In September of 2021 I was recovering from an injury and was spending a lot of time at home in the midst of the pandemic. I was still taking Chinese classes via video calls but I was starting to look for ways to become more fluent and also wanted to connect with people.
I signed up for a language app and started connecting with people in Taiwan. It started with text messages in English and Chinese. Then, I started having phone calls with several of these new friends. One of them in particular has now become my best friend. After meeting on this app we practiced English and Mandarin every day – sometimes up to three hours. I was becoming familiar with the time zone difference and talked to friends either early in the morning or after work in the evening. It gave me something to look forward to every day. It brightened my days and I felt like I was getting closer to Taiwan.
After living in the USA for 22 years I can count the number of friends I have on the finger of one hand. I was starting to feel like I had more friends in Taiwan than here.
Eventually, the idea got into my head that I had to go and work there for a few months. I became obsessed with this thought and spent all my free time thinking about it and finding ways to make it happen.
There were two challenges. Firstly, Taiwan was not open to foreigners. Due to the pandemic, Taiwan was not allowing tourisms, so entering on a tourist visa was out of question. The second challenge was to convince my employer to let me work from Taiwan for a few months.
Fortunately I remembered hearing about the Taiwan Gold Card, a very special card that serves as a visa, a work permit, and resident permit. It also gives you access to national healthcare after six months of living in Taiwan.
If I got a Gold Card I would basically be a Taiwan resident and be able to enter and leave Taiwan as I please for the next three years – even during the pandemic. This new program from the Taiwanese government was created to attract foreign talent to the island. This means that qualifying is not easy.
After watching many YouTube videos about the Taiwan Gold Card, understanding how to qualify, and gathering all the needed paperwork, I applied on December 5th of 2021 (or December 6th in the Taiwan time zone). I also started discussing working in Taiwan with my boss. He said if we found a project in Asia that could justify this trip, I would be able to go. I scrambled to find internal projects with our Beijing team and also built a prototype of a Chinese Line chatbot using our software.
I then spent my Christmas vacation preparing for the next steps as well as calling my new Taiwanese friends every day to improve my Chinese and help them practice English. There was a bit of back and forth with the Gold Card office. One tricky part was passport verification: in normal times, I would go to a TECO office (Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office) to let them check my passport before final approval. Unfortunately, due to pandemic, the San Francisco TECO was closed. They would only be able to verify my passport if I had an urgent reason to go to Taiwan.
I got over that hurdle by explaining the nature of the project I was going to work on in Taiwan. Then they asked me to send a notarized copy of my passport, and passport verification was completed within a couple of weeks.
I then received an email congratulating me on being approved:
Congratulations! Your application submission for “Employment Gold Card” on 2021/12/06 has been officially approved. This e-mail is to notify you that your application is now entering the certificate stage.
Now the second phase was to obtain approval from my boss. Eventually, he found a project with our Beijing team that would suit me. He told me I would be able to go in March for three months, but no longer than three months. I knew half a month would have to be spent in quarantine, so that would allow me to really experience Taiwan for two and a half months. I would also be able to meet some of my new Taiwanese friends.
I am so excited and feel that so much adventure is ahead. I am so grateful that Taiwan granted me this Gold Card. It is quite a privilege to obtain one.