[VIDEO] Taiwanese in Hubei 'losing hope'
A Taiwanese boy suffering from hemophilia and his mother were evacuated from China's Hubei Province, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak, and returned to Taiwan this week. It’s still not clear, however, when the approximately 1,000 other Taiwanese nationals still stuck in the province under lockdown, will be able to return home.
Worried that they might try to get on flights on their own, Taiwan’s government has submitted their names to airlines to ban them from getting on flights.
The government says this measure is aimed at preventing them from infecting others or getting infected. It says they can only get on chartered flights.
But there is no word on when chartered flights will be arranged.
The Taiwanese and Chinese governments are still at a stalemate, disagreeing on how the evacuations should proceed after Taiwan disapproved of the way the first evacuation flight was conducted by China and refused to allow further evacuations until the two sides can agree on how they should be carried out. Both sides blame each other.
One mother, Alice, is a mainland Chinese spouse who has lived in Taiwan for 14 years. She and her two children, ages 12 and 14, traveled to Huangshi City in Hubei province to visit her parents for lunar New Year.
She describes what it’s like to not know when she can come back to Taiwan to run her beauty salon business, when her children can go back to school, and how she will manage to pay the rent for her salon and other bills, without being able to earn income.
She recorded this video two weeks ago. Since then there have been some good news. This week, the city she’s in, which has a population of 2.7 million people, had its first day of no confirmed cases, she says. And her housing community has not had any confirmed cases for half a month. Starting last week they were allowed to go out to the housing compound’s yard to buy food, but they are still not allowed to leave.
With schools reopening in Taiwan this week, her children’s teachers have been sending them their lessons and homework by text message on the phone every day. While they try to maintain their studies as best they can, Alice can only call the city’s Taiwan Affairs Office, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council and the Straits Exchange Foundation frequently, to urge them to let she and her children come home.
