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Kabrina Kau
"Taiwanese Aborigines and the Education Dilemma"
Sponsor: L. Ling-Chi Wang, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies

• Project Description
• Scholar's Photo
• Scholar's Journal

Kabrina will undertake a field-study of the indigenous people of Taiwan, who were colonized by Han immigrants from mainland China in the late-seventeenth century, focusing specifically on their attitudes toward education. Using surveys and interviews with several targeted youth and adult populations in the city of Taitung, she will attempt to ascertain the factors that have impeded this minority group from using education as a means of improving their socio-economic status. She intends her research to provide information that will aid in the development of a new aboriginal education assistance program in Taiwan, as well as to shed light on the broader question of the factors which inhibit the integration of minority groups into modern mainstream societies.

I looked at my ten interview subjects, and they looked back at me. Silence. That word summed up what the general state of things had been ever since I'd arrived for the interview. I glanced at my watch. Twenty minutes past eight o'clock. Inwardly, I was groaning loudly. The translator was not just late; he was very late! Suddenly, it occurred to me that maybe he'd altogether forget to show up to help me. That's when I started sweating. I turned to my interviewees again and smiled at them for probably about the seventieth time, since I'd come to their neighborhood at 8 pm. Some of them smiled back at me. I hoped desperately that they couldn't see how nervous I was becoming.

The mayor of Taitung Shih, a city in Taiwan, had been nice enough to arrange an interview for me with a group of elders from the Ami aboriginal tribe. This particular group consisted exclusively of descendants of the first Ami tribal chief. They were a sort of royal family in the eyes of the Ami community. The only difficulty I'd have interviewing them, the mayor said, was that they couldn't speak a word of Mandarin Chinese. They could only speak their native Ami tongue, and I had no familiarity at all with this language. But not to fear! The mayor promised to send to the interview a terrific translator who could speak both Ami and Mandarin. With this guy helping me, I'd have no trouble at all.

Now, I was sitting in a circle of tiny patio chairs arranged right in the middle of a street in the Ami neighborhood. And I was having trouble all right. A lot of it. My interview subjects were seated all around me in this circle, and they were all looking directly at me. I asked aloud a question in Mandarin, phrasing it in very basic words and speaking slowly. I prayed silently. A pause. Then, the inevitable shaking of heads. None of the interview subjects understood the question. Some of them even gave me a slightly annoyed look, as if to reproach me for asking a question in a language that I knew they couldn't understand. I sighed and wished that I'd been better at charades. Without really noticing it myself, I muttered my frustration aloud in English: "Oh, God! Nothing's working! When is that translator going to get here!" I must have spoken pretty loudly, because I woke up the eldest of the elders with my first few words. (He'd started napping immediately when he'd heard the first of my pathetic attempts to communicate with his kinsmen.). He sat up now, rubbed his white hair, and squinted at me with his wrinkly eyes. And then, the weirdest thing happened. He said, "Do you come from the United States? I'm from Florida!"

I was so shocked that he'd spoken English that I made him repeat what he'd just said. Carefully, half-disbelieving what I had heard, I asked him when he had been to Florida. Pausing for the briefest moment, he launched into a story of his American adventures, telling me all about his years as a fisherman on Florida's coast during the early 1980s. The whole time that he was talking to me, I sat there happily soaking up his words: the lovely sound of English! With the white-haired fisherman as my new translator, the rest of my interview went better than I could ever have hoped. I asked my questions in English, and he deftly translated them into the Ami tongue for his relatives. Without the language barrier between us, the group of Ami elders became completely relaxed. They were thoughtful and detailed in their responses to my questions. What really impressed me, though, was their laughter and warmth. They told jokes and poked fun at each other and made a special effort to include me in their light-hearted conversations. We all sat there together until one o'clock in the morning, talking and laughing, and cracking peanut shells into the night.