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"I cried so many times, it was selling human meat!" says Autumn Fan of her
experience of being vended by a marriage broker. Fan had been one of about
one hundred young women offered to a group of Taiwanese bachelors during a
matchmaking trip to Vietnam. Twelve at a time, the girls were seated on a
sofa for the men to eyeball.
"I wasn't particularly happy or sad about being chosen," says Fan, who was
19 at the time. "My mind was just blank. I had no idea who this person was,
what my future would be." They had dinner, a silent date for lack of a
common language, and then she married the foreigner so her parents could
earn $1,000. Her three sisters later made the same choice.
As less desirable men find themselves snubbed by Taiwan's sophisticated
women, one in four grooms in Taiwan now marries a bride from Southeast Asia
or mainland China. "There's a strong urban bias in Taiwan," says Professor
Hsia Hsiao-chuan of Shih Hsin University's Graduate Institute of Social
Transformation Studies. "That means farmers and blue-collar workers have a
hard time finding wives." But the rejected and dejected are treated like
kings by professional matchmakers, who take them on trips to browse for
brides in poorer parts of Asia.
Like any other, the resulting marriages can be heaven or hell. "The husbands
fall into two extremes," says Keh Yu-ling, director of the Pearl S. Buck
Foundation which serves the new immigrants, "simple shy guys who dote on
their wives, or men with no respect for women." Fan had a taste of both. Her
husband was sweet, she said, until he lost his job and began abusing her.
When he broke her rib, she divorced him. Fan is grateful, however, for her
freedom and the custody of her daughter. Of her ex-husband, she says, "We do
our part as wives and mothers, but when they're unhappy, they say things
like 'I bought you.' Why couldn't he say he married me?"
Hsia blames the ruthless dealers: "They push men to buy a product and even
teach them how to control their wives". Ads with lines like "Vietnamese Wife
for $6,000," "Guaranteed Virgin" and "Refund for Runaways" were rampant
before the government regulated content. Even then, more recent ads
promised: "Vietnamese make ideal wives: pretty, tidy housekeepers,
obedient."
For railway worker Lee Shuang-chuan, they were also disposable. He derailed
the train that carried his second Vietnamese wife. As she was recovering
from the "accident" in the hospital, he injected her with deadly snake
venom - it turned out he had taken out a $2 million accidental death
insurance policy on her. As police began zeroing in on him as a murder
suspect, Lee hanged himself from a tree. His first Vietnamese wife died of
"a snakebite" four years earlier.
Lee's case, as well as public outrage over reported instances of virtual
slavery, have drawn attention to the vulnerability of foreign wives here. To
prevent the women from being purchased like commodities, Taiwan enacted a
law last month cracking down on the foreign-bride industry and its
advertisements. The law requires Taiwan's roughly 500 matchmaking agencies
to become non-profit organizations and adhere to stricter regulation, or
face recurring fines of up to $15,000.
Despite the new law, many Taiwanese have yet to embrace the roughly 366,000
Asian women who moved here to marry. Vietnamese wife Sho-chen complains that
people on the street say to her, "You Vietnamese wives only cost $8,000, do
you know how expensive a Taiwanese woman is?!"
Still, Taiwan does offer Southeast Asian wives free language classes and the
opportunity to work or study upon arrival. Some have adjusted well:
Mae-kwang, for example, whose delectably addictive Vietnamese restaurant
near my home has three busy branches all within a minute's walk.
But many of the wives who came to Taiwan in search of a better life end up
incurably homesick. Fan and her three sisters all regret their decisions to
marry Taiwanese men. One of the sisters also got a divorce after her husband
had an affair. Autumn Fan sighs, "If our family had more money, we wouldn't
have done this. We always get together and talk about how much we miss
home."
Source: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1705917,00
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