Leaving a Good Impression of Taiwan

Beyond the Globe (BG) has since 2008 continually provided volunteer services in Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia, with the focus in recent years being on teaching Mandarin Chinese. The group’s faculty advisor, Professor Hung Wen-jou of NCNU’s Department of Inter­national and Comparative Education, says that volunteering can be seen as a win–win proposition.

In pursuit of internationalization

NCNU has always pursued international engagement, and as early as 2008 BG went to Vietnam to provide services to orphans severely disabled by poison gas during the Vietnam War, by assisting with their occupational therapy. Later the group collaborated with a program launched by Taiwan’s Eden Social Welfare Foundation for “new children of Taiwan on the banks of the Mekong River,” assisting with teaching the Chinese language to the Taiwanese children of former Vietnamese immigrants to Taiwan, in order to give these children, who do not have Vietnamese citizenship, the opportunity to get an education. Hung Wen-jou hoped to extend the group’s services to the Thailand–Myanmar border. From 2018 to 2022, she went first to Chiang Mai, Thailand, and over the course of the last several years has focused service activities—mainly Chinese language education—on the Chiangmai Tzuchi School and the Zhong Zheng School (which primarily educates the descendants of former Nationalist Chinese soldiers who were left behind on the Thai–Burmese border after the Chinese Civil War).

Professor Hung Wen-jou (right), of National Chi Nan University, who is faculty advisor to the Beyond the Globe group, guided student Tsai Yu-juo on a volunteer teaching trip to Southeast Asia, where Tsai gained a deeper understanding of cross-cultural learning. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

Chinese language teaching

Tsai Yu-juo, a second-year master’s student in the Department of International and Comparative Education at NCNU who has been part of the Vietnam team for two years running, shares the following story: After a week of teaching kids Chinese in small classes, on the final day a student who had planned to go to study in China asked her how to apply to universities in Taiwan. “I felt touched, because this meant that what we were doing had meaning.”

Tsai says that when teachers from Taiwan made pearl milk tea (boba tea) for the students right there in class, the kids were delighted. After class, the students led the teachers to the supermarket to use their Chinese to help the teachers shop, working on their language skills by explaining the wares to the teachers. Tsai relates that Vietnamese students are very good about looking after others and are very warm and friendly, and they introduced the Taiwanese volunteers to “sweetheart cakes” (originally from Guangdong) and Vietnamese bánh phu thê (“husband-and-wife cakes”). She adds that the meat floss cake was also delicious and the volunteers bought a lot of instant noodles and snack foods as their visit turned into a shopping spree.

Asking Indonesian students to introduce their homeland in Mandarin is a way to energize Chinese language classes. 

Being cared for in Indonesia

In 2015 GB turned its attention to the Bina Mulia School in Pontianak in Indonesia’s Kalimantan Province. This school for ethnic Chinese students was founded by Soewito Limin (Lin Shangqiang), the father of Sri Dewi Limin (Lin Zhengling), who manages the school today, and it still persists in using traditional Chinese characters for instruction. Tsai Yu-juo recounts that when the GB volunteer team went to Vietnam they had to handle all their meals and transportation for themselves, but in Indonesia these aspects were all taken care of by Sri Dewi Limin, who previously studied in Taiwan, making the team feel especially welcome.

“There are some team members who still keep in touch with students they taught overseas even a decade or more after their time together,” says Hung Wen-jou. This is also one of the goals of GB: using cross-cultural exchange to break down international barriers. 

Vietnamese students take their Chinese language teachers around to visit scenic locations and explore the local environment.

At Zhong Zheng School in Thailand, an activity involving colored pictures of elephants provides an entrée for teaching the Chinese language.