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During the last few days, there has been a huge furor over this sentence spoken publicly by the Mayor of Kaohsiung City, Han Kuo-yu (Daniel Han):

"Mǎlìyà yīxiàzi zuò wǒmen Yīngwén lǎoshī 瑪莉亞一下子做我們英文老師" ("Maria suddenly becomes our English teacher")

Newspaper articles describing the incident, which is now being referred to as the "'Mǎlìyà' shìjiàn「瑪麗亞」事件" ("'Maria' Affair"), may be found here (in Chinese, with video clip) and here (in English).

Mayor Han is notorious for his errant, flippant manner of speaking, but this instance — which he later claimed was a "joke" — quickly came back to haunt him. To understand why this is so, we need to take into account a number of factors.

First of all, in recent years, there has been a big push to promote English throughout the country: "English as an official language in Taiwan" (12/8/18). Kaohsiung, in particular, aims to become a bilingual city in the near future. Consequently, in the rush to learn English, a conspicuous shortage of qualified English language teachers has become apparent. Mayor Han's quip may have been prompted by the fact that more than 90% of Filipinos in Taiwan speak fluent English, albeit often with a special accent:

Watch also here and here.

Filipinos form the third largest national contingent of migrant workers and account for about one-fifth of foreign workers in Taiwan as of April 2011. There are about 77,933 Filipino workers in Taiwan, with 53,868 of them working in the manufacturing sector and 22,994 people working as caregivers.

As in Hong Kong, where there are even more Filipina maids, most of the Filipinos in Taiwan are domestic helpers and caregivers whose social status in general is lower than that of the local inhabitants. As such, people who want to learn English may find it somewhat unsettling to have a Filipino as an English teacher.

A large proportion of the domestic Filipina domestic helpers are named "Maria" (see below for more information about the name "Maria" among Filipinas). To use "Maria" as a blanket designation for all Filipina migrant workers is considered to be politically incorrect, demeaning, and discriminatory. This accounts for the uproar over Mayor Han's off-the-cuff reference to "Marias" becoming English teachers for Taiwanese.

Foreign labor was illegal until 1992 when the Taiwan government formulated its first policy to permit the importation of workers from abroad. According to Prof. Lucie Cheng's survey (see the Table below): (1) Filipino and Thai workers dominated the makeup of all foreign labor throughout the decade 1991-1999, and (2) Thai labor (most are male) decreased and Filipino labor (most are female) increased. While Thai workers are found in large numbers in public construction work, most Filipinos are in domestic and care-giving work.

Lucie Cheng, "Transnational Labor, Citizenship and the Taiwan State," in East Asian Law: Universal Norms and Local Cultures. Eds. by Arthur Rosett, Lucie Cheng and Margaret Woo. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, pp. 85-104.

Since the 90s, large numbers of female Filipinos have been employed in Taiwanese households, and many of them have the name "Maria." Maria is one of the most popular names in the Philippines (influenced by Spanish colonization, 1521-1898). (For more information about the name "Maria" for female Filipinos, see this article.)

"Maria" has gradually become like a nickname or a code name in Taiwan, with stereotypes — someone who is a female servant in a house, who takes care of elders, has darker skin, with a Filipino English accent…, etc.

Due to population aging, the need for domestic and care workers has been on the increase. In 1999, the need accounts for more than half of the large increase of Indonesian workers. However, people are in the habit of calling all of them "Maria," regardless of their country of origin.

A Taiwanese colleague described the attitudes of many Taiwanese toward the Filipina domestic workers thus:

Because of a famous commercial, Maria (瑪莉亞) has become a synonym for foreign laborers from the Philippines. It even stands for doing housework and being a servant. Therefore, it has a derogatory meaning, especially toward the Filipinos. In this context, it means that people in Taiwan usually think of the Filipinos as foreign laborers, serving and doing housework at home, so they think, "How could they be our English teachers?" When Mayor Han blurted it out, it was discriminatory and politically incorrect because it means we Taiwanese think we are superior to and better than the Filipinos and think that the Filipinos are only capable of doing housework, not teaching English. It also shows that Taiwanese people think that hiring English teachers from the U.S., U.K., or Australia will be better than hiring Filipinos.

One Taiwanese citizen whom I asked about the "Maria incident" had this to say:

Yes, it is a discrimination and an insult. Many Taiwanese endeavor to uphold fairness and justice, but some stupid City Mayor, like Han Kuo-yu (who supports a one-China policy 一個中國政策, that is, Taiwan is one province of China), can destroy all the good efforts of everyone else in a second. Honestly, I don't like him. When the local election in 2018 was decided and Xi declared on January 3, 2019 that he wants progress on China's decade-long quest to win control of Taiwan, I was very anxious. I feel there is nowhere to go — because I am a Taiwanese, I was born in Kaohsiung and grew up in Tainan, I have to stay here.

Another Taiwanese citizen remarked:

It's because there are many Filipino women working in Taiwan as maids and Maria is a very common name for these ladies. Mayor Han was criticized for stereotyping these women and discriminating against their English skills because many of them speak English with strong accents. I believe Han made this comment in response to the suggestion that we could have these Filipino maids teach Taiwanese kids English. Nowadays in Taiwan, it is very easy for public figures to be accused of discriminating against women. However, many supporters of Han also believe that it's just purely political attack from his opponents since Han has become a huge political star and might be a potential presidential candidate in 2020.

N.B.: The current President of Taiwan is Tsai Ing-wen, the first female President of the Republic. She is up for reelection in 2020.

The stakes surrounding "Maria" are high, both for English-language instruction and for presidential politics.

[Thanks to Yongmin Lee, Melvin Lee, Sophie Wei, Chia-hui Lu, and Mark Swofford]

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