Taiwan’s Prosperity Excludes Aborigines : Culture: The ‘mountain people’ are ethnically different from the Chinese majority. They are forced to take dangerous and poorly paid jobs in the cities.

Glas started his nomadic city life 10 years ago. His 10-year-old son has changed schools six times in the last three years.

Glas is one of Taiwan’s aborigines, known as “mountain people.” Ethnically different from the island’s Chinese majority, they have faced discrimination for decades and for the most part have been kept from joining the economic revolution that has made most of Taiwan’s 20 million people wealthy.

With no jobs available in their traditional mountain homes, aborigines are forced to take dangerous and poorly paid construction work in the cities. Aborigine women turn to factory work or prostitution, social workers and officials said.

The only friends Glas has in Taipei, Taiwan’s bustling capital, are other aborigines.

He and his family live in a crude hut next to the building site where he works. They cannot afford the expensive rent for a real apartment.

When this job ends and he finds a new one, the family will move again.

“There is nothing I can do,” Glas said. “Maybe I’ll settle my family down in one place some day, but it is beyond my ability now.”

There are about 337,000 aborigines belonging to nine tribes. They live mostly in eastern and southern Taiwan.

Some scholars say the ethnic minority originated from Polynesian islanders in the Pacific. Others say their language shows that they are linked to people in Malaysia and Indonesia.

All agree that aborigines inhabited Taiwan long before the first large influx of Chinese landed on the island about 400 years ago.

Their folk arts, such as carving and painting, and their languages, dance and songs are dying now that they have been forced to move to the cities.

“Economic reasons, better education and living convenience attract aborigines to cities,” said Hsu Mu-Tsu, an associate professor at the Institute of Ethnology of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica.

But cultural and language differences make communication with city people difficult, and the aborigines face discrimination in education, jobs and marriage.

“Aborigine children in schools are discriminated against by city children because they can’t catch up with the standard of the class,” said Shen Tsai-Fa, an official at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs at the Taipei city government.

“The aborigines tend to stick together in a group and don’t mix with city people, so their knowledge of opportunities in the outside world is very small,” he added. “Very few of them know that the government can give them help.”

Despite the difficulties of city life, few aborigines believe that they can leave.

“Go back? I’ll starve in the mountains,” said Gazao, a 25-year-old aborigine who came to Taipei in 1989.

If they do go back to their villages, they tell stories of easy money in the city.

“Most of my students are so eager to leave school and go to Taipei. They heard too much about how fancy the city is,” said Liu Hsin-Li, a teacher at a high school where most students are aborigines.