Seeking overseas husbands

TAN LOC ISLAND, Vietnam — Nearly 70 young Vietnamese women swept past in groups of five, twirling and posing like fashion models, all competing for the hand of a Taiwanese man who had paid a matchmaking service about $6,000 for the privilege of marrying one of them.

Sporting jeans and a black T-shirt, 20-year-old Le Thi Ngoc Quyen paraded in front of the stranger, hoping he would select her.

“I felt very nervous,” she recalled recently as she described the scene. “But he chose me, and I agreed to marry him right away.”

Like many women from the Mekong Delta island of Tan Loc, Mrs. Quyen had concluded that finding a foreign husband was her best route out of poverty. Six years later, she has a beautiful daughter and no regrets.

From the delta in Vietnam’s south to small rural towns in the north, a growing number of young Vietnamese women are marrying foreigners, mostly from Taiwan and South Korea.

They seek material comfort and, most important, a way to save their parents from destitution in old age, which many Vietnamese consider their greatest duty.

Mrs. Quyen has not gotten rich - her husband earns a modest living as a construction worker - but the couple paid off her father’s debts.

I take this woman

Young women have become Tan Loc’s most lucrative export. Roughly 1,500 village women from the island of 33,000 people have married foreigners in the past decade, leading some to call it Taiwan Island.

Women in Tan Loc and other delta towns began marrying foreigners in the 1990s, when Vietnam opened up economically and many Taiwanese and South Korean firms set up operations in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s southern business hub.

Poverty and the proximity of foreign businessmen seem to be major reasons for the trend. The biggest complaints come from women’s groups, who consider it demeaning, and from young village men for whom the pool of potential brides is shrinking.

With money from foreign sons-in-law, many residents in Tan Loc have replaced their thatch-roof shacks with brick homes. They also have opened small restaurants and shops, creating jobs in a place where people have traditionally earned pennies a day picking rice and other crops in the blistering sun.

The luckier families received enough to build ponds for fish farming.

Western Union has opened a branch to handle the money sent by newlyweds.

“At least 20 percent of the families on the island have been lifted out of poverty,” said Phan An, a university professor who has done extensive research in Tan Loc. “There has been a significant economic impact.”

Story Continues →