Tao set himself on fire, Lishan, as his legal spouse, received a call from the police and went to claim his body. 

Inside his trunk, the police found a suicide note. On two thin sheets of paper, Ah Tao left his final words to his family and friends, and a few lines were for Lishan—

“Lishan: Don’t fight the lawsuit, don’t waste money on the lawyer’s fee, go home. You still have a family. Unlike me, you are not disabled. My job is cleaning and security. There’s nothing much to look forward to in my life.” 

The next sentence: “Lishan: I am sorry I was not able to fulfill your wish. Please go home.” 

10.  Going Home

On June 2, 2021, it was sunny and pleasant in Hsinchu. After June, the heatwave would gradually wrap around the city, brewing a new summer. People gathered on the east coast or went on a train to watch the sea at the Siangshan wetlands where crabs appeared on the sand beaches while the fireflies became active in the forest. Hsinchu welcomed the most pleasant time of the year. 

Lishan packed her bags, walked out of her apartment building, and took a pre-arranged cab to Zhubei. She would be taking a flight back home to Fujian. She wore a white protective suit with goggles. The city Hsinchu outside the window shrunk into a tiny square. Because of the pandemic policies, no friends had come to see her off at the airport.  

She flipped out her cellphone and recorded a video of the taxi running on the highway, “I was in so much pain. I was thinking all the way when I could set foot on this island again.” 

A year before that, the Covid-19 pandemic swept through Taiwan that issued a ban on the closure of eight industries. Azure Karaoke was temporarily closed. There was no farewell parties and no more rambunctious gatherings. Without work, Lishan slept through the day and took walks at night on the streets of Hsinchu wearing a mask. She only dared to go where no one else passed. Occasionally, she received news of the death of an old friend from an infection or a court summons. 

By that time, the lawsuit had been going on for five years, first at the Hsinchu District Court for three years and then at the High Court in Taipei. Every time at the court, the opening statement always reminded her of Ah Tao’s death. Out of curiosity, people always asked her whether this court case was the last straw that did not save him. 

Many fellow ladies suggested that should she lose the case, she could just stay illegally in Taiwan. Even as a wanted criminal, she could still hide somewhere and make some money. “Think about it. Just think about it.” They told Lishan on the phone. 

She seemed to be winning, having the case drag on for a long time. Her son was about to graduate from college, and her daughter had finished graduate school. She also seemed to be losing. In the summer of 2020, her son called to tell her that he was diagnosed with moderate depression. She then realized that she had to return. 

In December 2020, the Taiwan High Court gave the final verdict. Yuhua and Lishan were convicted under Article 214 of the Criminal Code for making a public servant fabricate an inaccurate document. Each was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, commutable to a fine of NT$1,000 per day, which came to a final fine of NT$180,000. They were to be repatriated back to the mainland and were forbidden to reapply for a dependent or long-term residence permit in the next five years. Together with the cost of a lawyer, the two women had to spend NT$300,000 to 400,000 on the lawsuit. 

After learning the time of her repatriation, Lishan did three beauty surgeries in a roll, microblading eyeliners and eyebrows as well as lip enlargement. 

Back in the mainland, her cellphone can no longer surf on foreign internet websites. Not knowing how to “jump over the firewalls,” she has slowly lost touch with people on the other shore. She has begun to adapt to another society, learning to use Alipay, Pinduoduo, and TikTok, applications that have been long familiar in the mainland. 

She worked in Taiwan for nine years, saved, and still had about  ¥‎400,000 left after deducting her living expenses and her children’s tuition fees. She used the money to buy an apartment of close to 1,000 square feet in the suburb of Ningde. The apartment has three bedrooms, the smallest less than 100 square feet, which she keeps for herself. Her favorite part of the apartment is the kitchen that faces east. The kitchen is bright. In the morning, the east wind blows in through the window screen. 

This is the first apartment she has bought independently in her life, except that it doesn’t entirely belong to her yet. At a 4.2% interest rate, the monthly repayment is ¥‎3,400, and there are twenty-five years left on the mortgage. Since she hasn’t paid social security for more than a decade, she has no pension or health insurance. She still needs a job to pay for the mortgage, the loan for the renovation costs, and her own living expenses. The spinning top must continue to spin. 

For a middle-aged woman of nearly fifty with only a junior high school education, finding a job is extremely difficult. In the two years since she returned to the mainland, she has had more than ten jobs. 

She went to set up a stall at the market to sell seafood. The daily income was around  ¥‎150. A month later, her seafood and scale were confiscated by urban management officers. In a hurry, her decade-old cellphone was stolen. She then went to a fruit store and worked as a cashier, earning  ¥‎4,500 a month. Unfamiliar with the computer system, and with presbyopia, and being slow, she was soon dismissed by her boss. The logistics station was short of manpower, so she joined express deliveries, with a daily wage of  ¥‎100. In the end, she gave up due to the high physical demand. She heard that the new energy factory was looking for female workers. She went with a friend, but her moped ran out of battery on the way to the faraway factory. She pled for the boss to pick her up, but to no avail, so she had to push her moped a few kilometers home. 

Then the following jobs—

Helper at a snack bar with a monthly wage of ¥‎3,600, two days off per month, ten hours of work a day, physically exhausting; waiter at a restaurant with a monthly wage of ¥‎4,500, replaced by a young waiter after ten days on the job; helper at a market stall with a monthly wage of ¥‎4,500, and the stall was closed after two months due to poor business; selling homemade xiaolongbao and yanpi, earning ¥‎50 or 60 a day; making skewers and washing dishes at a barbecue restaurant with a monthly wage of ¥‎3,300, two days off per month…

I wrote down all the above information in my notebook on a late night. I jotted it down as she recounted. After a little while, we couldn’t help but laugh. We laughed louder and louder for a long time. We both understood why the other laughed. 

“Does it make me look stupid when you write down things like that?” She asked. I shook my head and said no. An image came to my mind. My mother was a lot like a gopher in a video game. Every time she tried to venture out a bit, destiny pushed her back to the burrow. 

When she lost her old cellphone, she messaged the person who stole it, “This cellphone is not worth much but has a lot of important photos and contact information. If you are willing to give it back to me, I won’t hold a grudge and can even pay you.” She received no reply. Over the years, the aftereffects of her concussion have gradually worsened. She sometimes comes back home empty-handed after grocery shopping, leaving bags of groceries at the market.  

Her memories of Taiwan have become fuzzy. She can no longer verify many details. For a while, she felt very sad after hearing rumors that there’d be a cross-strait war. She asked me, “Why a war? People there were very kind to me. Should there be a war, many of my good friends would die.” 

In Ningde, she has to continue to fight against the others’ gaze. After her ex-husband approached her to borrow some money at a relative’s banquet and was refused, he shamed her in a loud voice in front of others: “What is there to be proud of with the money she has? Didn’t she get the money from prostitution in Taiwan?” Besides this, he also insulted her second eldest sister and her mother. Lishan rushed to his table, swung a glass at him, and went into a fight with him. The banquet ended in an absurd fashion. 

She seldom returns to her hometown, Village A. In the past, she was afraid of being found out that she was “in Taiwan,” but now she’s afraid of the sneer: “You haven’t gotten rich after going to Taiwan.” 

In addition to riding her moped around to look for work, she spends most of her time on the long sofa in the living room. She curls up in a corner of the sofa, wondering how to spend the next day. When she’s in a good mood, she asks me whether there is a hot spring nearby or whether I can take her to a café to have some coffee. 

The more Lishan’s life unfolds before me, the less resentment I have toward her, so I turn my resentment toward myself. Aren’t my brother and I responsible for our mother’s current situation? How much would we have to sacrifice for it? It is impossible for me to stay by her side forever. She has raised a restless daughter who wants to leave the family at any given moment. 

She is also similarly tormented by a sense of guilt. Since she’s no longer the primary workhorse of the family, she apologizes to me, “The last thing I want to do is to transfer all the stress onto you. I want this day to come as late as possible.” 

My mother, now back here, is like a moral dilemma frozen on the sofa. When she lived in Taiwan, these questions never bothered us. 

In the summer of 2023, Xiaopei returned to the mainland. At her place, Xiaopei described to us what it’s like after Lishan left Taiwan.

Azure Karaoke, which used to be so noisy in the past, has become quiet with very few clients. In the past, one heard about a store closing and then about a new store opening or another going through renovation. But now, everything’s in a serious downturn.  

The younger generations no longer go to karaoke bars, favoring more upscale venues of entertainment instead. Because of the strict interviews, fewer and fewer mainland women are going through fake marriages, and it is hard to see young faces anymore. The women who work at the karaoke bar are all close to sixty, their backs hunched. They still go to work every day. From afar, they look like old beasts prostrating in a pile of bottles. Their bodies are constantly damaged by alcohol. They are often taken home in a wheelchair after getting drunk. Their income dwindles by the day, “It’s hard to make money now. We can only rely on old acquaintances and friends. They tip us a bit more in private.” 

They don’t want to leave, fixing their bodies on these brown sofas. “In that environment, you cannot escape even if you want to.” Xiaopei said, “Some save money to buy an apartment for their son’s marriage; some earn money for their own retirement; and their families all need money. Instead of returning to the mainland without jobs, it’s better to hang in here in Taiwan, and to make money as long as it lasts.”

Cousin Xiaoyao bought two apartments in Ningde, one for her two daughters and the other for herself. She still doesn’t want to come back. Lishan asked Xiaoyao, “Why do you work so hard?” Xiaoyao replied, “Do you know how much debt I still owe? I still have a ton of mortgage payments to make.” 

Back home, these women could only get low-income manual labor jobs with low security. They are always afraid of being replaced by young people. In 2021, Zhilian Zhaopin released a “Research Report on Employment Problems of Middle-Aged and Elderly Job Seekers” for those over the age of thirty-five. This report shows that 80.1% of these job seekers believe that the biggest obstacle in landing a job is their age, an insurmountable barrier. The situation is worse with these women who are well past the statutory retirement age of fifty. 

I wanted to find more information on poverty among middle-aged and elderly women, in the hope of pinning down structural factors that have discouraged them from returning to the mainland. Unfortunately, I was not able to locate any usable survey data. In one report, Wu Xinyue, a post-doctoral fellow at Southeast University, who has been studying aging and caregiving, offered her perspective, which I took as a kind of complementary explanation for their choices: “They (referring to middle-aged and elderly female caregivers) have already spent most of their careers at the bottom of the social ladder. They have no skills, qualifications, nor credentials. They are in a position of multiple disadvantages due to age, gender, social class, thus trapped at the bottom of the labor market. They face limited job choices.”

As long-term providers for their families, these “old ladies” cannot easily call it quits. With their accumulated social resources, they still have a thin line of hope in Taiwan. Lishan said, “I also find that it is strange that Taiwanese people will dislike someone for being ‘fat’ but not for being ‘old.’ These old friends in their seventies and eighties are still willing to give us tips. In any event, one can still earn more there than here in the mainland.” 

By the end of fall, Xiaopei will go back to Taiwan for work and continue her crossings between the two shores, “But I’ll return in a few years. I will definitely come back. What’s the point of retiring in Taiwan? I will be so old. Should I still stand there in a skirt for others to take a look?”

Lishan has a different idea. When she looks herself in the mirror, she tries to lift the bags under her eyes and her jaw, imagining how to fix her aging face through micro-plastic surgery. She can take out the sagging bags under her eyes or get a dose of Botox to retract her wide jaw. The age spots will be hard to get rid of but can be covered with makeup. 

She has been asking if any of the repatriated ladies have gone back again. She prays that when the five-year ban is up, she will be able to enter Taiwan again through marriage, flying back to the island of her dreams. 

*The names of all the interviewees in this article are pseudonyms.

*Unless indicated otherwise, the currency used in the text is New Taiwan dollar.