Government estimates 50% of rural Korean children will be biracial by 2020.

The article in the Korea Times, which provides the above illustration and the figures by way of the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (what?), opens with a sad story from another victim of what's basically a slave trade. This one is in Gangjin county:

It's already been a year since 26-year-old Thien moved to Gangnjin, a small farming county in South Jeolla Province, but Korean still sounds like unbearable noise to her.

With a 35-year-old jobless husband and two elderly in-laws to take care of on a suffocating budget, the Vietnamese woman not pleased with her pursuit of the much-fantasized ``Korean Dream.''

``I don't feel like learning Korean. I'm not interested,'' Thien said through a translator, Kang Kyung-ae, who heads a support center for multicultural families in the rural town of 40,000 people.

A disappointing mix of financial hardship, language barriers and nonexistent romance has made Thien become increasingly more quiet and bitter over the past several weeks.

``I want to make a decision, whether to leave or not, before I have children,'' said the immigrant, who has a mother and two brothers at home.

The percentage of biracial children in rural areas is expected to quickly increase over the next decade both because young Koreans are leaving and because more foreign women are arriving.

People watch Korean dramas overseas and get the impression that Koreans live in palacial apartments, drive fancy cars, dress in clothes that don't clash, and generally lead lives of luxury. But of course these brides aren't being imported to Gangnam or Apgujeong, they're sent to keep house in villages and counties about as far removed from the soap operas as you can get. The women find themselves with men two or three times their age, often with disabilities or disorders that prevent them from earning much of a living. Stories like this are hard to take:

The 44-year-old Hamyang County farmer, identified only by the surname Kim, married a 20-year-old Vietnamese woman last December. Kim has a speech impediment because of his mental disability and lived with his parents until he got married. According to Lee Sang-do, a police offer at Hamyang’s Seosang Police Precinct, it was the second time he had married a Vietnamese woman.

The marriage, however, didn’t last. Kim’s bride ran away a few days after the wedding. Not knowing why his wife left him, Kim decided to make the journey to Vietnam to find her. Despite his mental disability, on Oct. 16 he took a bus to Incheon International Airport and boarded a plane to Vietnam.

Unable to speak Vietnamese, he quickly ended up on the streets. He was found by Vietnamese police last Saturday night, after two days in the country.

And there are other terrible stories, too, like the case of the 22-year-old Vietnamese woman who fell to her death in the city of Gyeongsang. It was ruled a suicide, though not much investigation was done since her 46-year-old husband had the body creamated before an autopsy could be done.

Tran’s husband, Ha, was unavailable for comment yesterday. However, according to the local police, he said that he contacted the matchmaker after Tran’s death and was told by the broker that the mother had agreed to the cremation. During the investigation, police said, Ha told them his new wife did not adjust well to her new family and that she slept a lot and did not do her chores. The two, lacking a common language, had no way to communicate.
Just a week after Tran’s arrival in Korea, the couple filed for divorce and a short time later Tran bought a ticket for a flight back to Vietnam. A day later, she plunged to her death from the balcony.
“The circumstantial evidence indicated it was a suicide,” said a senior Gyeongsan police officer who refused to be named. Further forensic examination is impossible since the body was cremated at her husband’s request, he said.

Perhaps anticipating such problems, or perhaps trying to compare these poorer women to their more uppity Korean counterparts, one Jeonju agency was running signs that said Vietnamese women wouldn't run away.



A New York Times article from a couple years ago profiled this trade between Vietnam and Korea, and said that, in 2005, 14% of new marriages in Korea were international. An excerpt from the article, which profiles the broker business that you'll find all over the place down here:

South Korean news organizations have reported that many of the foreign brides were initially lied to by their husbands, and suffered isolation and sometimes abuse in South Korea. Partly in response, the Ministry of Health and Welfare is now moving to regulate the international marriage industry, which emerged so suddenly that the Consumer Protection Board can only estimate that there are 2,000 to 3,000 such agencies nationwide.

After an initial setback — his first three choices found various reasons to decline his offer — Mr. Kim narrowed his field to a 22-year-old college student and an 18-year-old high school graduate.

“What’s your personality like?” Mr. Kim asked the college student.

“I’m an extrovert,” she said.

The 18-year-old asked why he wanted to marry a Vietnamese woman.

“I have two colleagues who married Vietnamese women,” he said, adding, “The women seem devoted and family-oriented.”

One Korean broker said the 22-year-old, who seemed bright and assertive, would adapt well to South Korea. Another suggested flipping a coin.

“Well, since I’m quiet, I’ll choose the extrovert,” Mr. Kim said finally, adding quickly, “Is it O.K. if I hold her hand now?”

She went over to sit next to him, though neither dared to hold hands. She spelled out her name in her left palm: Vien. Her name was To Thi Vien.

In South Korea, billboards advertising marriages to foreigners dot the countryside, and fliers are scattered on the Seoul subway. Many rural governments, faced with declining populations, subsidize the marriage tours, which typically cost $10,000.

The business began in the late 1990s by matching South Korean farmers or the physically disabled mostly to ethnic Koreans in China, according to brokers and the Consumer Protection Board. But by 2003, the majority of customers were urban bachelors, and the foreign brides came from a host of countries.

The widespread availability of sex-screening technology for pregnant women since the 1980s has resulted in the birth of a disproportionate number of South Korean males. What is more, South Korea’s growing wealth has increased women’s educational and employment opportunities, even as it has led to rising divorce rates and plummeting birthrates.

The rate of international marriages is much higher than 14% in rural areas, of course, with one article saying 41% of men in farming and fisheries went that route, and another source said it's as high as 37% in Jeollanam-do's Hampyeong county. That same article gives similar figures for other parts of southwestern Korea, even if it does erroneously place Imsil in Jeollanam-do and confuse Damyang with Danyang. A Korean-language article today has broken down where these women are coming from who marry men in rural areas: 45% from Vietnam, 25% from China, 12% from the Philippines, 8% from Japan, 6% from Cambodia, and the rest from elsewhere.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but the statistics say that these marriages aren't happy ones. A recent survey in the Chosun Ilbo said that 46% of international brides in Jeollanam-do want to divorce; not too different than every other demographic, I guess. A 2005 survey by the Corea Image Communication Institute found that around 80% of foreign women said they wouldn't marry a Korean again. Judge for yourselves how unique these problems are to Korean marriages:

Asked about the bad points of living with a Korean, over half the respondents cited lack of communications, and nearly half complained about interference from other family members. A third said they didn't like the fact that their spouses came home late at night.
And that was the opening wedge in a series of differences in the experiences of foreign women married to Korean men and vice versa. Those late nights were primarily women's complaints, of course, but other reasons were cited as the main reason only 35 percent of those surveyed said they would marry a Korean again. The biggest complaint was a lack of communication with a spouse, cited by 63 percent. That was followed by in-law problems (60 percent); late nights and a refusal to help with household chores were cited by nearly 50 percent each.

For what it's worth, I don't object to these sort of marriages out of hand. For people who want to get married but find themselves with few options---or who simply find themselves tired of looking---I don't see anything wrong with finding someone through the internet or going through an agency. We've all tried internet dating, haven't we? (Haven't we?) And, hell, Korea and other Asian countries where this sort of international marriage business is popular have a long---and recent---history with matchmaking services. I'm also not naive enough to believe these women are all innocent victims, who didn't come here for money or the chance to live out the "Korean Dream." It says so right in the damn article. But I find it sick that these foreign women are little more than indentured servants, tied to men twice their age and half their IQ, and charged with repopulating a rural Korea that a generation or two before would have thrown them down a well.

For as critical people here can be of Caucasians dating Korean women, often with the implication of an unequal power relationship, there sure is a lot of that going on vis-a-vis Korea's poorer, browner neighbors.

Because I can't think of a better conclusion---that last paragraph would have been a good one---I'll stick these two posts on at the end: go give "City and county, education and marriage" and "Vietnam, Korea's womb colony?" a read, because I pilfered a couple of the articles from them. If you have any other informative links on the topic, please post them in the comment section for further reading.