“Put your phone on self-timer mode and lay it down on the sixth marble slab counting away from the bottom of the stairs. That way you can capture the dome’s stained glass in the photo, and if you gather everyone in a circle and bring them close, you can get a group shot with the dome.” Dressed in an ao dai, a traditional garment for Vietnamese women, Tran Tu Binh demonstrates the method as she explains it in Vietnamese to some curious compatriots from Vietnam, who follow her directions to get a group shot of themselves under the dome of the National Taiwan Museum.

 

Gather in a circle and pull close to get a group shot with the stained glass of the NTM’s dome in the background: It’s a tip that these immigrant docents inevitably share with their tours.

Speaking Vietnamese to her compatriots, the “new immigrant ambassador” Tran Tu Binh explains the significance of the NTM’s greatest treasure—the “Yellow Tiger Flag” of the short-lived Republic of Taiwan of 1895.

The scene took place on a tour for which she served as a “new immigrant ambassador” under a program started at the National Taiwan Museum (NTM) in 2015. These tours are given by immigrants from Southeast Asia in their native languages.

Regaining the initiative

“I arrived in Taiwan more than a decade ago, but I never set foot in the National Taiwan Museum until I saw an advertisement recruiting new immigrant ambassadors.” That’s the gist of what four or five of these ambassadors say, if with slightly different phrasing.

On weekends immigrants have long gathered in the 228 Peace Memorial Park, where the museum is located, but museum staff noticed that few ever ventured inside. A quick survey revealed that the building’s grandeur was off-putting. The immigrants felt that the museum served citizens exclusively and was not a place for “new immigrants”—Southeast Asians who are migrant workers in Taiwan or have married Taiwanese men (particularly the latter).

These new immigrants now comprise Taiwan’s fourth largest ethnic group. For museum director Chen Chi-ming, drawing them into the museum became the next step in the NTM’s efforts to meet its corporate social responsibilities.

The NTM’s 2014 exhibition on “Islamic Life and Culture” created quite a splash within Taiwan’s Muslim community and earned excellent reviews. Moreover, the museum took advantage of the opportunity to recruit new immigrants interested in serving as volunteer “ambassadors” or docents. Indrawati, an Indonesian, was one of them.

A window on Taiwan

Established in 1908, the NTM is an embodiment of Taiwan’s modern enlightenment. Its core value as a museum is found in the ways it captures Taiwan’s biodiversity and cultural diversity.

Chen regards the NTM as the museum most representative of Taiwan, a place where Taiwanese can gain understanding about themselves and foreign friends can learn about Taiwan. “The NTM also should be a window on Taiwan for new immigrants and migrant workers,” says Chen.

NTM deputy director Lin Hwa-ching notes that Taiwan has experienced several waves of immigration since the Japanese colonial era, including the mainland Chinese who came when the Nationalist government decamped for Taiwan in 1949. The “new immigrants” are just the latest wave. “Since we’re right in the middle of this period of Southeast-Asian immigration, as a museum attuned to cultural diversity we should be paying a lot of attention to the impact of these new immigrants’ cultures on Taiwan.”

Consequently, the NTM began to go through various channels to find new immigrants who were willing to become museum docents. They began to recruit the first group of trainees at the end of 2014, and by June of 2015 ten new immigrant “ambassadors” from four countries—Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and the Philippines—were actually giving tours.

Making connections with Southeast Asia

“Because the training curriculum and reference materials are all in Chinese, it’s important that they have excellent Chinese listening comprehension and reading skills,” says Emily Yuan, who leads the ambassador program at the museum. “These are basic requirements.”

In the second round of training for new immigrant ambassadors, these women docents-to-be diligently take notes.

In a first for a museum in Taiwan, the NTM printed introductory pamphlets in Indonesian and Vietnamese.

In training, ambassadors-to-be first listen to senior guides explain the museum’s history, the special features of its architecture, and the content of its permanent exhibitions. Experiencing the different styles of various guides, they are constantly listening, working to fix the information deep in their memories.

The accuracy of the guides’ content is what the museum cares about most. When they hit translated academic terminology, they go back to the English for it and then look for something close in the vocabulary of their native language. Giving successive practice tours, the new immigrant women are asked by the museum first to give two or three tours in Chinese, and then to practice tours using their mother languages among themselves. 

In June of 2016, a second class of new immigrant ambassadors began their training. Before training began, Yuan earnestly said to this group of ambassadors-to-be: ‘I hope that you all can find some connections between the culture of Taiwan and those of Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. For instance, when the NTM was founded, what was happening in your native lands? It’s important to make connections with your homelands because your own cultures are just as important.”

Consequently, the Vietnamese women in training showed photographs of the Ho Chi Minh City Museum and compared it with the NTM. The Indonesian women point to the original checkerboard floor on the museum’s ground floor, noting that it resembles the floor in a palace on Bali.

What’s more, the NTM has set a precedent by printing introductory pamphlets in Indonesian and Vietnamese, which the ambassadors helped to translate.

The beautiful virtue of diligence

Linda Tjindiawati Arifin, who hails from Indonesia, recalls that the first time she gave a tour she could feel her voice quavering. Her daughter was watching and could tell that her mother was on the verge of tears. Even now, on the night before she gives a tour, Linda goes over her reference materials. Diligent by nature, she worries that her tours are not up to snuff and will reflect poorly on the museum.

By attending training sessions with their mothers, these second-generation “new immigrants” both gain knowledge about Taiwan and benefit from the example of their mothers’ diligent study.

Le Vu Phi, who is Vietnamese, attends training sessions partly because they foster self-growth, but she also brings her daughter to them because they provide an opportunity for the child to see her mother diligently studying. Le has slowly but surely come to love her work as a docent.

Tran Tu Binh has been in Taiwan for 16 years. Apart from her regular job, she teaches Vietnamese in “mother-tongue classes” at Wang Xi Elementary in Yonghe, New Taipei City on the weekends. From time to time she asks her students to invite their mothers to go with them on the weekends and to take in a tour at the museum. Apart from giving the students real-life experience with Vietnamese, she also hopes that their new immigrant mothers, who often don’t get out much, will take advantage of the opportunity to gain a better understanding of Taiwan.

Maree is a docent-to-be enrolled in the second session of “ambassador” training classes. She is also the only docent who speaks Thai. She first came to Taiwan to visit relatives 20 years ago. She never expected that she would fall in love with the island and never go back to Thailand. She says that she twice previously visited the NTM, but each time she gave it just a cursory walk around before returning home. She is eagerly looking forward to the training sessions, anticipating that one day she will be able to share the beauty of the NTM’s architecture with her Thai friends.

Nguyen Thi Ngoc Mai shares a memory of how one time she and Tran Tu Binh were practicing giving tours to each other, and they encountered a Taiwanese couple who insisted on hearing their Vietnamese-accented Chinese tour. The couple even asked the docents for a recommendation for a good Vietnamese restaurant, planning on going there for a meal afterwards.

At three on a Sunday afternoon, an Indonesian tour begins. Wearing a traditional royal blue kebaya, Indrawati stands outside the museum introducing its beautiful century-old architecture. The group of fellow Indonesians on the tour listen intently to her resonant and clearly enunciated Indonesian. Indrawati exudes confidence as she gestures, and her dangling earrings sway as she animatedly explains certain points. The scene is moving in a way that’s hard to put into words.

By bringing in immigrants, this century-old museum is moving a step closer toward the ideal of cultural equality. It is also continuing its work to tell stories that belong to all of the people of Taiwan.