NAMWON, South Korea — It was the constellation of acne
across her cheeks that made No. 242 stand out from the other young women who
were paraded before him in a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City.
Jeong Ha-gi, 46,
flew to Vietnam on a tour organized for South Korean bachelors. He was looking
for a wife who would be tough enough to withstand the rigors of life on a rice
farm. Trying to distinguish among all the women with the numbers pinned to their
shirts, he decided the one with a bad complexion might be made of sturdy stuff.
They were married three days later.
Today, they live together in sullen silence,
a chasm of cultural differences between them. She speaks no Korean, he no
Vietnamese. They communicate — barely — with a well-thumbed phrase book. Nguyen
Thu Dong, who turned out to be only 20, doesn't like getting up at 5 a.m. to do
the farm chores. She turns up her nose at kimchi.
"We have a lot of
issues between us," said the burly Jeong, who in his undershirt resembles a
Korean version of the young Marlon Brando. "Our age difference, our culture, our
food. But I wanted a wife and she is who I got."
Despite the obvious
pitfalls, South Korean men increasingly are going abroad to find wives. They
have little choice in the matter unless they want to remain bachelors for
life.
The marriage market in Asia is becoming rapidly globalized, and
just in time for tens of thousands of single-but-looking South Korean men, most
of them in the countryside where marriageable women are in scant supply. With
little hope of finding wives of their own nationality and producing children to
take over the farm, the men are pooling their family's resources to raise up to
$20,000 to find a spouse abroad.
The phenomenon has become so widespread
that last year 13% of South Korean marriages were to foreigners. More than a
third of the rural men who married last year have foreign wives, most of them
Vietnamese, Chinese and Philippine. That's a huge change in a country once among
the most homogenous in the world.
To some extent, the globalized marriage
market is having a trickle-down effect, exacerbating the shortage of
marriage-age women elsewhere, particularly China.
"There is a
long-standing son preference throughout Asia, but now it is happening in the
context of this 21st century marriage market," said Valerie M. Hudson, a
political scientist and author of "Bare Branches: The Security Implications of
Asia's Surplus Male Population."
The preference for sons has translated
in South Korea into 113 male births for every 100 females. Ultrasound became
widely available here in the 1980s, and the first generation screened for gender
before birth is now coming of marriageable age.
But perhaps an even
larger factor in the disappearance of young women from the countryside is their
tendency to move to the cities in search of careers or urban husbands or
both.
"South Korean women don't want to live in the countryside. They
don't want to do hard labor, getting their skin brown in the sun. The cities are
less traditional, less patriarchal," said Yang Soon-mi, a social worker with the
Ministry of Agriculture.
The wife shortage is most severe here in the
southwestern region of Jeolla, the traditional heartland of Korea. This is one
of the few swaths of South Korea where the rice paddies have not yet been
cemented over for gray slabs of high-rise apartments. On a hot August day, the
air is thick with the chirping of the cicadas, and red peppers are drying in the
sun on the pavement.
On roads cutting through the fields, marriage
brokers advertise their services on billboards.
"Vietnamese marriage,"
reads a billboard in shocking pink on an otherwise quiet country
lane.
The wife shortage is having a devastating effect on the
agricultural communities, already threatened by urbanization and free trade.
Without wives, young men won't want to stay on the farm. Without wives, there
are no babies to replenish the stock of farmers.
South Korea and Taiwan
are tied for the lowest birthrates in the world, 1.1 per woman, according to a
study released last month by the Washington-based Population Reference
Bureau.
Unlike China, South Korea does not limit births, and is
in fact offering tax incentives to encourage more children.
Many of the
villages around Jeolla are virtual ghost towns, with a sparse population of
elderly residents and hardly a child in sight.
"There are only old people
around here," said Le Pho, a 22-year-old Vietnamese woman who married a South
Korean a year ago and is now pregnant. Her child will be the first born in the
village, Seogok-ri, in more than 20 years. Despite a regulation, widely ignored,
prohibiting doctors from divulging the sex of the fetus, Le knows already that
she is having a boy.
"My husband and mother-in-law are very happy.
They've treated me very well since they found out the baby is a boy," Le said.
"The neighbors too. When they see my belly, they are amazed."