“Home-making” in Taiwan: Indonesian Muslims’ Activities

This is the second report of the Research Project titled “Interdisciplinary Study of Mutual Cultural Exchange between Japan and Indonesia,” which was supported by the Research Institute of St. Andrew’s University from 2013 to 2015. The aim of this paper is to examine how Muslim migrant workers from Indonesia have made their ‘homes’ in Taiwanese cities. The concepts of ‘home’ and ‘home-making’ have been influenced by the discussion in Migrants of Identity : Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement edited by Rapport and Dawson (1998). In terms of globalization, Taiwanese society has changed drastically since the early 1990s as a result of two major streams of migrants. The first wave of migrants consisted of contract workers from Southeast Asian countries. These workers were mainly Thais and Filipinos, but they were followed by Indonesians from the 2000s and soon surpassed by them in numbers. Over 80％ of the Indonesian workers, numbering 154,596 in 2010, are women who look after the elderly as caregivers and live in their employers’ homes. The second wave consisted of Chinese and Southeast Asian women who married local Taiwanese men. Two thirds of the marriage migrants are from Mainland China, and the rest are mostly from Southeast Asian countries, such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. Also, there are Indonesian students, whose number is much less than the above-mentioned Indonesian migrants. Most Indonesian workers and students living in Taiwan are Muslim. Based on Islamic beliefs and teachings, they have formed Muslim organizations to conduct religious and social activities aimed at mutual aid, helping other Indonesian workers facing serious problems. Worker and student organizations sometimes cooperate with each other to hold training courses for Indonesian female care workers. Focusing on two mosques in Taoyuan city, Longgang Mosque in Zhongli district and At-Taqwa Mosque in Dayuan district, this paper discusses how Indonesian Muslims have made their ‘homes’ despite being aliens in Taiwan. Longgang Mosque was built in 1964 by Taiwanese Muslims who originally came from Yunnan, China. One of the Indonesian Muslim organizations, FOSMIT, uses a vacant room in the mosque to conduct its religious activities. Though the mosque is the core of Islamic identity for Taiwanese Muslims living in Zhongli, Indonesians use the mosque as their ‘home,’ where they intimately talk with each other in their native language and eat their favorite foods. In 2013 AtTaqwa Mosque was built by a former Indonesian worker and her Taiwanese husband, who converted to Islam when he got married. Many Indonesian workers donated money to build the mosque. On August 23, 2014, when I interviewed some of the staff members of the mosque, after a performance of Javanese Islamic music with rebana (a Malay tambourine), a recitation of Yasin verse from the Al-Qur’an was performed, with a total of eighteen Indonesian workers in attendance. Because most of the attendants were from East Java, at the end of the ceremony, an Islamic leader (ustad) gave an Islamic sermon in Javanese, not Indonesian. The mosque became a ‘home’ filled with a Javanese atmosphere. Indonesian Muslims in Dayuan have succeeded in making their own ‘home.departmental bulletin pape