Immigrant culture and businesses flourish in Taiwan
In recent years, the sizeable Southeast Asian community in Taiwan has introduced more than just their cuisine to locals. From Muay Thai to Vietnamese head spa, they’re bringing trendy experiences otherwise not known to locals. Let’s take a look in our weekly special.
Punches and grunts fill the space. They’re practicing Muay Thai, a popular sport in recent years.
Muay Thai pad work emphasizes a steady rhythm above all. The trainee must accurately hit the target held by the coach. The coaches here are all from Thailand.
Max
Muay Thai coach
I’ve always liked Muay Thai. I used to watch the players and think they’re so good and so strong, and I wanted to be like them.
Thum
Muay Thai coach
I’ve wanted to compete since I was little, because my family didn’t have much. When I was seven or eight, I only made around 150 or 200 baht per session, but it made me so happy.
Thum, who’s now 37 years old, started practicing Muay Thai as a kid to earn money, like many others in his native country. After some 20 to 30 years, it’s become a bona fide skill.
And here’s the person who brought them to Taiwan.
Kelly Tang
Muay Thai gym owner
Unlike many other sports, Muay Thai uses the whole body. There’s the elbow, the knee strike and also turns, and also punching and kicking, really varied. I found it more exciting, and also lost weight very quickly. I lost almost 5kg just two months in.
Tang started practicing Muay Thai five years ago to lose weight, during which she met Lin Jing-cheng, a professional Muay Thai boxer.
The two of them soon became a couple and eventually opened four Muay Thai gyms in Kaohsiung. Tang travelled to Thailand herself and recruited 11 coaches. This not only gave Taiwanese boxers a chance to train with seasoned coaches, it also deepened cultural exchanges between Taiwan and Thailand.
Lin Jing-cheng
Muay Thai boxer
Speaking of the Thai coaches’ credentials and experience, they’ve all participated in hundreds of professional matches. Taiwanese coaches really don’t have that kind of experience if I’m being honest.
What was once a weekend past-time for migrant workers, is now a trendy workout in the country. In the past four years, the number of Muay Thai boxers in Taiwan almost tripled, from a little over 200 to almost 600.
Max
Muay Thai coach
When Thai boxers compete, they are prepared with wits and movements. They’re fast. They move fast, strike fast, kick fast and kick hard. We’re here to teach them how to make more effective strikes. We must teach them false moves. Thai boxers do employ false moves.
Thum
Muay Thai coach
You must think about your strategy, and not just attack. You’ll lose stamina.
Taiwan is a country of immigrants. There are now more than 800,000 migrant workers. Adding marriage migrants and overseas compatriot students, that brings up the number to over 1.6 million.
Chen Hui-fen
National Taipei University of Education
We have lots of new immigrants. We also hope that they can assimilate and conduct exchanges with Taiwanese society in a way that precludes cultural autonomy and greater personal agency. Meaning, when we’re interacting with them, we can also learn from their cultural strengths, unlike in the past, or even at present still, when we’re extracting another group’s labor to do tasks we ourselves aren’t willing to do.
The immigrant community in Taiwan was predominantly manual laborers, but now, an increasing number are skilled workers introducing an international flair to local life.
At 7 p.m. the gym comes alive with office workers looking to work out, lose weight, and learn self-defense.
Thum
Muay Thai coach
I hope they become really good. After all, they did pay, if we can’t make them happy, they won’t come back.
Chen Hui-fen
National Taipei University of Education
It’s a conceptual shift from fighting to workout. On a societal level, I think Taiwan’s martial arts gym model is a great incubator for Muay Thai.
There are lots of customers in the waiting area of this Vietnamese head spa. Meanwhile, the phone is ringing off the hook.
Cheng Chiu-huai is from Vietnam. After ending her previous marriage, she met Kuo Chin-fu, a Taiwanese businessman. Cheng had always wanted to open a hair and nail salon, but Kuo had other ideas. Having been thoroughly impressed with Vietnamese head spa while in the country, Kuo suggested that they bring the experience to Taiwan. In 2021, at the peak of Covid, the couple opened Taiwan’s very first Vietnamese head spa.
Cheng Chiu-huai
Vietnamese head spa owner
I want customers to feel like they’ve traveled abroad when they come here. Everyone working here is Vietnamese and from the way they speak, it’s obvious they’re Vietnamese. Some of our clients even want to learn Vietnamese.
Kuo Chin-fu
Vietnamese head spa owner
We’ve been doing well since the beginning. Our clients are from everywhere, even from the south.
This golden hydrotherapy device is an instantly recognizable trademark of Vietnamese head spa. A hair wash in Taiwan normally costs around NT$200, but be prepared to shell out at least NT$1,500 here for a session, starting at 90 minutes. It may seem like a lot, but there’s a whole range of cleansing and pampering treatments from head to toe.
Client
I think it’s great, whether for men or women. It feels really great to come here and relax.
Cheng Chiu-huai
Vietnamese head spa owner
In Vietnam we scratch our clients’ scalp with our nails when giving a head wash. But in Taiwan, it seems that clients prefer the pads of the fingertips. So we really need to switch up our technique. I make sure our employees don’t grow their nails, even just a little bit must be trimmed.
But for a cultural product to break into a new market, it must teeter the fine line between authenticity and palatability.
Chen Hui-fen
National Taipei University of Education
It must make a lot of adjustments when being introduced to the Taiwanese market, we call this process adaptive innovation, or by another term, innovation recontextualization. In that way, a hair wash is no longer just a hair wash. There’s a conceptual shift. What was a hair wash now becomes a spa treatment.
According to the Ministry of Finance, there were more than 20,000 hair salons in Taiwan in 2023. But in the past two years or so, more than 100 hair salons added are Vietnamese head spas. For Cheng’s establishment alone, seven branches were opened in just four years. They employ more than 200 Vietnamese people, many of them single mothers divorced from their Taiwanese ex-spouse.
Cheng Chiu-huai
Vietnamese head spa owner
I am also a marriage migrant, and a new immigrant. I hope I can take care of my compatriots.
Cheng’s business also shows how immigrants can find their niche and succeed in Taiwan.
Chen Hui-fen
National Taipei University of Education
In the earlier days, new immigrants usually open restaurants when starting a business. But we can see how with head spas or Muay Thai, they’re actually bringing a whole new skillset with their business ventures. I believe this helps improve the social standing and image of new immigrants in Taiwan.
Nuel, another Muay Thai coach, shares his life with friends and family back in Thailand through livestreams.
Kelly Tang
Muay Thai gym owner
They have uprooted their lives to come here. They send two-thirds of their salary to their wives and children in Thailand. They usually keep less than NT$10,000 for themselves, so they are really frugal.
Tang says being with the Thai coaches day in and day out has completely removed any prejudice she might have held against Southeast Asian migrants.
Kelly Tang
Muay Thai gym owner
This group of Thai people are really responsible and disciplined. So I’m so grateful that they’re willing to come here and be so far away from their homes. So I try to treat them as well as I’m able to.
Lin Jing-cheng
Muay Thai boxer
As long as you treat them well, they reciprocate manifold. They’ll really go the distance. They will feel that we too are really passionate about Muay Thai. They tell me that they’re really happy and willing to impart their skills.
Thum
Muay Thai coach
When Lin went to Thailand to compete, I was so happy that he won. I took him there twice and he also won twice. I’m really happy.
Thanks to these Thai coaches in Taiwan, more and more people have taken up Muay Thai. This helps raise the visibility of the sport and perhaps make it an Olympic sport someday.
Meanwhile, Cheng and her husband are also planning on opening new branches in Vietnam, and hope to expand to other countries too.
Chen Hui-fen
National Taipei University of Education
Taiwan is a really diverse society that can nurture lots of innovative ideas. Because we’re accepting of new things, innovations that are successfully trialed in Taiwan can then have a greater chance of success in the rest of the world. I think all this is great.
Immigrants are bringing their skills and business ideas to Taiwan, and Taiwan in turn helps their innovations take root and flourish, opening up new possibilities in cultural exchanges between Taiwan and the world.
For more Taiwan news, tune in:
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2025-09-26
