Vietnam - When money ruins dreams of marital happiness

What do we seek in marriage? Happiness or money?

For most women elsewhere in the world, it’s probably the former. But most Vietnamese girls who agree to cross the border to live with their South Korean husbands, leaving behind their family and friends and all that give them their identity, set their heart on the latter -- money.

However, the money is not meant to spend on themselves but to help their parents back home pay off debt, build a decent brick house or help their younger brothers and sisters go to school. To these ends, many Vietnamese girls have agreed to throw in their lots with men from China, Taiwan, and South Korea after a brief one-time meeting.

No, it is not love at first sight. Rather, it is the triumph of hope or misplaced expectation over experience and knowledge.

The men they have agreed to share their life and their bed with are mostly past their marriageable age, divorced, low-income earners, or suffer physical or mental disabilities that render them ineligible to local girls. With the domestic market for marriage becoming off-limits to them, Korean men have no choice but turn to poor girls in less developed countries, like Vietnam, and engage in what is nothing other than a form of “wife buying.”

After a brief honeymoon period, most Vietnamese brides quickly realize what they have let themselves in for. Mistreated and considered as mere domestic servants around the house or sexual objects to satisfy their husbands’ need in the bedroom, they soon file for divorce or in some cases run away from the what is even worse than their worst nightmare.

Driven by the call of filial duty

Facing a host of problems, such as cultural differences and a linguistic barrier, in a Confucian-dominated country that frowns upon biracial marriage, Vietnamese brides still have to deal with the demands for money from their parents back home.

Viet brides often receive phone calls from their parents and even older brothers and sisters in Vietnam to ask for their financial help. And many women have risked their marital happiness by secretly taking a job without their husbands’ and in-laws’ knowledge and then hiding money they earned to send home.

As those nagging phone calls keep coming on a fairly regular basis, few Korean husbands or his family feel they could trust their daughters-in-law enough to hand over the family purse string to them. Desperate to seek money to send home, some Vietnamese secretly take on a manual job outside the house against the will of their husbands.

At Busan Fish Port, many Vietnamese wives are seen sorting out the fish or hired to apply baits to the hooks for local fishermen. They sit in groups and assiduously work under the cold weather in an open tent with the freezing winds blowing freely around them.

Lam Thi Hue is one of them.

“I asked my husband for his permission to work here but he refused. So when he is out for daily work, I come here to work for a couple of hours a day and return home before him to prepare meals for him,” Hue said.

“I earn a sum equivalent to 200,000 Vietnam dongs (US$9) a day and save it to send home every month to help my sisters stay in school,” she added.

But truth will out eventually. The husband knew about his wife’s job and they bickered with each other over it. She refused to obey his order to quit the job and they separated and later divorced.

“How can I stop working when my purpose in marrying a South Korean man is to send money home to my sisters? I willingly sacrificed my life and happiness to make sure my sisters have a better education and to escape poverty,” Lan confides to Tuoi Tre journalist.

Hue is one of many Vietnamese wives in South Korea who abandon their marriage after conflicts with their husbands and then strive to make their own living in Korea to help their family in Vietnam.

Ngo Thi Bich Thom of Tay Ninh Province, who married a Korean man in 2003 just two days after her 18th birthday, told Tuoi Tre, “All my salary is kept by my mother in law. I have to ask her for each penny I need to buy my daily necessities.

“Besides, my family from Vietnam calls me regularly to ask for money. My husband’s family doesn’t understand my dilemma,” Thom said honestly.

After getting divorced from her husband and leaving her 6-year child with him, Thom came to Busan to find work with other Vietnamese women stuck in a similar conundrum.

“The naïve Thom my family knew back then in Vietnam died long ago. It gave me much pain just to think about my past. I hope that my parents and family at home understand the hardships I’ve been through and stop pushing me into a dead-end street,” Thom said, sobbing.

She said she is happy to work late for her employer and does not want to hang a picture of her child in her rented room because she cannot cope with the emptiness and loneliness of her life alone in her room.

Marriage or human trafficking?

For Korean men and their families, marriage with Vietnamese girls is the choice of last resort -- seeking nothing but a female body to meet the husband’s sexual desire and a woman’s uterus to fulfill the families’ wish of having a child.

It is merely a business transaction, based on a cold calculation of cost-and-benefits, not on tender feelings of love or romance.

Showing no respect towards the foreign wives and daughters-in-law, the family gangs up on her, physically and mentally.

Deprived of the legitimate right have a job and social relations, they are reduced to slave-like status. Rebelling against the brutal dehumanizing conditions, many of them decide to leave the husband’s family by asking for a divorce or simply running way.

Yet, once out on the street, without a social support network of family or friends and little legal assistance from the host country, many Vietnamese women in the cities Incheon and Ansan end up prostituting themselves to earn their living after divorce.

TUOI TRE

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