Many Vietnamese women have become ‘bound’ in their broken marriages with foreign men, mostly Chinese and South Korean, whom they had met after just a couple of meetings through matchmaking.
Unaware of the life after marriage in foreign lands, many of the Vietnamese brides fall into despair and run away from their husband’s families with the legal status of ‘married women’.
Returning back to Vietnam, they cannot officially re-build their own families.
Falling into deadlock
Le Thi Thu Van lives in a small house by the bank of Thoi Xuan Canal in Xuan Thang Commune of Thoi Lai District in the Mekong Delta City of Can Tho.
She has become the victim of a situation partly established by herself in 2008. She agreed to marry a South Korean man after meeting him a couple of times through matchmaking.
She returned to her homeland four years ago after her husband’s family denied her the right to keep and take care of her son.
Losing the right of a mother and being economically dependent, Van decided to free herself by fleeing from her husband and her son to return home.
Although her husband filed a petition for a divorce in South Korea and was approved, Van could not afford to be present in a court there to get a document of divorce.
Van has set up family with a Vietnamese man after the divorce but the relationship has not been acknowledged in Vietnam because she is already married by law.
She has a daughter in the Southeast Asian country but the name of her father is left blank on her birth certificate.
Nguyen Hoang Khai, an official of the commune, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that Van must obtain the document from South Korea to prove her divorce so that she can officially marry another man.
Similar situations have ‘bound’ the lives of many young Vietnamese women.
Huynh Thi Bich Ly, 28, also in Xuan Thang Commune, is another typical case of marriage between Vietnamese women and foreign men through matchmaking.
Huynh Van Sau, the father of Ly, said she married a South Korean man but her husband’s family forced her to divorce to marry another South Korean man. She refused and ran away.
“We were given VND20 million [US$962] from a matchmaker when Ly agreed to marry a Korean husband,” Sau recalled.
Stateless children
Children of such couples also got into trouble due to the broken marriages.
Provinces in the Mekong Delta now have a large number of children whose fathers are foreigners. They are the results of marriages through matchmaking. A 2010 report showed that South Korea had around 35,400 wives coming from Vietnam.
Can Tho City in the delta have around 200 children of those couples, according to local police.
Though bearing foreign nationality and foreign names, the children have almost no knowledge of the country mentioned on their passport because they were taken to Vietnam at early ages by their mothers after suffering broken nuptials.
Despite speaking Vietnamese fluently, the children are not officially admitted into schools in Vietnam because they are not natives by law.
They are not allowed to benefit from allowances for school tuition as local children.
In Vietnam, the children apparently have no chance to be close to their fathers and neither their mothers who often leave the hometown to find jobs in other localities.
In some cases, the Vietnamese mothers sent back children to Vietnam for their relatives to take care of and remained living and working in South Korea or China to earn money.
They can only return home in Vietnam to visit their children once a year.
Although local authorities facilitate to receive them in schools, these children must wait to reach 18 years of age and to be given the nationality of their mothers’ since they do not need the approval of their fathers by then.
It is a really long time for the kids to fully integrate into the local community.
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Đăng ký: VietNam News
