KoreaToday Cross-border marriage tests ties with S-E Asia

By Kang Hyun-kyung

Staff reporter

The recent murder case involving a 20-year-old Vietnamese bride is a revealing example of how dangerous a cross-border marriage can be; where a man and a woman decide to tie the knot without knowing much about each other.

Not to mention the potential risk at the personal level, Professor Jacquelline Aquino Siapno of Seoul National University pointed out that transnational marriages could have a dysfunctional effect on bilateral relations between the countries that send and receive brides.

“Cross-border marriage could become a serious thorn in bilateral relations between Southeast Asian countries and Korea,” Siapno told The Korea Times last week.

Her remarks are in response to the death of Thach Thi Hoang Ngoc, a Vietnamese bride who was brutally murdered by her Korean husband in the port city of Busan just eight days after the couple wed. The tragic accident was also part of the agenda during the Korea-Vietnam ministerial meeting held in Vietnam.

During the talk, Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan expressed his deepest regret over the tragedy, explaining to his Vietnamese counterpart Pham Gia Khiem that South Korea was taking the case very seriously.

Yu added that a separate inter-ministerial meeting was held to address the murder during a Cabinet meeting to discuss counter-measures to prevent such a thing from recurring.

His apology on behalf of the government was accepted as the Vietnamese foreign minister was quoted as responding that his government was grateful for the South Korean government’s sincere effort over the incident.

Before returning to Korea, the foreign minister invited the Vietnamese ambassador to his office in the foreign ministry in Seoul to further express sincere condolences over the tragic loss facing the young Vietnamese bride and her family.

As transnational marriages have created social problems such as sex trafficking and domestic violence, some Southeast Asian governments, including Cambodia and Vietnam, have imposed restrictions to protect their nationals.

In March, the Cambodian government imposed a provisional ban on transnational marriages to Korean nationals to prevent a sex trade of Cambodian women.

In Cambodia, Korean males account for approximately 60 percent of cross-border marriages there. Almost all of them meet their Cambodian brides through international matchmakers.

Since 2007, Vietnam has strengthened regulations over illegal and falsely brokered marriages to protect Vietnamese women.

“Exotic goods”

When asked about the underlying causes of the tragedy, Rep. Han Sun-kyo of the Grand National Party (GNP) blamed the misguided belief of viewing foreign brides as “exotic goods” that can be purchased.

“Combating the negative fallout of international marriage will require policymakers to tackle this deadly inaccurate notion held by some Korean males,” Han told The Korea Times last week.

The lawmaker has campaigned to defend the human rights of migrant workers and Southeast Asian women who cross the border to marry Korean men.

According to the Ministry of Justice, approximately 140,000 women mostly from China, Vietnam and the Philippines settle in Korea after entering an interracial marriage.

These women met their husbands, who were on a marriage tour in their home country, through arranged dates by international matchmakers.

Some of these bachelors, usually older men, saw 100 or more candidates before deciding on one during the short trip.

International marriage migration happens in other countries, as well.

According to anthropologist Kathryn Robinson, Australian men are “importing” Southeast Asian brides to rural Australia.

Working-class Vietnamese men in the United States marry upper-class

Vietnamese women in Vietnam.

In the United States, Slavic and Filipino women migrated to marry American men. Research papers show that until the early 1980s, Asian women, particularly from the Philippines, dominated trans-border marriage. By the 1990s, women from the former Soviet Union had joined the international marriage market.

Some of them found their spouse through so-called “mail-order brides” where girls list themselves in catalogues and wait to be picked by men for marriage.

Marriage tour

A Vietnamese bride, who asked The Korea Times to call her by her Korean name Won Ga-hee, met her husband in Vietnam eight years ago through an arranged date set up by international matchmaking company.

Asked if she was scared about the possible negative consequences of marrying a man of a different nationality whom she hardly knew, Won said she “never” had such a feeling.

“Initially, my parents didn’t approve of my decision to enter into a transnational marriage. But they knew that their hands were tied as the decision was mine to be made,” she told The Korea Times.

“Before meeting with my husband, I was told many times about broken families after Vietnamese women married South Korean men. I also knew that many Vietnamese wives suffered from domestic violence and other awful experiences. But such information did not discourage me from marrying a South Korean man.”

Won said she was determined to help her parents who live in poverty by sending financial support after marrying a South Korean man.

However, her life after marriage has not gone the way she intended.

For the first five years of marriage, Won lived together with her parents-in-law in Geomdan, Incheon.

She confessed that it was challenging for her to maintain a caring relationship with her in-laws.

Won didn’t elaborate on the details of the nature of her relationship with her parents-in-law, except by simply saying she was “hurt.”

Sending money back to parents in Vietnam remained a mission unfulfilled, as well.

“Nevertheless, I think I was luckier than the other foreign brides living near my place,” she said.

Won, who offers free counseling and interpretation services to Vietnamese brides as a volunteer, witnessed many migrant wives who had to endure domestic violence.

“The language barrier, culture shock and difficulty in developing good interpersonal skills with the new in-laws are major challenges facing women who migrate to Korea for marriage,” she said.

Professor Siapno said some women migrate in the hope that the situation in the husband’s country might be more comfortable and promising than in their own.

“Possibly, they are putting too much trust and faith in the husband’s capacity to help them adapt to the new country,” she said.

Gender imbalance

Korean men who look for brides overseas are mostly in their 40s or older and engaged in farm work or in the manufacturing sector as a laborer or other precarious types of jobs.

Education, income levels and job stability are the most cited factors driving these males to remain unmarried or divorced at their age.

The competitive domestic marriage market prompts them to look beyond national borders and search for soul mates in foreign countries, mostly Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Cambodia.

The bride shortage-driven international marriages here have increased since the 1990s.

Lee Sang-joo, director of the center for migrant women for international marriage, told The Korea Times that the average age difference between the Korean husband and Southeast Asian nation bride is about 20 years.

“Men are usually in their forties, while women are in their early twenties,” he said.

Meanwhile, groom shortages, which population expert Daniel Goodkind called a “double marriage squeeze,” prompted Vietnam to become a sending country.

According to Goodkind, “young women in Vietnam during the 1970s and 1980s faced a severe deficit of male partners due to population growth, war and excess male migration.”

“At the other end of the Vietnamese diaspora, overseas Vietnamese men during the 1980s and 1990s have faced an even greater shortage of Vietnamese women,” he said in his article, entitled “The Vietnamese Double Marriage Squeeze” published in 1997.