'Youth, beauty, virginity & homemaking'
- Source: Global Times
- [13:42 November 05 2009]
- Comments
Selling points
Two girls talk in a park in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo: AFP
Multinational matchmaking agencies promote their Vietnamese product line through traditional time-honored selling points: youth, virginity, beauty and homemaking.
All candidates for sale are 18-25 years old, according to the promotional brochure of the "ASEAN Vietnamese Bride Network". As the legal marriage age for women is 20 in China, the Network has a 15-45 day, $5,500 plan B for marrying an 18-20 year-old Vietnamese.
The would-be groom goes to Vietnam and marries there. He cannot bring his wife back until the newlyweds pass an interview at the immigration office of Vietnam and obtain all the necessary certificates and documents.
The paperwork to marry a 20-25-year-old Vietnamese takes five to 15 days and then the wedding can be held in China. Both single and divorced men must provide the rel-evant official Chinese evidence that they are not married.
The ASEAN Vietnamese Bride Network promises all the young women they supply are "slim and beautiful", even claiming "there is no lack of mixed blood and smooth white complexion" catering to the exotic and traditional beauty mores of Asian culture.
Online shopping for Vietnamese brides is little different from old stories in which men in developed eastern China cities bought wives from western rural regions, according to Shen Yifei, the deputy secretary-general of the Gender and Development Research Center at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Men in need have always bought wives from impoverished areas, Shen told the Global Times. "The business has just developed from domestic sales to international trade," she said.
Photographer Ma Hongjie in 2000 documented the story of a disabled man buying a wife from the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwestern China. His Buying a Wife in the West photo series proved influential.
Buying Vietnamese brides usually occurs on the Chinese borders. "The buyers are 30-40 years-old, poor and marginal men," Han told the Global Times.
First of all, she said, those who buy wives cannot afford to marry a local Chinese wife. Second, as more and more rural women went to the cities, it is getting even harder for men who stay in the village to find a wife.
