Taiwan's immigrant children reshape university Southeast Asia studies through lived experience

Harry Chan grew up between two countries, speaking Vietnamese at home with his mother and younger brother, yet by his teenage years he realized the language had only partially stuck. He could understand what people said to him in Vietnamese, but when it came to reading—to the written form of his mother's tongue—he was essentially locked out. His classmate Sean Hsu had traveled the opposite path. Hsu visited relatives in Vietnam as a child and could pick out written words here and there, but his family mostly spoke Mandarin at home, leaving him able to manage little more than basic greetings when relatives spoke to him in Vietnamese. Both young men, now nineteen, carry the same family structure: Vietnamese mothers, Taiwanese fathers. And both are now in their second year studying Vietnamese at National Chengchi University's Department of Southeast Asian Languages and Cultures, trying to reclaim and deepen something that had always been partly theirs but never fully within reach.

They enrolled not simply to become fluent speakers, though that matters. They wanted to understand the country their mothers came from, the history and culture that shaped the people who raised them. What they discovered once classes began was that the department offered far more than conjugation drills and vocabulary lists. Hsu's mother had been too busy working to teach him much about Vietnam's past or its social fabric. Chan found himself studying women's roles across Southeast Asia, regional economics, and the political complexities of the region—knowledge that extended well beyond anything his family's dinner table conversations could have provided. The department chair, Le Thi-Nham, who herself moved to Taiwan from Vietnam in 2010, explained that heritage-language students often arrive with conversational ability or family connections but quickly learn the department teaches "cultures, history, civilization, literature, politics and economics." The transition was not seamless. Both had grown up speaking Vietnamese with a southern accent, learned informally through family life rather than structured instruction. When they entered university classrooms where northern Vietnamese was taught, the unfamiliar pronunciation and formal grammar felt jarring at first.

Their choice to study Vietnamese was not universally celebrated. High school classmates questioned why they needed formal instruction in a language they already spoke at home, suggesting their mothers could simply teach them. More stinging was the mockery that surfaced online when the department itself was derided as a "migrant worker department," a label that revealed how thoroughly Southeast Asia had been reduced in the Taiwanese imagination to the roughly 895,000 migrant workers laboring in the country. "Calling us a 'migrant worker department' is meaningless," Hsu said flatly. "The people actually learning the language are us, not them," Chan added. Both had experienced this kind of reduction before. As children speaking Vietnamese in public spaces, they had noticed the way vendors seemed to regard them differently after hearing their mother tongue, the way passersby would stare into Hsu's mother's shop when Vietnamese music played or when her Vietnamese friends gathered there. The message was clear: this language, this culture, this way of being did not quite belong in Taiwan.

Yet something has shifted. When Chan speaks Vietnamese with vendors now, they respond with surprise and admiration rather than the subtle coldness of before. "Wow, you can speak Vietnamese," they say. Hsu has noticed the same change—people are more likely to compliment him on being bilingual than to question where he really comes from. Le, who has lived in Taiwan for sixteen years, has witnessed this transformation across the broader society. When she first arrived, children of Southeast Asian immigrants often tried to hide their family backgrounds, fearing discrimination. Now, increasingly, she sees them step forward with pride. "Most of the second generation now step out," she said. "They say they're very proud. They say, 'I am half Vietnamese, and I love my mother's culture.'" Taiwan's demographic reality has shifted too. As of March 2026, more than 615,000 new immigrants were living in the country, and their children had become an increasingly visible part of Taiwanese society. The presence of these families, and young people like Chan and Hsu claiming their heritage openly, has begun to reshape what it means to be Taiwanese.

The department itself has become a space where this identity reclamation happens collectively. Around half of the students in Chan and Hsu's cohort also come from immigrant families, meaning they are not alone in navigating the gap between family language and formal study, between inherited culture and deeper knowledge. "I am now proud of this identity," Chan said. For Hsu, becoming more fluent in Vietnamese had strengthened not only his connection with his mother's extended family but his sense of what his own heritage meant. Both believe schools could do more. Vietnamese was never offered at the schools either attended, despite the availability of classes in Taiwanese and Hakka. At Chan's high school, the Vietnamese elective existed but was treated as an easy course rather than serious study. Expanding access to Southeast Asian language instruction, they argue, would help more children from immigrant families understand their own backgrounds and feel confident about who they are.

Le sees the value these students bring to the classroom itself. Their presence, their stories, their lived experience of moving between cultures—these are what make discussions authentic. They offer classmates a window into Southeast Asian life that no textbook can fully provide. Looking forward, both young men are considering paths that would deepen their connection to the region. Hsu is interested in translation or teaching and has not ruled out eventually living in Vietnam. Chan is similarly open to working there. Hsu believes the growing number of immigrant families in Taiwan could become a vital bridge between the country and Southeast Asia, strengthening ties through travel, trade, and cultural exchange. Chan sees a different kind of bridge: young people from immigrant families helping their society move beyond stereotypes, helping people understand that these families are simply "a new group that has come to our country" and that their presence is "proof of our diversity." What began as a personal struggle to reclaim a language has become something larger—a quiet reshaping of how Taiwan sees itself.