For years, Chan Kuo-ting has been carrying a painful burden. From not long after he was born to the time when he was in fourth grade, he was under the care of an Indonesian woman called E-dam. She became the primary mother figure in his life, until one day, she disappeared.
Chan is Taiwanese, but of ethnic Chinese Indonesian descent. His grandmother back in Indonesia arranged for E-dam to go to Taiwan to work for her family there as a nanny. Over the next ten years, E-dam and Chan became as close as family.
Then, one day when Chan was in fourth grade, a teacher told him that E-dam had returned to Indonesia. It seems that some fellow migrant workers came to the mistaken conclusion that E-dam wasn’t being paid for their services. They filed a report with the authorities, and though this report had no basis in truth, E-dam was forced to return home.
Chan Kuo-ting is now 27, but the sudden departure of his mother figure during his childhood has never stopped haunting him. Now, he has set out to reconnect with E-dam, enlisting the help of Taiwanese and Indonesian media outlets. He has been encouraged by a recent report about a similar story of reconnection between a young Taiwanese woman and her former Indonesian caregiver. Chan is now set to become a father, and hopes for a happy reunion with the woman who helped raise him soon.