Affective Entanglements at the Ends of the Market: The Intersection of Poetry and Carework for Migrant Worker Women in Taiwan

As we chatted back and forth on Facebook Messenger about her experience as a caretaker in Taiwan, Erin Cipta, whose work I had recently read in an anthology of migrant worker writing, told me: My experience working in Taiwan is good.My employer is very kind, they full fill my right (salary and my basic need), appreciate my religion, I got a lot of bonuses, and they treat me as family.Just if I have to work again in Taiwan, I am willing to work in the same house.Until now, 7 years [ago] I left Taiwan we are still get contact.Me and Ama regularly sending messages each other, greetings each other in every occasion.Recently, we greet for mid autumn festival last Saturday Amagive me a picture of mooncake.(Cipta 2023) While many women certainly do not have a good experience as in-home caretakers, being "treated like family" or an intimacy with the person or people they care for that gives rise to family-like feelings appears frequently in poetry written by migrant worker women.Umirah, another writer I spoke to over Facebook Messenger in 2023 told me: "I got a job as a caretaker for an elderly person.and that's according to the job I got.but indeed the boss treats me like their own family.I too, take care of her just like I take care of my grandmother.working in Taiwan as a caretaker, made me a person who is more patient and cares more about others" (Ramata 2023). 1 Both of these women speak to the complexity of the careworker position.It is a job, and it is an intimate relationship rife with emotional bonds that shift, stretch, blossom, and warp around proximity and distance as these women care physically for members of Taiwanese families in order to care financially for their own family back home.