More and more Taiwanese men reach the age of marriage but cannot find spouse in Taiwan, they consider cross-cultural marriage. Generally, their social status is lower than the average. Most of them don’t receive decent education, so they usually cannot find a well-paid job to make their living. Therefore, they often have difficulties getting their lifelong companions, unless they try marriage agency.
Some men seek for foreign brides partly is because that they don’t want to go through the whole process of courtship. Being tired of playing love games with women, they speed up the slow procedure of courting, and transformed it into a drive-through－browsing through thousands of women’s pictures, order one that they feel pleased with, pay the agency money, and then drive away with their “meal.” The sacred marriage has changed into a commodity of export and import: Southeast Asia women exports to Taiwan.
To go deeper, we find that most of these men are actually looking for someone who can bear them children, earn money to support their family, and most of all, they want a young, beautiful, and docile woman who can take good care of them, an all year round nurse or maid, and not an expensive one. In other words, what they want is a wife at their commands, a multifunctional machine that can satisfy all their needs. Local women naturally were eliminated on these men’s lists, because few young local women will want to marry an old man with nothing, these men know that, so they turn round and embrace brides from Vietnam, Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Mainland China.
Taiwanese men marry foreign brides for their own reasons, and vice versa. Foreign brides also take advantage of their coupling with Taiwanese men. Marrying Taiwanese men brings these foreign women certain amount of financial wealth and they can send money back to their hometown to improve their family’s economic situation. That is to say, both sides get married not purely because of love, but for many other considerations. This not only distorts the true meanings of marriage, but also destroys the relationships between males and females. Taiwanese men looking for foreign wives only because foreign wives are easier to be tamed; foreign females marry men in Taiwan because that ensures them a relatively better life.
This current model of marriage greatly influences Taiwanese women. Statistics show that there are more and more highly-educated men choose to marry foreign brides, so Taiwanese women find it harder to find men of a better social background as their husbands. And it creates many social problems that will possibly affect the whole society in some ways.
Here is a clip of Taiwan’s presidential candidate’s remark about China brides.
His speech provoked many China brides. They protested against his racial discrimination of their marriages with Taiwanese men. They said that some interracial couples get married because they love, cherish, and want to spend the rest of their life with each other. He shouldn’t price their marriage, and even claimed that they are “cheap.” This clip reflects that most Taiwanese people look down on interracial couples, especially the China-Taiwan couples, because many people still regard China brides as enemies. Well, we hope this video can change your viewpoint of these foreign brides. We have to show our respect to them, for they have to suffer others’ judgmental eyes and uneasily acclimatize themselves to life in Taiwan, it is not an easy job.
References:
“金門根本文采工作室” . 金門日報. 4 September, 2002. 21 June,
2008 < http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/09/ >.
王明輝. “外籍婚姻下的「新台灣人」”. 21 June, 2008
< htp://tsa.sinica.edu.tw/Imform/file1/2003meeting/113010_1.pdf >.
藍雅萍、林詩屏. “臺灣外籍新娘的研究” 21 June, 2008
< http://www.shs.edu.tw/works/essay/2006/10/2006102609515719.pdf >.
written by Esther.
