Why Do Vietnamese Women Marry Korean Farmers?

One of six men in Korea's farming and fishing villages is now married to a Vietnamese woman. A report says of the 8,027 farmers and fishermen got married in 2005, 2,885 or 35.9 percent of them had foreign wives, with more than half of them (1,535) marrying Vietnamese women. What persuades so many women from Vietnam to come all this way to marry Koreans? Prof. Kim Hyun-jae of Youngsan University is the author of the first academic paper on the subject. Titled "Immigration of Vietnamese Women to Korea thorough Marriage", it analyzes the reasons from the Vietnamese perspective.

Kim stresses that most of the Vietnamese women who marry Korean men come from farming villages in the country's southern Mekong Delta. In 2005, the Korean Embassy in Hanoi in the North issued 720 marriage visas. The number of marriage visas issued by the consulate in the southern city of Ho Chi Minh was five times higher at 3,853.

Vietnam's Doi Moi (reform) policies have improved its economy greatly, but the gap between urban and rural areas has grown, with the upper 10 percent income brackets earning 13.5 times more than the bottom 10 percent in 2005. The Mekong Delta also suffers an imbalance between the number of men and women, because many men moved to cities to find a job. In 2004, there were 365,300 more women than men in the region. Kim says all these social and economic problems led Vietnamese women to seeking husbands abroad.

Annexed in the late 17th century, the Mekong Delta has very different traditions and culture from the north. It embraced Indian, Islamic, French and American influences over the course of history, which makes it far less influenced by Confucianism than the north and thus more open to marriage with foreigners. Since milk money is common, arranged marriages are also familiar.

The third reason is social changes in neighboring nations. Until 2000, most Vietnamese women married Taiwanese men -- some 13,863 in 2000 alone. Taiwanese men, like Korean men now, would be introduced to tens or hundreds of women by matchmaking agencies during a weeklong visit to Vietnam. If they met a woman they liked, they would register their marriage there and then before returning home with their brides. But Taiwan saw the same problems Korea is now facing, including human trafficking and domestic violence, so the Taiwanese government made it harder to acquire citizenship, which resulted in decrease in such marriages. Korean men are filling the gap. The number of marriages between Korean men and Vietnamese women jumped from 95 in 2000 to 5,822 in 2005, leaving Taiwan behind with 3,212.

Lastly, the Korean pop culture craze sweeping Asia has played a part. Some 100 Korean dramas were aired in Vietnam from 1997 until 2005. The drama "Jewel in the Palace" ("Dae Jang Geum") has been aired five times. Women in Vietnam's rural areas, where newspapers and magazines are rare and TV is almost the only link to the outside world, have come to admire Korea by watching the soaps. The local media have warned of the illusions about Korea created by these dramas.

Kim is calling for measures to help Vietnamese women married to Korean men. "The government should develop Korean language programs for them according to their academic level and provide support to ease their economic difficulties and help them find jobs", he said.