by Khải Đơn
weddings—which promised new houses to
their indigent parents—they show us money cannot buy
happiness even though they starve from drought and crop
failures; We chant om in yoga poses munching
imported almonds and keto meal plans, dropping
fat from outsized waists, symptom of wealth.
The brides relieve their parents’ hunger—offering themselves
to foreign husbands in catalogues—who do not even speak the same language,
no courting, no love; we scoff. We got married to the husbands
devoted to homes, where they returned, wrecked
on whiskey—lipstick on their necks
Our sons shrugged—obsolete mothers perturbing their lives;
by then, we post contented family
pictures assuring our wholesomeness,
not like those brides selling their bodies.
If I were a farmer’s daughter, an incubus of hunger of Mekong
I had scavenged dusty fields and depleted rivers for jasmine
rice and fresh tilapia, if I could mix papaya salad
in our dilapidated stilt home, I would marry a husband of the
same language and we’d insult each other for
the rest of our lives in our mother tongue.
Khải Đơn: Since 2005, over 6,000 Vietnamese women a year have married South Korean men. In 2007, I visited an island in the Mekong Delta called Tan Loc. At the time, local people called the island “Korean Island” because of the number of young women who had married South Koreans and moved to South Korea with them. Attitudes towards these women are hostile and humiliating. Newspapers in Vietnam and overseas have smeared them as gold-diggers, scam artists, or even prostitutes. For instance, The New York Times ran the headline “For Some in Vietnam, Prosperity Is a South Korean Son-in-Law”, implying that money was the only motivation for these women. Urban intellectuals such as writers and artists looked down on these brides of foreign men, believing them to be shameless women wanting to get rich quickly.
After a month living on the island and interviewing families, I realised there was another side to their stories. The young women, inculcated with the Confucian notion of a good daughter, have to “repay” her parents with a better life. In many cases, young daughters decided to marry foreigners because their parents were in huge debt and unable to pay it off, and marriage was the only option left to save the family. In other cases, rural Vietnamese women didn’t want to fall into a vicious cycle of marriage to local men, who might be unemployed, alcoholic or abusive towards their wives and children. They found that meeting new people from far away might bring them a happier future. My poem employs the stereotypes bandied by newspapers and social media that mischaracterise Vietnamese brides in foreign countries. I don’t believe the public should have anything to say about those young women who dedicate their lives or even their bodies to their beloved families because their own country hasn’t provided them with a better education, better employment opportunities, or better life choices.
Published: Saturday 13 November 2021
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Khải Đơn (Phạm Lan Phương) is a Vietnamese writer inspired by the Mekong River. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Singapore Unbound, Orion Magazine, and The Architectural Review. She is learning to write nonfiction at San Jose State University (SJSU). She won the Academy of American Poets/Virginia de Araujo Prize in 2021 at SJSU.