By Jason Lim
On July 8, only eight days after arriving in Korea, a 20-year old Vietnamese woman was murdered by her 47-year-old Korean husband who told the investigators that voices told him to kill his new bride. By all accounts, no one involved in this tragically short-lived marriage ― from the marriage broker to the bride’s family ― knew that the husband had a history of mental illness.
The post-tragedy media spotlight has attracted the usual suspects. Bureaucrats, eager to avoid charges of neglect from an angry public, have hurriedly announced a series of measures ``to prevent a marriage that is undesirable or inappropriate.” The police, also seeking to avoid blame, have announced a crackdown on the evil marriage brokers largely seen most responsible for this tragedy. Politicians, not to be outdone by either the police or bureaucrats, have outraced each to announce their intent to become defenders of the helpless women from Southeast Asia who marry Korean men.
This is too little too late for Thach Thi Hoang Ngoc, the murdered woman. This wasn’t the first time that Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian brides encountered a horrible fate at the hands of their Korean husbands. Stories are abound of Vietnamese women being raped, beaten, and ostracized by Korean husbands who leverage their knowledge of the language and system to abuse their largely helpless foreign wives with impunity.
However, this case has received the most publicity because of the especially heinous nature of the tragic narrative, which goes something like this: a loving, attractive Vietnamese girl from a poor, rural family is tricked by unethical marriage brokers into marrying a much older Korean husband who murdered her in a bout of a mental episode only a week after she arrived in Korea to begin her new, hope-filled life.
In fact, this story has the makings of a classic drama, with a sympathetic and attractive protagonist in the murdered bride, a faceless and unrepentant villain in the marriage broker, and a hapless husband who cuts a Frankenstein-like figure, pathetic but monstrous.
Only if it were that simple. I had also bought into the mainstream narrative hook, line, and sinker until I read the father of the slain bride quoted as, ``There was no reason for a parent to oppose their daughter’s desire to marry a Korean man … we were unlucky. Daughters of other families and friends who married Korean men have had no problems.”
Although the father was saying this in the context of asking the Korean public to make sure that other Vietnamese women in Korea don’t suffer a similar fate as his daughter, I was struck by his words that he, as a parent, would have had no reason to oppose the marriage of his 20-year-old daughter to a Korean man of nearly his father’s age whom she has probably met only briefly a day ago and was chosen from among other equally young candidates, if we are to believe stories of how these marriages happen. His words imply that he considers his daughter’s murder as bad luck (apparently for having married a mentally ill husband) that fatally marred a largely sound decision.
While not making light of a parent’s grief over the horrible loss of a child, what am I to think about the father’s words? How am I to understand the thinking process that considers marrying a totally stranger from a different country with a different language to be normal, if not desired?
Further, what am I to think about the fact that this 20-year-old woman apparently chose to marry a Korean man who, albeit much older, would take her to Korea and provide her with a stable home and, more importantly, an escape from her poverty-stricken and suffocating future? Was she just unlucky and choose wrong?
And what about the Korean husbands, the other side of this equation? What’s their story? Are they all either pathetic losers or twisted perverts, seemingly the only two roles that we can fit them in? Are they really as one-dimensional as they are made out to be? Even more importantly, do I have the right to pass judgment on something that I have no hope of understanding, especially since I instinctively find it alien and abhorrent?
I don’t have the answers to these questions. However, what I suddenly realized is that the real dynamics behind this tragedy is much more complex and nuanced than the simple narrative of right and wrong that the media is selling and we are buying.
And it’s bound to get even more complex and numerous since international marriages, the large majority of which are between rural Korean men and foreign women largely from China and Vietnam, have doubled from about 15,000 to over 33,000 in eight years. You don’t have to be a fortuneteller to see that other tragedies will inevitably follow.
Cracking down on marriage brokers, even if hastily enacted, could conceivably prevent a similar misfortune from happening. But laws will never be enough, especially when they are based on a simplistic and dramatic interpretation of reality. Ultimately, perhaps the best tribute we can pay to the memory of Thach Thi Hoang Ngoc would be to begin understanding international marriages in their full, messy human complexity that cannot be written off with simple dramatic devices. May she rest in peace.
Jason Lim is a non-resident fellow at The Peace Foundation, a non-partisan think-tank researching policy options for peace on the Korean peninsula. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com. You can also follow him on Facebook.
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