Taking a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017), the study explores the controversies surrounding the Vietnamese female character Ruan Yuei Jiao, created by a Taiwanese male YouTuber. Ruan Yuei Jiao is a fictional character, with a marriage immigrant background. Ruan Yueijiao has a persona different from the stereotypical image of Vietnamese female spouses. Not conforming to traditional gender roles, at home, Ruan Yueijiao orders her mother-in-law to do the household chores while she herself is lazy and lacks culinary skills.

This study firstly investigates Ruan Yuei Jiao's performances on social media, studying how the mediatized Vietnamese-accented Mandarin is utilized to portray the persona of a lazy, untraditional Vietnamese immigrant woman. Then, the paper delves into a protest initiated by Vietnamese communities against Ruan Yuei Jiao's portrayal in a Carrefour TV advertisement. Through thematic analyses of comments by Taiwanese Facebook users on the protest, this paper identifies a prevalent theme of the "Vietnamese inferiority complex", where Taiwanese netizens attack Vietnamese immigrants for being self-abased and unconfident in their own accent(s), denying any accusation of Taiwanese content producers as racist. Another prominent theme engages with a “post-racial” discourse, emphasizing the multicultural nature of Taiwanese society, and rejecting claims of racism against Vietnamese people by Taiwanese. Based on these themes, Taiwanese netizens instead accuse the Vietnamese protestors of heightening racial tensions between Vietnamese and Taiwanese people.

The thematic analyses of this research underscore the power dynamics between Taiwanese people and Vietnamese immigrants in shaping the enregisterment of the Vietnamese spouse accent. Non-Vietnamese individuals in Taiwan wield significant influence over the portrayal and interpretation of the Vietnamese accent. This paper argues that the re-interpretation of the protest among Vietnamese immigrants as racism is itself an act of raciolinguistic listening (Pak, 2022) that needs to be problematized.