“Vietnamese wed foreigners to help family”

The Turkish Daily News article, “Vietnamese wed foreigners to help family,” from last summer brought me right back to Ed Dunn’s article “Blame It on Rio, Pool Test and Gas Prices.” You see, Ed Dunn has often hinted that being in a man-woman relationship with a woman not born and raised in the United States has more benefits than drawbacks. I agree (often) but the article about the Vietnamese brides makes explicit the most glaring drawback to these unions. This article is explicit about the economic realities of many of these unions: these relationships have the potential to lift the non-American family of the happy couple out of poverty. This also implies that the non-American can be under significant amounts of pressure from all parties involved to “make it work.” Sometimes this pressure does damage:

Not all the marriages work out, of course.

Dam Psi Kin Sa went to Taiwan nine years ago, at the age of 20, and married a Taiwanese car wash owner more than twice her age who had been divorced three times. She met him through a matchmaking service.

Five years later, her husband demanded a divorce and locked her out of the house. Even though she had learned his language, Mandarin Chinese, the couple had trouble communicating. “We were angry at each other in a quiet way,” she said in Taipei, where she has remained to be close to her daughter.

Over the past year, one Vietnamese bride was beaten to death by her South Korean husband, another jumped out a 14th-story window and a third hanged herself on Valentine’s Day, leaving behind a diary full of misery.

These levels of extreme drama are not necessary for me to be wary of seeing these international affairs as a quick fix for ‘My Three Sexist Assumptions of the Apocalypse.’ The more subtle scenario that makes me pause is the moment when I find my foreign-born darling quietly weeping alone in our love nest. I ask her what is wrong and she tells me that one of her second (or third) cousins is in trouble in the Home Country. All we have to do is send a little money to this cousin and all is well. Then another one of cousins is in trouble—and another… Note that I am not suggesting that my life partner is a gold-digging liar—I am suggesting that she is human and being responsible. The bottom line is that her non-American family is more effective and efficient communicating regularly with one another—while my super-individualistic, self-alienated domestic family members are hardly in contact with themselves let alone other people.

It soon becomes clear that my darling’s family outnumbers my US family ten to one. The financial resources of our perfect union flow in her family’s direction. Yes, we are all one big happy family now but it is clear that there is ample opportunity to see this bias.

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