Mail Order Brides

Duke Nguyen denied being married. His Vietnamese friends and his coworkers at Tepanyaki Restaurant said that his wife had just arrived in February but he denied everything. He simply said that he wasn’t married. I found it odd that so many around him said that he was married while he simply said that he was single. Duke, born to Vietnamese immigrants and fluent in Vietnamese, wasn’t the last choice of someone who would “order” a Vietnamese bride. One night he was trying to persuade his fellow coworkers, me being one of them, to pick up a woman from the Springville Wal-Mart nail salon where she works. When finally asked point blank if this were Duke’s new wife he sat down and spilled his story. He said that he had denied that he was married because it was hard on him. He had gone to Vietnam the year before and met his wife; the INS requires proof that you have met your spouse and then normally about a year has to pass before a visa is granted. But Duke said that he already regretted his choice and wanted a divorce. He admitted to sleeping on the couch for sometime although his wife had been living with him for only about a month.

When one hears the term mail order bride, it is hard not to picture a woman being sold like the slaves of old. But that is not how mail order marriages work. In this paper, the term mail order bride will be used to identify a woman that has agreed to a marriage with little or no physical contact with their future husband and traveled to a distant region, especially a more industrialized nation to live. I have never heard of a man who has admitted ordering a bride; in the sense that they exchanged money for her, and then had himself a marriage. And the same would be true for the women. No woman thinks of herself as a commodity that can be sold. The very act, under U.S. law, is illegal and the marriage contract would become null and void. Li Ming a Filipino mail order bride is quoted as saying, “What’s a mail-order bride? [laughs] I never heard of that…I’m not selling myself [sounds offended] No! Of course not. That would be like a prostitute! (Constable 72)

History

Many think that mail order brides are something new. It is true that the popularity of such marriages have exploded in recent years with the rapid growth of the internet. In the 90’s most people probably thought of South East Asians as the stereotypical mail order bride. Filipinas were the most popular, even serving as the cast of the movie Mail Order Wife. But with the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Russian women (Russian serving as a label for women from the former Soviet Union) are quickly becoming the most popular mail order bride. In 1999 Filipinas were granted the most fiancé marriages with Russians quickly behind. (Luehrmann 873 footnote 14). It is my assumption that Russians have taken over as the most populous of mail order brides, or at least they are the most advertised, especially on the internet.