By Anna Fifield in Yangbuk, South Korea
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cead98f0-7e85-11db-84bb-0000779e2340.html
Published: November 28 2006 02:00 | Last updated: November 28 2006 02:00
Down on his luck and approaching 40, Jang Sae-jong three years ago followed in the footsteps of an increasing number of South Korean men – he boarded a flight to Ho Chi Minh and within a week had a Vietnamese bride.
In a country fast leaving behind its agricultural roots, rural Korean men like Mr Jang are finding it increasingly difficult to persuade upwardly mobile Korean women to choose rural life.
“I was living in a remote village with my mother then I decided to come to open a restaurant here in Yangbuk, but it failed and I lost a lot of money,” Mr Jang says, sitting on the floor of his modest two-room house in the south-east of the country. “At the same time, I was getting old and there weren’t many women around, so I joined a guy from this village who was going to Vietnam.”
With a dozen other men, he went to a hotel in Ho Chi Minh where he was presented with a line-up of 60 potential brides, which he whittled down to three. He asked them about their backgrounds and families, then chose Tran Thi Diem, now 27.
“I didn’t want anyone who was better educated than me because I thought that if she was too smart, she might figure out how to run away,” he says. “And I liked her – she seemed nice.”
The following day he met her family and the day after, they were married in a Vietnamese-style ceremony with the other bride-hunters. The trip to Vietnam, fees to the marriage agency and the wedding cost Mr Jang about $15,000, a third of which he had to borrow. Ms Tran, who had travelled seven hours to Ho Chi Minh, remembers the event in similarly un-nostalgic detail.
“My husband liked the look of me and I liked the look of him, but actually the brides don’t get much choice,” she says.
“I wasn’t thinking about love. My family is very poor and my parents are sick and I heard that Korea was a very wealthy country so I wanted to help them and earn money for them,” she says, their two-year-old twin daughters jumping on her.
In a conservative country fiercely proud of its ethnic homogeneity, marriages like that between Mr Jang and Ms Tran represent a seismic social shift. Indeed, the Korean countryside is fast becoming more globalised than the cities.
Last year 14 per cent of all Korean marriages were to foreigners, up 20 per cent on the previous year, but in rural areas, four in every 10 men married non-Korean Asian women last year.
Many are Chinese or Philippine but men are increasingly opting for Vietnamese women because of their ethnic similarity. Posters on the lampposts in Yangbuk declare: “Get a new life – marry a Vietnamese lady! You can pay later!”
With the birth rate plummeting and farming life on the brink of extinction, local governments are supporting efforts to help men find wives and have children to pass the farm to.
Kyongju City Government, which encompasses Yangbuk, will soon start giving grants of Won5m ($5,000) to help local men find wives. “There are no young people left in the countryside so we have to help the men revitalise rural areas,” says Kim Sang-guk of the Kyongju welfare centre.
The local authority is also trying to help the 450 foreign women, including 282 from Vietnam, in the area, offering Korean language and cooking classes.
But almost all of the women struggle with their new lives. “This is not the Korea I imagined. I had heard that Korea was a wealthy nation and I wasn’t expecting to be out here in the countryside,” says Ms Tran. “But even though I didn’t love my husband when we got married, since I had my babies I’ve grown to love him.”
But the biggest problem has been the language barrier – she says she still often has to rely on sign language to communicate.
While Ms Tran seems to accept her new life, Mr Jang, who flits between temporary agricultural or building jobs, is not so happy. “It’s quite a burden to send money to Vietnam because I don’t earn much,” he says.
But it is the relationship between his wife and his mother that causes him the most headaches. “My mother speaks very fast and gets angry when my wife can’t understand her. My mother once yelled at my wife to go home to Vietnam and my wife cried a lot.”
“Now I’m opposed to international marriage,” he says in front of his wife, who is distracting herself with an imaginary spot on the floor. “If I get married again I won’t go to Vietnam, I’ll look for a bride in Korea.”