NEW TAIPEI, Taiwan – Ms Win Win has been glued to social media for the past day, trying to work out whether her family in Myanmar’s Mandalay survived March 28’s powerful earthquake, distracting herself at the Taiwan restaurant where she works by serving samosas and other snacks.
“We spoke last night but then nothing today. I can’t get through. I’m so scared for them,” Ms Win Win, one of Taiwan’s estimated 50,000 Sino-Burmese, told Reuters on March 29 at the eatery in Little Myanmar in New Taipei, neighbouring the capital, Taipei.
Myanmar’s second-largest city, Mandalay, which lies close to the epicentre of the 7.7-magnitude quake, has a large ethnic Chinese population, many of whom have ties to Taiwan, whose government has offered to send rescue teams.
Taiwan’s foreign ministry says it has yet to receive a response to that offer.
Ms Yee Yu Nai, sitting at a snack store in Little Myanmar, scrolled through her phone looking for the latest news from Mandalay, where her sister lives.
“I know their house is OK as it was newly built, but the street is very badly damaged,” she said.
Taiwan’s Myanmar community traces its history back to the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, when many of the defeated Republic of China soldiers fled into what was then called Burma before eventually being evacuated to Taiwan.
Others have come more recently, fleeing repression and anti-Chinese sentiment.
Ethnic Chinese in Myanmar have historically faced discrimination, especially under the rule of General Ne Win, who seized power in 1962.
He barred ethnic Chinese and other foreigners from owning land, banned Chinese-language education and stoked anti-Chinese violence. Bloody anti-Chinese riots erupted in 1967.
Another resident of Taiwan’s Little Myanmar, who asked to be identified by her family name of Huang to avoid repercussions for her relatives still in the country, said the precarious state of civil strife-hit Myanmar was her biggest concern.
“I just don’t think anyone is coming to save them,” she said of her relatives still in Mandalay. REUTERS
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