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Lessons for Taiwan's Vietnamese
brides
By Tran Dinh Thanh Lam
HO CHI MINH CITY - When Nguyen Thi Phuong is not
petitioning local authorities to help her get her
children back, she takes part in forums on the risks and
realities that Vietnamese women face when they go to
Taiwan as brides.
Phuong has run the emotional
gamut, and her story is far from over. And similar sad
tales abound.
When she was 19, the girl from
Vietnam's southern Can Tho province, near the Mekong
Delta, married a 46-year-old Taiwanese. She called her
life in Taiwan "hell", and accuses her husband of
hanging her from her tied hands when she was pregnant
"until I nearly became unconscious".
Her "crime"
was that from a large herd of swine she said she was
forced to take care of, one had died. After three years
of such a marriage, Phuong decided to return to Vietnam.
"I would rather live in anguish forever than return to
Taiwan to live with a cruel husband in a strange
country," she said.
Her husband let her go, but
not with her two young sons.
In recent years
there has been a growing number of young girls from Tay
Ninh, a rural province bordering Cambodia, marrying
Taiwanese men - in 2000 alone there were 670 - as there
have been from elsewhere in Vietnam.
"In 1995
there were only 1,476 Vietnamese women married to
Taiwanese husbands," said David Wu, director of the
Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Ho Chi Minh City.
"The number now is more than 60,000."
Many
Vietnamese women are looking for a better life, while
many of the Taiwanese men may be old and unable to find
local wives and look to other places, including Vietnam
and mainland China, for brides. Some pay about US$10,000
to an agency to "introduce" them to Vietnamese brides.
While the sad experiences of Vietnamese brides
are played up in local media, Wu said the cases were
"uncommon and exaggerated".
But the
circumstances that lead Vietnamese to go to Taiwan as
brides are depressingly common. "These women were from
families that were experiencing financial difficulties -
unpaid debts, a bad harvest or jobless family members,"
said Do Thi Nhu Tam, director of the Mobility Research
and Support Center (MRSC) here.
"As they come
from the remote countryside, Vietnamese girls lack basic
information about their future life in Taiwan and what
is in store for them there," said Tam. "They agree to
marry a Taiwanese husband to support their family, a
husband who is usually advanced in age or infirm. Most
marry through matchmakers or intermediaries and have
little or no time to get to know their husbands or their
future family."
MRSC's approach has been to push
community-based intervention in the provinces that are
most affected. MRSC gives the women alternatives to
going overseas as brides and arms them with necessary
knowledge if they still do so.
Since April 2001
in the villages of Tay Ninh and in conjunction with the
local women's union, MRSC has helped communities develop
their own solutions. Former sex workers, women who have
returned from Taiwan and families of those living there
have related their experiences.
Training
workshops teach brides-to-be about rights, reproductive
health, Vietnamese and Taiwanese marriage laws.
Women who have returned have received loans from
the Tay Ninh Women Union (TNWU) or from the Bank for the
Poor to develop small businesses - like raising pigs or
poultry - that can bring in earnings that can support
families.
For the Taiwanese men - who are often
very much older than the brides they seek - marriage
often provides them an all-in-one solution as the wife
is housekeeper as well as nurse to her husband and his
parents, those working with the brides say.
"In
many cases, the foreign woman is used as a housemaid
without salary or services as cheap labor in the family
business. Some husbands don't even work at all and use
their wives a source of income," said Bruno Ciceri, a
Catholic priest in charge of the Stella Maris
International Service Center for migrants in the
southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung.
"Many
times women are used as a tool for reproduction and they
must give birth to a boy, otherwise they are considered
useless," he told a recent seminar on migration in
Thailand.
"After I had given birth to a child,
my husband gradually cooled toward me. His family also
became dissatisfied with me. Eventually he was beating
me openly, and pushed for a divorce," he quoted a
Vietnamese spouse as saying.
In a 2002 report on
its research in Taiwan, MRSC quoted a member of The
Migrant Worker, a non-governmental organization there,
as saying: "Many men pay money to 'buy' a wife and then
make her his servant and child-bearing machine. I have
encountered and helped women who were victims of sexual
assault by their husbands."
Nguyen Thi Luom from
Can Tho said her 22-year-old daughter was convinced to
marry a Taiwanese man by her friend. "After meeting a
group of Taiwanese men, she was chosen by one," Luom
recalled. After the wedding two weeks later, "the group
leader gave me VND5 million [$330] and my son-in-law
gave me two pieces of gold. Later, I found that the gold
was fake."
The problem has deeper social roots,
says Ciceri. A key part of the problem is the men's
perceptions of the marriage, and the lack of social
support and adjustment by the women in Taiwan.
Ciceri explains that many men get into marriages
with foreigners not because of love - "the men want the
opportunity to marry and start a family, while the women
are seizing a chance to improve their standard of living
and better themselves".
"The lack of love,
cultural differences and the language barrier make these
marriages doomed to fail from the beginning," he said.
He added that some foreign wives are barred from making
friends and phone calls and do not know of local laws
they can use to assert their rights. Those who cannot
speak Mandarin find it almost impossible to get help if
they are abused.
The Eden Foundation for
Prosperity in Taiwan has set up a hotline for foreign
wives, while Taiwanese officials have commissioned
courses that help foreign wives learn Taiwanese and
integrate better into society.
Local groups
continue to work on preventing Vietnamese women from
wanting or needing to leave overseas and welcome what
they see as early signs of a slowing down in the trend
of women going abroad as brides.
Tam said the
TNWU estimates a drop of about half, in 2001 from 2000,
in the number of Tay Ninh women who have become wives in
Taiwan.
This, she says, is just the
encouragement they need before embarking on a similar
project in Can Tho this year.
(Inter Press
Service)
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