Taiwan News
Date: 2016-04-04
By: Jennifer Lin

The National Taiwan Museum and Quartet Cultural & Creative have jointly organized a Taiwan-Indonesia bilateral literary forum, with the first session being held on April 3. This forum will invite two famed Indonesian writers and four Taiwanese writers to talk about the spirit of international immigration literature and the environment for literature creation.

Pipiet Senja, dubbed as the “mother of migrant workers” by young Indonesian migrant workers around the world, and Wu Ming-yi, a professor in the Department of Sinophone Literatures at the National Dong Hwa University, will engage in in-depth discussion on the topic of migrant workers’ literature and culture. He predicts that ratio of young writers with multiple origins of races and immigrants will increase and the languages and culture of their home countries will inject new perspectives into Taiwan’s literature and culture.

Nowadays, universities in Taiwan have an “imbalance of culture”, with almost no schools having a Southeast Asian language-related department, and very few Taiwanese students chose languages of Southeastern Asia as their second language. “It is a great regret that a deep culture discrimination exists,” Wu said.

Pipiet doesn’t think that language is a hindrance between cultural exchange. She found that new immigrants can learn local language very quickly, she said. When she teaches them how to compose, she often encourages them to write letters to their children and practice writing at the same time.     [FULL  STORY]