Sunday September the 27th
KBS News
Article by Yun Ji-yeon
During international matchmaking, “men conceal their jobs while women conceal their family relationships”
Korean men and foreign women are confronting each other through mediation services regarding the situation of the men’s jobs and the women’s relationships with their families. A survey by an international marriage brokerage shows that, in the last three years since 2012, among 800 men surveyed 16.8% of them and among 402 female marriage immigrants surveyed 8.1% of them had received information about their spouse [before marriage] which turned out not to be true. The situation for men was that information about their spouse’s dependent children and care for their parents [had not been provided accurately] and for women their spouse’s earnings and job were cited [as information which had not been accurately provided].
Because of this 39.7% of the male [survey respondents or of those who had experienced problems? The Korean is not clear] and 26.2% of the female respondents [ditto] had experienced conflict in their marriages.
According to the laws governing international marriage brokerage, from 2010 marriage brokerages have been required to furnish spouses with personal information concerning the situation of those they are introduced to.
Analysis: for many rural Korean men, their only realistic prospect of marriage is getting married to a woman from a developing nation looking to emigrate to Korea. Traditionally oldest sons of a family bear the responsibility for care of parents in old age, and so many rural men are forced to remain in the countryside while young women typically head for the opportunities offered in big cities. Women from countries including China, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam and Mongolia have entered into agency-brokered marriages in significant numbers over the last ten years, but as the article makes clear these unions are by no means guaranteed to be happy.
Apart from all the issues mentioned in the article, and the obvious problems one might expect with a marriage entered into on the basis of a short correspondence or brief face-to-face meeting, there are several specific attributes to Korean-international rural marriages which have led to high rates of divorce, domestic violence and reported unhappiness. Many of the women from other Asian countries travelling to Korea are avid fans of Korean music and television, and have therefore based their impression of Korean men on the sensitive and charming characters they’ve seen and listened to. Finding themselves in a relationship with a conservative rural man who may not have had much experience with women – and who expects them to take care of his ageing and equally-conservative parents – often comes as an unpleasant shock. The key role of alcohol as a recreation and stress-valve in Korean life tends to exacerbate these problems. Korean husbands, for their part, are often frustrated and disappointed with their new wives’ slowness at learning the Korean language and mastering the dizzying array of social conventions which accompany life there. Additionally, while attitudes are changing, many Koreans still frown on mixed-heritage marriages and aren’t slow to make their opinions known. (However, mixed-race children are much more common in rural schools than in big cities, due to this ongoing demographic trend of international marriage by rural Korean men. Some rural schools have a majority of mixed-race students.)