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Daisy Nguyen - not her real name - had been working at a factory in Ho Chi Minh City since finishing middle school. At age 22, however, she came up with a new ambition. As the eldest daugher of four, she wanted to support her parents, who were impoverished farmers. One day, one of her colleagues told her about a matchmaking agency, adding that the agency specialized at marriage with Korean men. If she were to go to Korea, she would be able to overcome her family’s poverty, the friend said.
The two women visited the agency and registered. After a while, the agency contacted her and she met several Korean men. She chose one out of a number of them to marry. The man said he was in his 40s and was operating a shop in Korea.
They got married and took a honeymoon trip. Then, the husband returned to his nation while Nguyen registered their marriage in Vietnam using documents given to her by her husband. It was then that she uncovered some surprising facts. Her Korean husband was actually in his 60s. She felt deceived, but she could not reverse the marriage, as the agency had made her parents sign a waiver that if the marriage was not followed through with, they would have to pay a hefty compensation. She did not want to cause further financial burden to her parents.
So, in the fall of 2003, Nguyen came to Korea. She lived with her husband in an apartment in a provincial city. Her husband was a merchant, so he left in the early morning and returned late at night. During the day, the apartment was like a prison, as she did not know the Korean language and could not communicate with her neighbors. Within a few months, the husband became violent towards her. She did not know why he was angry, as they could not communicate with one another. He continued to beat her more and more brutally.
Finally, Nguyen sought refuge, appealing to the matchmaking agency. Fortunately, the agency sent her to a support center for victims of abuse in international marriages. Nine months later, she headed back to Vietnam with the help of the center. She left her country with the hope for a new life, but her short marriage instead left her with a deep emotional wound.
Returning home as a divorcee, she was so ashamed that she did not go out of the house. Moreover, as her divorce has not yet been legally settled in Korea, she has not yet recovered her Vietnamese census registration. As a consequence, she cannot get a proper job in her native country. Her ex-husband says that if she does not pay him compensation, he will not accept the divorce. However, she thinks that he should take the responsibility because he lied to her about his age and physically abused her.
"In retrospect, I was too reckless in deciding to go to Korea," said Nguen. She should have found out about Korea and her future husband more carefully in advance, she said. Now, she advises Vietnamese women who want to marry Korean men to be prudent, but added that her advice falls on deaf ears, as "they think my misfortune has nothing to do with them."
A Cambodian woman whom The Hankyoreh met at the Korean Embassy in Phnom Penh on January 16 did not appear any more prepared for her marriage than Nguyen was. "I don’t know anything about Korea," she said. "As for my husband, I only know that he is working at a foreign company. We got married just a day after we first met," she said. The woman, who was headed to Korea after her visa interview, said that she had not known that her husband had been previously divorced before they were married - in fact, she had just found out about this fact during the visa interview. Neither her husband nor the matchmaking center had informed her. The eldest daughter of eight brothers and sisters living on a rural farm said, "What can I do now?"
According to a 2005 survey of foreign women living in Korea after marriage with Korean men, conducted on the request of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, in more than 40 percent of those marriages achieved through matchmaking agencies, women received false information about their would-be husbands. Over 50 percent of this false information involved the men lying about their financial situation.
Many Korean men that marry foreign women through these matchmaking centers are not adequately prepared for the experience, as well. Kim Myeong-su (an alias), who married a Cambodian woman in Phnom Penh on January 15, works at a college. He went on dates with a number of Korean women, but they were not interested, he said, because he was not financially independent enough to be able to move them out of his parents’ house after marriage. Now that he is over 40, people advised him to marry a foreign woman. During vacation, he met a Cambodian woman through a matchmaking agency and they got married. He knows nothing about Cambodia except for the notorious Khmer Rouge period and the temples of Angkor Wat. He likes his wife, but his biggest worry is how he will teach her the Korean language and culture after she comes to Korea.
Yun Gyeong-hwan - not his real name - married a Vietnamese woman about a year ago. He said, "If I had known that married life with a foreign woman was going to be so difficult in advance, I wouldn’t have married her. If there were preparatory educational programs for concerned men and their families, they would be very useful," added he.
Kim Jin-won, a South Korean consular officer in Cambodia, said, "To overcome the cultural gap is difficult enough. To make matters worse, these couples don’t have a common language through which they can bridge this gap. However, there is no legal grounds to demand preparatory education or to restrain them from providing false information; therefore, during the interview, we just inform them about the difficulties involved in living in Korea."
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