Tips for searching for a job in Taipei for Filipinos married to Taiwanese Spouses (JFRV)

I am a 22-year old male Filipino with a taiwanese Fiancee. My fiancee’s mother has agreed to let her daughter marry me and live in taipei together with them with the condition that I have to make sure that i can get a job in taipei first. I am currently a second year medical student and i am also a registered medical technologist. What jobs could i possibly in taipei with these credentials ? Please help :frowning:

IMHO, it would be a lot easier to get the job after you both have officially married and received your JFRV. And as for these conditions, who is she to decide these conditions? Sounds BS to me that my mother-in-law will layout rules and regulations regarding my marriage. I would definitely re-consider tying bonds with a woman who can’t defend you and is not trying to choose you over her mom especially with conditions like the aforementioned.

Regarding your question, like I said before, with a JFRV in hand, the process of job finding would be simpler and straightforward since that will eliminate the need of a work-permit. Good luck

Thank you for your advise. My fiancee tried to defend me though and i completely understand her mother since in their tradition, it’s supposed to be the girl who moves in with the guys family. but yeah, i would also want to find a job. Thanks for your input! :slight_smile:

If you are a medical student then you are simply not in a position to get a job. The MiL’s request is completely unreasonable.

Although asking permission for marriage is a polite formality, there is no legal requirement to get parental permission. If you and your gf want to get married, then just get married. It may well be, of course, that your gf will listen to her mother, in which case she’s clearly not ready for marriage anyway.

You might want to just try explaining to the MiL that, as a student, with no work permit, getting a job would be either illegal or inadvisable, and that job-hunting will be a whole lot simpler once you’ve (a) graduated and (b) got married. If she doesn’t get it, then you’ll have to just tell her politely that you’ll be getting married anyway. Such is life.

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I’m not familiar with the jurisprudence of filial piety (which is still a thing btw), but she does need permission if she hasn’t reached the age of majority, which is 20 (Civil Code Art. 12 and 981).

@Derpbag Try to make sure your fiancée’s mother understands how the law works and how bad the job market is. If she only hears it from you, she may think you’re just making excuses.

If you are a medical student just finish your medical studies first otherwise you will regret it.

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It’s 20, is it? I thought it used to be 18 or under, but you can’t get married at <18 these days anyway.

I just assumed they were both of an age where marriage wouldn’t be (unusually) foolhardy.

If she is only 19 or 20, that in itself would be a good reason to wait for a few years. :wink:

Thank you for your replies! Actually my fiancee’s age is 27 and i’m still 23 so yeah, no problems about getting married. I just don’t want to have bad emotions between me and her family. How do should i go about finding a job in taiwan anyway? i am supposed to visit taiwan for 2 weeks this december and by that time i already want to go on job hunting since we plan to get married by january and hopefully migrate to taiwan on april.

Try to contact https://www.facebook.com/lai.ninigun
I understood she is helping Filipinos find work
Good luck

This topic is a bit on the nose for me, a Filipino married to a Taiwanese and living and working in Taipei. Interestingly, I have lived in Taipei* longer than @Derpbag has lived in the Philippines. (* OK, this includes 5 years on the Mainland)

However, I have no special Pinoy job hunting secrets for you. Most of the Filipino spouses I know are housewives and housekeepers - neither of which are roles you qualify for. Well, you qualify as a househusband but that would disqualify you in your future mother-in-law’s mind.

Many of the Filipino-Chinese who I know here are in the service industries - driving taxis, working the kitchens in restaurants, serving our country or serving the church, or practicing medicine. There are many exceptions, and by being exceptional, they defy general advice. We landed or built our unique situations despite not being able to use typical job-hunting channels.

As many here have already advised, I recommend you finish med school, and pass the medical board. Off the top of my head I can easily think of 5 Filipino doctors I have come to know in just the past 5 years since I moved back to Taipei from Shanghai, and I am sure if I made an effort to look, I will find many more. So, I think you are in the right field, if you are looking for a white collar job here. They do all speak Chinese, so that’s another thing you will have to work on while you are contemplating how best to come over.

As far as your mother-in-law is concerned, let me offer you a perspective that I imagine is probably true of any parent who loves their kid: until you can demonstrate some capacity to take care of the daughter’s livelihood and convince her mother that a path to prosperity can be reasonably expected, you are little more than an extra mouth to feed / what-did-my-daughter-drag-in-from-the-rain-this-time moocher. Nothing personal (and I’m someone whose own father wanted me to settle down with a nice Filipina, but since high school I only happened to date Koreans and Chinese).

So, if you are going to ditch medical school to come here, there better be something really good to land on in Taiwan. Let’s assume you speak passable Mandarin, you will be competing with an island full of under-employed bachelor degree holders for jobs at mulitnational companies. Government jobs are unlikely without a special connection or special circumstance. By Special Connection, I am not talking about blue-blooded rich family ties – I landed jobs in TAITRA and a Fortune 100 company by friends who were already working in or leaving those organizations. (And I know someone - ex-Forumosa moderator, no less, who landed a job as regional head of IT for a Fortune 500 company by striking up a conversation in the men’s room while he was taking a piss)

You might want to explore graduate programs here as a student. You won’t be able to work legally while you are student, but (assuming you can afford to stick it out here for 2 or 4 more years) hopefully you can intern and network your way into a situation where you have a stable (but still small) income. By then, you will probably qualify for an APRC without the need for a JFRV. Naturally, you will also have been studying Mandarin all this time. Also, I would hope you are not going to be staying with the girlfriend’s family, and instead just far away enough somewhere in Xinbei where MIL can see you bootstrapping yourself and living frugally while you lay your foundations.

By the year 2022, what would be the chances you and your girlfriend are still together? And finally planning the wedding banquet (with MIL’s blessings, I might add)? Probably not very good. But you, pare, are going to be a serious catch - not only Mandarin speaking and with an advanced degree, but you will have Taiwan and China as your area of operations. If you are smart, you will make real friends with some of the lifers at MECO and keep in touch with those who get transferred to the Mainland, not to mention your own social network that you build here. Since healthcare will always be a sector that requires some special background before you are taken seriously, you will be considered interesting for a range of sectors - from venture capital to hospital services to equipment makers.

Y’know? Maybe you should come here and ditch med school :wink:


I am no doctor, but I come from a family of radiologists (i.e., the docs who like to boss around medtechs), so let’s PM each other after I check in with some people in Taiwan and the Philippines about sepcific things you might want to explore.

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@GooseEgg Thank you for a very insightful advice. Like you, my father is also a radiologist and I am also into dating japanese and chinese girls ever since i lived in cebu. I just think that the life of a doctor is not actually for me. I mean i became a medical student since I was partly forced by my parents to be one since they have a diagnostic center already. Point is my girlfriend is offering me an escape from a career that i don’t want. You know how it is here in the philippines, if i can’t be a doctor, i would be living a life that would be somehow financially challenging and i wouldn’t want that to happen which lead me to considering the offer my girlfriend gave me. But yeah, maybe i will just take you up on your advice to explore graduate programs so i could qualify for better jobs. Oh, and yeah i know how to speak in mandarin but i cannot read nor write chinese characters. Thank you soo much for your offer of assistance. I look forward to that. :slight_smile:

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With some exceptions, as explained in a few other threads.

It’s 17 for males and 15 for females, with parental permission. (The age of consent for sex is another story.)

+3 “likes” for GooseEgg’s post. Some good advice there. If you take away nothing else from that post, remember this:

I was under the impression you were studying in Taiwan, not the Philippines, which puts a different slant on things. A Philippines medical degree will be of little value here, so if you want to leave, just leave. You could simply write off those two years, apply to a Taiwanese university, and start over in a subject that interests you.

Do not ever view a person as an “escape from a career that i don’t want”; certainly not by means of marriage. Likewise, do not allow other people to make life-changing decisions for you against your better judgement. These things are weak, unmanly, and immoral. Ultimately it will land you in deep shit. If you don’t like your (planned) career then leave it under your own steam. I understand that Filipino parents seem to view their children as tools, playthings, or extensions of their own ambitions, but do you not realise that you’re treating your gf much as your parents treat you? Make your own decisions. Dealing with “bad emotions” is part of life, and you’re going to have to start by dealing with those between you and your parents.

Solve your own problems, and then think about getting married. Right now, you’re not ready.

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This guy asks about jobs and now everyone giving him marrying and relationship advise? :roll_eyes:

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Correction: I’m not viewing her as something that gives me an escape. I said “My girlfriend is offering me an escape from a career that i do not want”. You have to get your comprehension skills checked. The offer is the escape, not the girlfriend herself. I love her and we have been together for quite sometime already and the distance is already bothering us now that we have already been together for a year and a half. Plane tickets are expensive and we usually take turns in visiting each other for 3-4 days every month, so yeah imagine how financially draining that would be for a Filipino medical student who is still depending on his parents. The original plan was to live here in the philippines under the assumption that i would become a doctor but yeah, i began to reconsider when she offered that i live with her. Furthermore, my parents did not view me as a tool, they just wanted the best for me since i am their eldest son and the best candidate for succeeding my father’s business. I understand a lot of people would advise me to go to school. What most people don’t know about medschool are the sacrifices you have to make and the toll it takes on your life. Point is, I wouldn’t be considering to move in with my girlfriend if being a doctor was easy. Thank you for your advice though. :slight_smile:

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I don’t think you’re being honest with yourself. What’s the difference? The fact remains that you see no escape from your situation except by using her as leverage. I can’t fault you for wanting to leave the Philippines, but don’t imagine she’s your passport out. There are other ways and means.

Again, I don’t see the difference. While deciding what’s best for you (and by happy coincidence, for them), they didn’t consider your feelings in the matter at all, did they?

This makes no sense. Of course being a doctor is hard - which is precisely why one should not waste one’s time on med school if one doesn’t have one’s heart in it.The only possible result is that you’ll reach the age of 40 or 50, screaming quietly to yourself inside, wondering where your life has gone and what happened to your dreams.

I’ve met so many people there who studied medicine or law or engineering because it’s a “good career”; they end up spending their lives faking it, sitting behind a desk taking payments for doing nothing. That sort of thing quickly erodes a human soul.

In my experience, the success of one’s career and one’s personal life both depend on very similar factors.

I am being honest with myself. We already planned to get married before the topic of me moving in her was brought up. Of course there are better ways and means, come to think of it, there are better countries than taiwan in which I can really be sure to work as a medical technologist, especially since i have relatives there and i have already passed the licensure exam for that country. If I was using my girlfriend as a way out, why would i be spending so much time, effort, and money just to move in a country in which the majority of my fellows are working as blue collar workers? I could use the same amount of time, effort, and money in another country where i could work in my field of expertise. I have brought this up with my fiancee but she does not want to even consider the possibility of moving to a far away country that would take more than 15 hours to travel to since she wants to be close with her family. I understand why you have the assumption that i am “using” her since i am from the philippines. Please do not generalize us filipinos. We may share the same culture but like other countries each of us have our own unique personalities and morals that we believe in. Marriage is a serious thing for me and i believe I should only bestow myself to one person for the rest of my life. I have thought this thoroughly and carefully, and honestly i do not need anybody’s advise on this. FYI, this post was intended to ask for advice on how to find a job, not on whether i should get married or not.

  • True, my parents can be hard on me and force me or manipulate me to make me do stuff without consideration for my feelings. Though i don’t believe that this kind of parents are only limited to Filipino families, i believe that this kind of “style” is common among any other nationality.
  • I Couldn’t agree more. Which is exactly why i already want to quit med school.

P.S. Please do not hastily judge and give advices about marriage to somebody whose story you don’t even know. The decision to marry someone is subjective, personal, and serious. I understand that my fellowmen usually do this method but it doesn’t mean everybody has the same reason right?
Hasty generalization is a reflection of racism and poor character.

Obviously. But you also share the same foibles that all other humans are subject to, such as the capacity to delude ourselves that we’re doing things for the right reasons. I’m actually describing a little bit of my own hindsight and regrets here. You’re 22, ffs. Your life could go anywhere. True, some people get married and stay married at 22. A much larger number do not. We all think we’re the exception to the statistics.

Of course. Nevertheless it is extremely prevalent in the Philippines (and in Taiwan for that matter).

Anyway, the generalisation is irrelevant here: the only thing that matters is your own personal situation.

Go for it. You’d be amazed how things pan out in ways that you don’t expect. The only thing that matters is that you take control: don’t let life just happen to you. GooseEgg did a far better job of describing this than I can.

Thank you soo much for this. I needed this. i admit, talking to you might have aggravated me a bit but it has brought more reflection on my part since i am afraid of going out of med school. Thank you finley!

My parents got married at 24 and they are still happy together which makes me believe that i could also do it with my girlfriend.

Hi gooseEgg i recently graduated medical school here in the philippines and just passed our board exam here. Is there a way i could find a job in taiwan?