http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/LK16Dg01.html
Nov 16, 2010 Foreign wives stir Korean melting pot By Andrei Lankov Last summer, I visited Buyo county, which lies in the heart of an agricultural, less-developed and deeply traditional part of South Korea's southwest. Not far from the bus terminal, a large poster attracted my attention. It stated: "Vietnamese girls, those who never run away." Not far away, there was another poster that made another bold - but, perhaps not completely unfounded - generalization about the Vietnamese: "Vietnamese daughters-in-law are really kind!" The presence of these posters was not unusual - Vietnamese girls constitute a large number of new brides in the area, and international introduction agencies seems to be present at every major crossroads in this part of Korea. Indeed, in recent years South Korean public mood has undergone a major change where marriage with foreigners is concerned. When in the early 1990s the present author published a book on daily life in Korea, he stated with a measure of confidence, "as a rule, Koreans do not approve of marriage with foreigners". This might sound like a generalization, but back then, some 20 years ago, public opinion polls supported such a statement, stating that South Koreans were remarkably less willing to marry their children to foreigners than, say, Hong Kong Chinese or Japanese. When in the 1990s a gender imbalance caused by sex-selective abortions was much discussed, one of the oft-repeated scares was that Korean males would have no choice but to marry foreigners. Had anybody told me some 20 years ago that soon Korea would become one of the world's leaders when it came to international marriages, I would probably laugh at such a ridiculous idea. But this is exactly what began to happen around 2000. Only one type of international marriages had been quite common in Korea, beginning in the late 1940s - marriages between South Korean girls and American soldiers. No exact statistics are available, but the number of such marriages over the last half a century may have reached 100,000. In most cases, though, Korean spouses of the American soldiers came from underprivileged social groups and were more or less despised (or, perhaps, pitied) by mainstream society. Syngman Rhee, the first South Korea president, might have had a "foreign wife" (Korea's first First lady was an Austrian-born American), but in general Korean males seldom married non-Koreans until very recently. Though the changes only began two decades ago, as is usually is the case in Korea, those changes were fast indeed. In 2000, a foreigner was involved in 3.5% of newly registered marriages, and in 2005 the share of such "international marriages" reached the impressive 13.5%. In the subsequent years the ratio went down slightly, but was quite steady, so in 2009 some 10.9% of all marriages (33,300 cases) were concluded with foreigners. It is the Korean male who usually take a foreign spouse these days - in 2009, 75.5% of all newly registered mixed marriages had a Korean groom and a foreign bride. >From the first glance at the marriage statistics, the nature of these unions >becomes clear; this is essentially one of the largest mail-order-bride >operations the world has ever seen. The Korean farmers, largely from the less >developed parts of the country, marry young women from Asian countries. In 2009, about a third of all brides in newly registered mixed marriages (34.1%, to be exact) came from China. Vietnam was the second largest bride exporter, with 21.8% of all brides. China and Vietnam were followed by Cambodia and the Philippines, but also by Japan (even though the nature of 1,140 marriages between Japanese women and Korean men must be different). This explosive growth was brought about by the demographic changes in the Korean countryside, such as a flight of marriageable young women to the cities. From the 1980s local women left their native villages in droves, while men who were expected to take care of the family farms and had no choice but to stay. For a while, there were attempts to solve the problems with public awareness campaigns - I still remember how in the mid-1990s Seoul subway carriages had billboards encouraging Korean girls to marry farmers. Korean girls were decisively reluctant to move back to the countryside. So, foreign brides were "discovered", and nowadays the share of mixed marriages in the countryside is astonishing. For example, in Southern Cholla province, 43.5% of all farmers who married in 2009 took a foreign bride. Not surprisingly, the foreign wives tend to be much younger than their Korean husbands - a usual situation with mail-order brides worldwide. A 2009, large-scale research of the mixed families indicated than on the average wife was 8.3 years younger. However, this research dealt with all existing mixed marriages, including those with a Korean wife, so for foreign wives from some countries the difference could be much greater, for Cambodia, the average age difference reached 17.5 years, and in the case of Korean-Vietnamese marriages the average age difference is 17 years. Some exceptions exist, to be sure, but in most cases such marriage is a business deal, pure and simple, which both sides hold as advantageous. A Korean farmer finally gets a wife (presumably, youthful, hard-working and obedient), while a girl from the less developed parts of poorer nations gets a material life far better than she can realistically hope for in her home village. For young women from many countries even a poor Korean farm house is a paradise: it has running water, electricity, a TV set and fridge - all still luxuries in many parts of rural China and Vietnam. In most cases, the marriages are arranged by brokers or agencies - a large and booming business nowadays. The brokers describe South Korea as an earthly paradise. The popularity of Korean soaps reinforces this image, so girls tend to have a rosy picture of the country where they will go. TV dramas usually depict the life of the rather privileged middle class families, not the farmers whom they are most likely to marry. The brokers arrange for the wife-hunting farmers to come to Vietnam or China, where they are introduced to a number of potential marriage candidates. Then the choice is made and paperwork begins, so in few months, a new bride emerges from a plane. Thanh Ha Minh, a post-graduate at the Seoul National University, conducted a large study of the Vietnamese wives in Korea. In the survey, the four most frequently cited major reasons for taking the decision to marry were, "economic reasons", "parental pressure", "dreams about Korea", "impact of the 'Korean wave' in pop culture". For the foreigner-marrying Korean men, whom Thanh Ha Minh surveyed, the reasons cited were different: "the disdain Korean women feel towards husbands who are not economically successful", "dislike of Korean women", "the similarities between Vietnamese and Koreans in appearance" (obviously, an assumption that neither woman nor their children would stand out in a crowd). Taking into consideration such a background, one cannot be surprised that these marriages are often criticized in Korean media. Nonetheless, a more balanced view on these unions should be, perhaps, more sanguine. Most of those marriages are driven by pragmatic considerations, but we should not forget that the same is applicable to a majority of marriages throughout the world. The idea of love as the sole legitimate reason for getting married is very recent (maybe, a century or so old), and so far it has prevailed only in the more affluent parts of the globe. A modern consciousness feels uncomfortable about the idea of a young woman going to an unknown place to live with a man whom she has never seen before, on the assumption that this would secure her livelihood, but this is a pretty correct description of, say, 90% of marriages concluded before 1900. It would be naive to think that the life of our ancestors was devoid of domestic bliss - evidence shows that often the opposite was true. If people are good, and caring, and decent human beings, they might and usually do become a perfect couple, whichever were the initial reasons behind their marriages. The Korean press often runs horror stories of gross domestic abuse suffered by the foreign wives. Indeed, the girls - poorly educated and with limited command of Korean - are easy victims. Abuse does happen, to be sure and one should welcome the position of the Korean media, which is quite sympathetic to their plight. However, one should remember that the bad news usually gets to newspapers more readily. A look at the statistics reveals a much more optimistic picture. In 2009, during a nationwide study of mixed marriages, over half of all foreign wives (57%) said life in Korea was "satisfactory" or "very satisfactory" - and 36.3% described it as "normal". Only 6.7% saw their lives in Korea as "unsatisfactory" or "very unsatisfactory", and this is clear a sign of international marriages being more successful than many people assume. Another sign of success - perhaps, more powerful than all poll results - is the constant inflow of the new marriage migrants, usually coming from the same areas, same towns and villages as earlier "foreign brides". They and their parents have enough experience by now they get plentiful information from those who moved to Korea earlier, so these girls and their families - or, at lease, a majority of them - know what they are doing. But one thing is clear: Korea is not a mono-ethnic country any more - or rather it is losing this peculiarity at an amazing speed. In a few decades many thousands of people of various ethnic backgrounds will be seen on Seoul's streets. The ethnic "purity", long a topic of self-congratulatory speeches of the Korean nationalists, is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Andrei Lankov is an associate professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, and adjunct research fellow at the Research School of Pacifica and Asian Studies, Australian National University. He graduated from Leningrad State University with a PhD in Far Eastern history and China, with emphasis on Korea. He has published books and articles on Korea and North Asia. 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