Vietnamese Brides go to Korea

Posted on February 22, 2007
Filed Under Vietnam |

I found this story fascinating. There is plenty of room for exploitation in a system of marriage brokers. But having lived in Vietnam & read a bit of Vietnamese literature, I can tell you that there have always been such brokers & that the Vietnamese are in some ways quite unsentimental about marriage. They are also deeply committed — even sentimental — about the extended family. The Times reporter does a nioce job of showing that marriage in Vietnam (& presumably Korea, which I know much less about) is not so much a relationship between two individuals as between two families. And the bits of local color in the story made me nostalgic for Hanoi.