kude.punny: Finding Love Overseas the Perfunctory Way

Thứ Sáu, 10 tháng 8, 2007

Finding Love Overseas the Perfunctory Way

A Korean man meets with Vietnamese women at a matchmaking firm in Ho Chi Minh City.

In a match-making company’s office in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, a Korean man sits on a bamboo sofa looking at a chorus line of Vietnamese women. Number tickets pinned to their dresses, the women wait to be chosen for what they believe will be a way out of poverty. The man looks at their faces with some embarrassment. “I feel so sorry for them and I can’t decide whom to choose,” he says. After 20 minutes, he stops.

At 35, Kim Jang-ho (not his real name) is unemployed. His mother runs a small restaurant in Incheon. He has come to Vietnam to find a spouse. In addition to meeting the 11 women in the office, he is also shown a catalogue on CD-Rom containing just the pictures of would-be brides - just scanning them all would have taken an hour and a half. Some 150 Vietnamese girls, also with number tickets on them, appear on the screen, but again he gives up after 20 minutes. By then he has actually decided that two of the 11 he had seen earlier would make suitable candidates.

Wedding dresses line a matchmaking firm in Vietnam that hooks Vietnamese women up with Korean husbands.

Kim decides to interview Shen (20) and another woman (21). “I’m unemployed now but I will find a job soon. My mother, who is quite old, runs a small restaurant,” he tells them. “Could you live with and take care of my mother?” Both of them nod. Shen lives in a poor rural area a four- hour drive from the city. She wants to marry a man from another country to escape poverty. “My great-aunt’s daughter married a Taiwanese man three years ago, and thanks to the marriage she now has a new concrete house,” Shen says.

After pacing and smoking for a while, Kim decides that Shen will do. The pair immediately head to a local hospital for an AIDS test. After news that a Vietnamese woman who had already married a Korean but was not allowed to enter Korea because she was HIV positive, such tests have become mandatory. The results come back in an hour and a half, and both are negative. The couple are married in a simple Vietnamese ceremony where they exchange rings, toast a happy future together and Kim meets Shen’s parents. Then they go outside to take a picture in the scorching sun. The whole process has taken two days.

Once left alone after the frenzied round of activities, the communication problems set in. “I thought we could communicate by using body language, but I was wrong,” Kim says disconsolately. He leaves for Korea a few days later. Once he has entered Shen in his family register and sent a copy to her, she will start taking the necessary steps for a visa, which usually takes between 20 days and two months.