ABSTRACT
Migration is certainly an important theme in mainland Chinese documentary films as well, and famous examples range from Wu Wenguang's Bumming in Beijing to Jia Zhangke's Dong. But while the largest migration flow in contemporary mainland China that so engages the interest of China's documentary filmmakers is the migration of people from the rural to urban areas for survival, as Lu Xinyu remarks, in the contemporary Taiwanese context, migration is basically a transnational phenomenon. The major outflow is the migration of Taiwanese business people to mainland China, while the inflow is the migration of contracted migrant workers and immigrant wives from Southeast Asian countries, such as Vietnam and Indonesia. My Imported Wife shows the operation of the cosmopolitanism of the underprivileged and the act of documentary making as an exercise of hospitality. Tsai Tsung-lung sheds interesting light on what may be called 'the cosmopolitanism of the underprivileged'.
