something to learn from Viet_Kor marriages
Vietnam latest news - Thanh Nien Daily
Mutual misunderstandings underlie Vietnamese-Korean marriages
Most marriages between Vietnamese women and South Korean men fail as
they know little about each other and the women enter a spousal relationship very different to those at home, experts told a conference on April 22.
South Korean husbands tend to “over-guard” their wife and money, while most Vietnamese women expect to manage the family’s income and spending as well as to keep a close watch on their man, a report released by the Chungcheongnam-do Women’s Policy Development Institute (CWPDI) said.
The institute co-organized the conference in Hanoi with the Gender and Development Research Center of the Hanoi University of Social Sciences and Humanities.
Chungcheongnam-do, a province in western South Korea, is home to many Vietnamese women married to South Korean men.
Other studies done by the institute show that the number of divorces between South Koreans and foreigners, many of them Vietnamese women, has tripled since 2003 and around 80 percent of such marriages last for a maximum of four years.
Vietnamese women, who sometimes discover only after their marriage that they are at least 10 years younger than their husbands, are not accustomed to always staying at home after marriage and are depressed when they are forced to do so.
Also, the women are required to study South Korean culture, including the language and cuisine, while the husbands make no effort to reciprocate. Their children, meanwhile, are only taught their father’s language, culture and social mores, and none of their mother’s.
Kim Kyung Suk, head of the Chungcheongnam-do Institute, said Vietnamese women should know what life with their husband’s family entails and be prepared.
Most Vietnamese women who marry South Korean men
look forward to sending money back home, and this makes the husbands tighten their control even more.
Several studies show that marriages between Vietnamese women and East Asian men have surged in the past decade.
Most Korean-Vietnamese marriages are arranged by illegal brokers and the prospective spouses lack information about each other.
Some Korean men want their potential wives to know the truth about them, but the brokers prefer to boast, and the Vietnamese women become disillusioned after they’re married.
The conference also raised the problem of Vietnamese wives finding it very difficult to attain South Korean citizenship.
They need to attend at least 200 classes of the country’s social integration program in 17 months.
But most Vietnamese women that marry South Korean men are from poor families in Vietnam’s rural areas and have little education.
Surveys in the Mekong Delta show that more than 60 percent of natives marrying Korean men are very poor, Dinh Van Quang from the Family Department of Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism told the conference.
The Vietnamese government in January announced a plan for the nation’s first matchmaking firm to prevent the abuse of Vietnamese women by foreigners. The plan is to be submitted to the prime minister by the end of June.
Reported by Le Tung