“These girls don't want to be with poor guys because those kinds of men do nothing to help their wives and children. ” —Hang Nga, Marriage Broker
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Kelly McEvers
When I first met Hang Nga, all she could do was giggle. She had just walked out of a back office at an open-air coffee shop in Hai Duong, an hour's drive from Vietnam's capital, Hanoi. When she saw me, she covered her face and laughed.
"She's shy," said my interpreter, Thuy. "She doesn't want to talk."
Oh no, I thought, and gave Thuy a look.
"Don't worry," said Nga's boss, Yong-jae Cho, following Nga out of the office. Tall and smiling and confident, he motioned me to a chair. "She will talk." He then sat Nga down, ordered juices and thick, dark, sweet, iced coffees, and whispered in Nga's ear.
"What we do is not illegal," Cho said after a few minutes. "So there is no need for her to be afraid. Besides, it's good for our business to publicize what we do!"
Even still, we decided to take it slowly.
Nga told us how she moved to Seoul, South Korea, when her Vietnamese husband started an import-export business there. She studied Korean language and eventually worked as a translator for Vietnamese girls who'd married Korean men and settled in Seoul.
In 2007, Nga and her husband returned to Vietnam. One day she was riding on a bus, speaking Korean on the phone. A man approached her and asked her how she learned Korean. That man was Cho.
"He told me he had a trading business... and also a marriage business," Nga told us, with a grin.
For years Cho had been running a business to pair South Korean men with Vietnamese women. But he was looking for a new Vietnamese partner. He offered Nga a job for $1,000 a month — a huge salary in Vietnam. Nga talked it over with her husband and finally accepted.
When I first heard about the idea, I was mildly disgusted. I could just picture it: dozens of girls, lined up in party dresses with numbers pinned to their chests, like I had seen in brothels and karaoke halls during my time as a reporter in Southeast Asia. Then a man swoops in, points to the prettiest girl, and whisks her away to a country where she has no friends or family and doesn't speak the language. In other words, all business and no love.
For the people involved, though, the process is more practical than it is appalling. For them it's a question of numbers. In rapidly developing countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and parts of China, falling birthrates and a preference for male offspring means there's a shortage of women. In poorer countries like Vietnam and Cambodia, an abundance of women from struggling, rural families look to marriage as a way to improve their economic standing.
That's where Cho and Nga come in. They say they're just here to help these two groups find each other.
Of course, it's not quite so straightforward. To find the girls in the first place, Cho and Nga have to rely on a network of “madames.” These are women who recruit poor Vietnamese women from the countryside. If a woman is chosen to marry a Korean man, her family must pay the madame a fee — usually more than $1,000. Poor families often take out high-interest loans to pay for this, on the promise that their daughters will send money home once they reach South Korea. Which, in fact, they generally do.
Sadly, there's not always a happy ending for the brides. Some shady madames match brides with fake grooms, and after the couple is married, the bride never sees the man again. Instead, she is shipped to South Korea and forced to work without pay — in a factory, or, worse, in a brothel.
I asked Nga about the madames, and she giggled again.
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