The Chinese language lends itself to inventive new terms for social phenomena. 'Card slaves', or kanu, are people who have got into trouble with their credit cards - spending beyond their means and taking out high-interest cash advances to juggle their many card accounts.
Many card slaves are part of the so-called 'strawberry generation' - young people born in the 1980s who are said to lack the work ethic of older generations of Taiwanese. Others have fallen on hard times but had access to easy credit.
A-Lian is a 43-year-old single mother from the south. She got sick, lost her job and feared she would lose her daughter if she slipped into poverty. So A-Lian applied for many credit cards and took out cash advances as her savings dwindled, then eventually disappeared. She made things worse by buying things on Taiwan's many TV shopping channels, and eventually ended up almost NT$3 million ($716,000) in debt.
Then collection agencies began to harass her. Such firms were illegal until recently, because officials feared that gangsters would open collection agencies using legal fronts. They were right, but banks faced with spiralling consumer debt began using them enthusiastically.
Taiwan effectively has no personal bankruptcy laws, so A-Lian left her daughter with relatives and fled to the relative anonymity of Taipei. There, she has found work in Taipei's hospitals for terminally ill patients.
The hours are brutal - she is on call 18 hours a day for weeks at a time, knowing illegal immigrants from the mainland and Vietnam will take her job if she complains. Still, she has managed to cancel out nearly one-third of her debt over the past two years.