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pandabear
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30 Jun 2011, 1:29 pm

Well, here is a petition, to put an end to the "Vietnamese Virgin Bride" business.

http://www.petitiononline.com/stopWTra/petition.html

It seems that there is some hyperbole in the petition.

I don't personally see anything wrong with people using a matchmaking service. They make it sound as if women are kidnapped in Vietnam and sold into slavery in Singapore. This does happen in Thailand with the brothels. But, marrying someone is hardly the same as enslaving someone.

But, by all means, feel free to add your name to the petition, if you wish.



ArrantPariah
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21 Jul 2012, 5:31 pm

I recently stumbled upon a Singaporean documentary relevant to this topic.

http://www.cutv.ws/documentary/watch-on ... Match-Made

The documentary follows a middle-age Singaporean man who travels to Vietnam to select a wife. Heavens, what a selection.

The fellow lives with his parents in Singapore, and wants a wife to take care of him and his aging mother. In America, a middle-aged man who lived with his parents would be labeled a "loser", and have zero chance for romance (except for our Howard Wolowitz 8) ), particularly if he expected his wife to take care of his mother. I sure wouldn't want to marry the guy in the documentary--he seems a bit strict, and what if his mother didn't like me?

It is somewhat customary for a Chinese wife to take care of her husband's parents. The trouble is, in Singapore (as in the USA), a lot of women are doing a lot better in school and in their careers than a lot of men, most women want to marry up (rather than down), and not many modern Singaporean maidens want to take care of a poorer man's mother.

This leaves a lot of Singaporean bachelors, like the salesman who is the documentary's protagonist, with few options.

Similarly, it is probably impossible to find a 21-year-old American woman who is a virgin. She would be regarded as a freak. But, in Asia, men want virgin wives, and women want to remain virgins until marriage.



HisDivineMajesty
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21 Jul 2012, 5:49 pm

What's the problem with this? Whatever happens, these women are better off in a new situation.
And the men? Well, they can just wage war against Cambodia again to solve that half of the equation.



ArrantPariah
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21 Jul 2012, 9:14 pm

Well, it does look as if Vietnam is cracking down on this business.

http://www.thanhniennews.com/index/page ... etnam.aspx

Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese ladies have by now married outside their country (to live primarily in China, South Korea and Taiwan). A few well-publicised failures and the whole industry comes tumbling down.



ArrantPariah
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22 Jul 2012, 9:03 am

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/LD30Ad01.html

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Foreign workers (and wives) pour into China
By Kent Ewing

HONG KONG - Thousands of illegal Vietnamese workers are flooding into China's Pearl River Delta region, the country's manufacturing hub. At the same time, an increasing number of hard-up Chinese men are looking to Vietnam in search of the ideal wife.

Both stories speak volumes about changes in China's economic and social landscape. Double-digit economic growth has returned to the nation as the world climbs out of a prolonged recession, and the social stability so fretted over by the Communist Party leadership remains largely intact. But, although its economic juggernaut continues to roll, China is not the same country that it was only a few years ago.

Illegal Vietnamese migrants are taking low-paying factory jobsthat Chinese workers no longer want, and Chinese men - at least many of those who like to sound off on web blogs and in Internet chat rooms - are fed up with the soulless avarice of Chinese women and employing matchmakers to find them more "obedient" Vietnamese wives. Indeed, their predilection for brides from Vietnam has ignited a web war of words over the merits of Chinese women versus their Vietnamese counterparts.

For male netizens who have taken the plunge into a foreign marriage, the verdict is in: Vietnamese women are the best. Their testimonies abound.

A happy newlywed from the eastern city of Nanjing writes of his Vietnamese bride: "[She is] not greedy, not lazy, not too free, not arrogant, not money-worshipping. [She is] pretty, hard-working, kind-hearted, and the key is obedient."

In other words, his Vietnamese dream girl is everything that he perceives Chinese women are not.


Another Nanjing man, 42-year-old Dai Wensheng, was so impressed by the wife he acquired during a visit to Vietnam last September that he has begun a blog organizing tours for Chinese bachelors who hope to achieve similar conjugal perfection.

Dai, the owner of a dance school who had previously been married to a Chinese woman, writes: "My ex-wife wanted LV [Louis Vuitton] bags and a new car from me while my Vietnamese wife takes care of the laundry, cooking and cleaning - and even peels the shells off shrimp for me. For the first time, I feel loved and spoiled."


Apparently, both Dai's sentiments and tours are catching on. Vietnamese matchmaking agencies are now looking increasingly to China.

A representative of Wtovisa Vietnam Marriage Agency, located in Hanoi, recently told a South China Morning Post reporter that the agency is considering devoting 70% of its staff to its booming China market

"In the past," Xie Junping said, "Taiwan and South Korea were the favorite destinations for Vietnamese women who wanted to marry foreigners. But we have seen a change since 2008, and more and more men from the mainland are seeking wives in Vietnam."

Cross-border marriages between Chinese and Vietnamese go back thousands of years, and the selling of "mail-order" Vietnamese brides to Chinese men has been taking place for the past 20 years or so. But this latest trend marks the first time Chinese suitors have made their way to Vietnam to woo their brides and hold a proper wedding.

On his blog, Dai tells his followers that his romantic 15-day excursion to Vietnam put him out only 35,000 yuan (US$5,123), including the cost of the wedding and the 80-table banquet that followed. "Brothers," he proselytizes, "drop the greedy, lazy and arrogant Chinese women who ask for property worth millions. Come to Vietnam for perfect wives."

What Dai fails to mention, however, is that many of his love-starved brethren have no choice but to look abroad for a mate. Thanks to China's one-child policy, adopted in 1979, there simply are not enough Chinese women - greedy or not - to go around. Because of the traditional preference for male children in Chinese families, by 2020 China will be home to 24 million bachelors who have no prospect of finding a wife in their own country - a massive lonely hearts club with ominous social implications. Foreign brides are their only hope - and also, even if not by design, good social policy.

Meanwhile, as romantic sparks fly for Chinese men at wedding banquets in Vietnam, hordes of Vietnamese migrants, many using snakeheads (traffickers in humans) who are in cahoots with Chinese employers, are sneaking into China to take low-paying factory jobs. Again, illegal cross-border traffic into Yunnan and Guangxi provinces goes back many years, but now Vietnamese migrants are penetrating deep into the manufacturing hub of Guangdong, taking jobs formerly held by Chinese workers.

The reasons for this development are two-fold: As China's standard of living improves, bottom-rung factory labor is no longer attractive to many Chinese workers; in addition, a labor law enacted two years ago to protect these workers now makes unprotected Vietnamese migrants more attractive hires for factory owners. In other words, China is becoming a victim of its own success.

In February, there were more than two million job vacancies in the Pearl River Delta, state media reported. In response, Guangdong Communist Party Secretary Wang Yang announced a 21.1% rise in the minimum wage starting May 1.

Wang's announcement should be good news for Chinese workers but, coupled with a two-year-old labor law that requires employers to pay for basic benefits such as medical care and social security insurance, it has the effect of opening the door much wider for illegal migrants from Vietnam.

As illegals, the Vietnamese are willing to accept salaries well below the minimum wage and are not protected by the Labor Contract Law. Moreover, their similar appearance allows them to blend in easily with native workers to avoid detection by Guangdong police.

The minimum wage for a low-level factory worker in the Pearl River Delta is reportedly around 1,800 yuan per month, with - thanks to the labor law - double overtime pay after eight hours of work and triple pay on holidays. But factory owners can hire unskilled Vietnamese labor for as little as 1,000 yuan a month while escaping overtime and holiday pay as well as other benefits now guaranteed to Chinese workers. They can also hire Vietnamese employees during peak season and fire them in low season without offering the severance pay to which Chinese workers would be entitled.

Thus, factory owners are understandably pleased with the deluge of illegal migrants seeking work in Guangdong; some even pay people smugglers to bring workers to their factories. As for the illegal workers, mostly farmers from Vietnam, they are happy to have a job that pays more than anything they could find at home.

Indeed, so agreeable is this illicit meeting of supply and demand in Guangdong that a number of Chinese academics have called on the government to allow foreign laborers to work in China. So far, these calls have been ignored.

Instead, Guangdong police claim to be cracking down on illegal labor. According to the official Xinhua News Agency, last year provincial police deported 180 foreigners who did not have valid work permits. So far this year, 53 illegal migrants from Vietnam have been arrested in Guangxi as they traveled on a bus toward Guangdong, and 66 others were seized on another bus in the Guangdong city of Zhuhai. Police also said they discovered 24 illegal Vietnamese workers in plastics factory in another Guangdong city, Qingyuan.

But these modest arrests no doubt represent only a drop in the bucket of illegal immigration in the Pearl River Delta.


A lot of Chinese men seem desperate for a woman, and a lot of Vietnamese people are desperate for a better life. Imagine sneaking into China to take an extremely low-paying factory job. The Vietnamese are probably a lot worse off than the Mexicans who enter the USA to work illegally. I don't think that I've heard a whole lot about American men seeking a Mexican wife, but it probably does happen, although probably not on the same scale.

One does occasionally encounter a few comments from American men who are bitter with feminism, but seldom as bitter as those of the Chinese gentlemen quoted above.



puddingmouse
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22 Jul 2012, 9:54 am

^They see women as a commodity to be outsourced. I feel sorry for people who feel that way about relationships. They miss out on a lot.


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ArrantPariah
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22 Jul 2012, 1:31 pm

puddingmouse wrote:
^They see women as a commodity to be outsourced. I feel sorry for people who feel that way about relationships. They miss out on a lot.


I recommend Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club: a very fascinating look at romance and family-building, then and now.

For a lot of bachelors, particularly in China and South Korea, there really is no choice: China's Old-Child Policy, and gender-selection in South Korea, have contributed to a serious dearth of females.

Traditionally, in a lot of Asian countries, marriages were arranged by the family, and sometimes the husband and wife didn't even know each other until the wedding. Modern, western-style romance is a somewhat new development. The use of a marriage broker or match-making service may be more in keeping with traditional ways.

Moreover, Asians generally consider the family of paramount importance. For a lot of Westerners, personal gratification always comes first. Hence, quite a lot more divorces these days in Western versus Asian countries.

Decades of warfare in Vietnam left a serious shortage of eligible men for marriage. Things may have evened-out more, with relative peace during the last generation. But, for a while, there were a lot of Vietnamese women who had to deal with spinsterhood, in a country where women were expected to marry and have children.



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22 Jul 2012, 1:45 pm

There is a balance between seeking only personal gratification and looking after family life. It's possible to have a practical approach to relationships but at the same time have it as a mutual attraction with equal partners.


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ArrantPariah
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23 Jul 2012, 7:57 am

puddingmouse wrote:
There is a balance between seeking only personal gratification and looking after family life. It's possible to have a practical approach to relationships but at the same time have it as a mutual attraction with equal partners.


The modern concept of romance, heavily promoted by romance novels and movies, tends to work best for people who most closely resemble the movie actors, or who possess the wealth of movie actors.

People at the other end of the spectrum may find the standards set by the movies impossible to achieve.

By the same token, selecting a bride (or being selected as a bride) on-the-spot from among dozens of other prospective brides, where neither party speaks each-other's language, seems a bit rushed, and could entail significant risk. I guess that it works out fine, most of the time. The middle-aged Singaporean man (in the documentary above) really should have brought his mother along to help with the selection, particularly since he was selecting a daughter-in-law for her.

Still, a lot of people are very heavily focused on their jobs and careers, and, in some Asian countries, work very, very long hours with very little time off. They have no time for courtship or other hanky-panky. If they are unattractive and not very wealthy to boot, then a quick 4 days in Ho Chi Minh City might be the best option.



ArrantPariah
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26 Jul 2012, 9:07 am

Well, it does look as if this industry will be petering out in Vietnam in the next 10-15 years.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11627426

Quote:
Sex ratios at birth are becoming increasingly imbalanced in Vietnam, with far more boys being born than girls, the UN Population Fund says. For every 100 females, 110.6 males were born - compared to a norm of 105. The situation was particularly worrying because of the rapid increase in the proportion of boys being born in the last five years, it said.

The UNFPA warned that the imbalance could lead to a number of social problems in the coming years. In May 2009, Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan warned that the gender imbalance in Vietnam could lead to about 3 million men having difficulty in finding wives by 2030.

Bruce Campbell, the UNFPA's representative in Vietnam, said that other Asian countries with gender imbalances had developed these over much longer periods. "Over 30 years China reached the ratio of 130 (males per 100 females) and Korea 116, and these are declining," he said. "Vietnam went from quite a normal level of 105 to 110.6 in the last 5 years."

Vietnam banned foetal sex selection in 2003 in an effort to tackle this problem, but the practice is still going on. "Three factors that contribute to the increase of an imbalanced ratio at birth are firstly son-preference, a very fundamental aspect of culture and society in many countries, secondly the pressure of fertility to have a smaller family size, especially in a number of Asian countries, and thirdly the access to legal and affordable technology for son-selection," Mr Campbell explained. "And in Vietnam it's the combination of all three factors."

Dr Tran Van Chien, vice-head of Vietnam General Office for Population and Family Planning (Ministry of Health), says that the biggest difficulty Vietnam was facing in tackling the problem was the 1,000-year-old tradition that favours men over women, where men carry on the family line and care for elderly parents. He says changing this will take years.


Image

Below the age of 20, boys are outnumbering girls. This gets more acute in the younger age groups.

As a result of the decades of war, the older women outnumber the older men. Now, gender selection is dramatically turning the tables.

So, anyone who wants a Vietnamese wife had better act fast.



HisDivineMajesty
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26 Jul 2012, 9:20 am

ArrantPariah wrote:
Image

As a result of the decades of war, the older women outnumber the older men. Now, gender selection is dramatically turning the tables.


That's probably not just because of war. Look at the population of the Netherlands.

Image

Light blue, seen mostly at the bottom (ages 0-30 and 40-50), means there are more men than women. In the first half of life, men outnumber women in most societies. Light purple, seen at the top, means there are more women than men. This is a known pattern that starts after 70, approximately. Throughout the world, there is a general trend in which men die several years younger than women. There are more widows than widowers in any part of the world. You don't need a war for that.

The rest of your analysis is probably very true.



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26 Jul 2012, 10:49 am

HisDivineMajesty wrote:
Light blue, seen mostly at the bottom (ages 0-30 and 40-50), means there are more men than women. In the first half of life, men outnumber women in most societies. Light purple, seen at the top, means there are more women than men. This is a known pattern that starts after 70, approximately. Throughout the world, there is a general trend in which men die several years younger than women. There are more widows than widowers in any part of the world. You don't need a war for that.

The rest of your analysis is probably very true.


Well, in Vietnam, that "light purple" region seems to start at about 35.

But, you're right. A single bachelor in Florida can be quite a hit in the retirement communities.

Where will the men, particularly in countries with an acute shortage of women, have to go to find virgin brides 10-20 years from now?



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26 Jul 2012, 11:05 am

Apparently, among others, the answer: Djibouti, Zimbabwe, Armenia, Bangladesh, Mauritania, El Salvador, Estonia, Sierra Leone and Russia.
All of those have a lot more women than they have men in the category 15-64. That explains why the Russian mail order bride business means big money.



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26 Jul 2012, 12:06 pm

ArrantPariah wrote:
puddingmouse wrote:
There is a balance between seeking only personal gratification and looking after family life. It's possible to have a practical approach to relationships but at the same time have it as a mutual attraction with equal partners.


The modern concept of romance, heavily promoted by romance novels and movies, tends to work best for people who most closely resemble the movie actors, or who possess the wealth of movie actors.

People at the other end of the spectrum may find the standards set by the movies impossible to achieve.

By the same token, selecting a bride (or being selected as a bride) on-the-spot from among dozens of other prospective brides, where neither party speaks each-other's language, seems a bit rushed, and could entail significant risk. I guess that it works out fine, most of the time. The middle-aged Singaporean man (in the documentary above) really should have brought his mother along to help with the selection, particularly since he was selecting a daughter-in-law for her.

Still, a lot of people are very heavily focused on their jobs and careers, and, in some Asian countries, work very, very long hours with very little time off. They have no time for courtship or other hanky-panky. If they are unattractive and not very wealthy to boot, then a quick 4 days in Ho Chi Minh City might be the best option.


No, equal relationships work out fine in socieities where women are seen as at least close to equals (i.e. not East Asia). I never wanted anything like a movie romance, anyway. I know plenty of couples where it works, and the players involved don't exactly look like actors. 'I'm poor and ugly' isn't an excuse. There are enough poor and ugly women out there. The problem is men not wanting an equal relationship, because it suits them to have a pretty housekeeper that they can also have sex with, instead (and such women are always available due to the relative poverty in other nations). But it's really their loss. I'd argue that men who buy mail order brides in the West, or only use prostitutes, are missing out, as well. There are plenty of women they could have a meaningful relationship with if they lowered their standards and stopped acting so entitled. Their life, though. I understand why some people wouldn't want an equal relationship, but they're not as mythical and unobtainable as people think.

Perhaps it's different in Asia, where women have higher expectations about a man's earning potential. I know as a working class person from a European country that no such expectations exist amongst the bulk of women.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant. I don't think men should be stopped from buying women (and vice versa) as partners. I reserve the right to find it kind of sad, though.


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26 Jul 2012, 12:51 pm

puddingmouse wrote:
Perhaps it's different in Asia, where women have higher expectations about a man's earning potential. I know as a working class person from a European country that no such expectations exist amongst the bulk of women.


I suspect that, given the choice between a highly-paid doctor, a business executive, a janitor, or a disabled man living on disability payments, most European women would prefer the doctor or the business executive. Most US women would, anyway. Maybe European ladies are more egalitarian. :wink:



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26 Jul 2012, 1:44 pm

ArrantPariah wrote:
puddingmouse wrote:
Perhaps it's different in Asia, where women have higher expectations about a man's earning potential. I know as a working class person from a European country that no such expectations exist amongst the bulk of women.


I suspect that, given the choice between a highly-paid doctor, a business executive, a janitor, or a disabled man living on disability payments, most European women would prefer the doctor or the business executive. Most US women would, anyway. Maybe European ladies are more egalitarian. :wink:


Most women would prefer a highly paid man, but what about women who are janitors or on disability? I'll never get why people have such unreasonable expectations.

Men are seen less as providers over here, and I know a lot of relationships where the woman is the breadwinner, and they're happy with that.


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