WE WERE on D. Jakosalem St. waiting for the left turn traffic signal on my way to Maxilom when I saw this Caucasian cleaning the window of a small store on the side. Oh, so, that’s his store, I thought, as he went in where I couldn’t see him anymore. A short while after, a small girl looking like 12 years old came out. His child, he’s married to a Filipino, I told myself.
I watched the kid as she crossed the street. Then I noticed that her skirt was very tight on a young body that she nourished before her own time, nothing child-like at all.
“No, that’s not his kid, she’s his girl, ma’am,” said the cab driver who read my thoughts. “But I think she’s 12 years old, yes.”
How did a small girl like her meet this oldish Caucasian? Is she a mail-order bride arranged on a lurch (it’s illegal in the Philippines)?
A news item about the matchmaking business in Thailand being at a booming rate could make you think of reasons for matching. It says in many other words that the matchmakers put couples together for the girl to lead a more comfortable life and the man to get a pretty, young, more committed caregiver (in the guise of a bride).
But also, it could be love. As the examples given in the item—the American, who divorced his American wife because she wasn’t the one or there was somebody else in her life, came to Thailand and found the perfect girl through the Sweet Singles company and its listing of “eligible” Thai women.
In terms of the statistics available, matchmaking, which not so long ago was a “fringe industry,” is the business to be in. From 2002 to 2004, there were about 88,000 fiancee visas issued by the US Department of Homeland Security.
The White guys are leaving home grounds to come to Asia for the girl/woman they need. And for only so little to pay for a lifetime of love.
Years and years ago in faraway kingdoms, matchmaking was made by the royalty to keep their line “pure.” It was hoped that love would later develop. Was that reason enough for the match?
On the practical side, singletons in the royal lines were paired in marriage through the advice of trusted counselors of royalty to keep a possible war at bay. So that in Europe, there was always a connection you could find between kings and princes, etc. The same highborn blood could be traced from one European sovereign to the other. And the families ruled kingdoms as if they were rooms in the same house.
This was also the case in a province in Ireland (as now cited in modern online ads for the dating system) when marriages were fixed. In tradition, the rich landowners married daughters of rich landowners, the poor farmers the poor girls. There was no crossing the line.
Today, there’s still a matchmaking affair in the same place but with someone dealing the match as both parties are introduced in a romantic spa, say, or in a dance, and so soon, during the Matchmaking Festival in September.
Is this matchmaking for love? Love, they always say, is reason enough. Not for money, not to maintain a lineage, not for a dream of physical comfort. Love is the romantic match made by friends or relatives in search of happiness for the couple.
Yet in India, they have more reasons to do matching up to now. There are the social classes to consider strictly. Marrying within the class is just perfectly correct.
What is the “right” reason to keep for a match? If it’s love, as they say, is it because of beauty or the right muscles, the perfect stand, or is it the voice, the tone, the same outlook? Not the dollars or euro?
It was still in 1970 when Cebuano writer Lina Espina Moore wrote a short story about girls and old foreigners. But Human Resources sounds like 1970 today as you now see the matched couples (of young girls and the oldish Caucasians) in Fuente Osmeña fast food restos or the malls. Moore, herself married to an American, wrote tongue in cheek about someone who looked like the little girl along D. Jakosalem St. “Nicia was a doll. Karl Rolph’s doll. The babykin...the prized poodle...the binkybonk bunny....”
But who’s to judge whom?
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