COLUMN ONE : Journey Home for a Bride : Men like Henry Phuoc Pham of Garden Grove are returning to Vietnam to find traditional wives.
The wedding was held one sunny day last spring on a wooden porch bedecked with blinking Christmas lights. Barefoot village children lined the street and watched with quiet curiosity.
The bride looked bewildered as she stared into the small crowd of well-wishers. The mustachioed groom, debonair in a white suit with a red bow tie, stole a couple of furtive glances at his new spouse, then looked away uncomfortably when she continued to gaze ahead.
Henry Phuoc Pham and Vo Ngoc Dai were understandably edgy; they had just met 10 days earlier.
“They have every right to be nervous, and I am too because they haven’t known each other very long,” the groom’s mother, Tran Thi Kim, confided to a guest at the wedding held in this rural district about 130 miles southwest of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon.
“But I am also happy that my son is finally starting a family and that he found a wife so soon on this trip home.”
Pham had traveled from Garden Grove to Vietnam to look for a wife. He had spent much of his savings on the trip and had been introduced to three women who, sight unseen, wanted to marry him. But none had appealed to him and he was about to head back when he met Dai.
“I had girlfriends in America, but it all just didn’t work out,” Pham, 34, said. “I thought I’d come home to Vietnam where I could meet someone compatible. And I wanted to make my mother happy. She had been worried for a long time because the last of her three sons was still single and had no wife and children.”
In the five years since travel resumed between Vietnam and the United States, Vietnamese Americans have been steadily returning to visit their homeland. Many are men hoping to find a mate.
Immigration lawyers and travel agents in Orange County, home to the largest Vietnamese community outside of Southeast Asia, estimate that 20 to 25 men return each month looking for wives.
There are many--and complicated--reasons that Viet kieu, or “overseas Vietnamese” as expatriates are called here, seek wives in Vietnam. Most are rooted in the Asian values and traditions in which they were raised.
Some men say they want a “traditional Vietnamese wife,” one who places the happiness and comfort of her parents, husband and children above all else. Such a spouse, they say, would have to be raised in Vietnam and not influenced by Western attitudes.
Some men who say they have not assimilated into the American culture believe they cannot meet some Vietnamese American women’s expectations about education and income.
Other men say the 9-to-5 pace of the Western lifestyle is too hectic and hampers their ability to meet people. In Vietnam, they are more at ease meeting and flirting with women.
“For these expatriates who are ready to settle down, the main reason they come here to seek wives is because it is the easiest course for them, “ said Phan An, a professor of ethnology at the Institute of Social Sciences in Ho Chi Minh City. “They feel it is easier to find a woman who is raised to value her family . . . and who does not--and this is probably the most important reason--find the man’s reason for doing this comical or offensive.
“Many Vietnamese women who are raised in America probably do not and cannot relate to these reasons.”
The Vietnamese American experience is relatively new; the community started making its home in the United States in 1975 after the fall of Saigon. However, the practice of emigres turning to their homelands for spouses dates to America’s birth.
Not only was it popular with Asian American groups such as the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, but European Americans such as the Germans, Scandinavians and British also have looked homeward, says Marion Goldman, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.
In the 19th Century, Cornish miners would return to their English villages to look for wives, she says, because the single women in America’s mining towns were not considered suitable.
“A lot of these men were concerned with respectability,” said Goldman, who in 1981 published a book called “Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode.” “In the 19th Century,” she adds, “having a trustworthy wife partly meant marrying a religious woman . . . and a woman who had not had relationships with other men.”
An says most Vietnamese Americans who seek wives back home want to maintain a connection to their que cha, dat to, or land of their fathers, earth of their ancestors. When a man yearns for “a traditional Vietnamese wife,” An said, “it is not so much for one who cooks his rice, cleans the house and watches after the children--although that is a part of it--as it is someone who will strengthen his memory, his mentality of the land he left behind.”
Women who marry Americans also benefit. Many see the union as their ticket out of the Communist country and a visa to a better life. Even if a wife decides to remain in Vietnam--which is not uncommon--marriage to a Viet kieu means her standard of living will improve dramatically.
Twenty-year-old “Anh” was excited at the prospect of being interviewed for this story, but also nervous that she might say something wrong, something that would offend her husband, “Nguyen,” who is in the process of sponsoring her move to the United States. In an interview at her home in Ho Chi Minh City, Anh insisted that neither she, nor her husband who lives in Southern California, be identified.
A relative introduced Anh to Nguyen, who is more than 10 years her senior. The first time they met in early 1992, Nguyen told Anh she was pretty. He also told her he wanted a wife, but he was leaving that week. Perhaps she would consider marrying him? He would probably be back within a year. He would write and call her in the meantime.
The two got married after 10 months and lots of letters and phone calls.
“Why should I be bothered that he came home to look for someone to be his wife?” Anh asked, clearly puzzled at the question. “A lot of Vietnamese men do that, we all know that. All of us would like to get married, and it is nice when we have a chance to marry someone who could bring us to America.”
The young woman wants to come to the United States. “It’s not poor like Vietnam is,” said Anh, a street vendor who gives her parents the money she earns selling noodle soup. “My husband will take care of me there; I won’t have to work as hard and worry if my family will have enough food for the week.”
Hung Joseph Vu, a 42-year-old real estate agent from Midway City, had worried that Vietnamese women would only be attracted to him because of his American money and Viet kieu status. Ma My Van, the 23-year-old he met in a dance club, dispelled his fears when she told him she didn’t want to immigrate to the United States and leave her parents. They were married in March, and Vu divides time between the countries on three-month tourist visas.
Vu once was married to a Vietnamese American. He blames the breakup of that 10-year marriage on cultural differences. If his ex-wife had not been raised in the United States, he says, their marriage would not have ended in divorce.
Vu says the beginning of the end of their relationship came about three years ago when his real estate office wasn’t making money. His then-wife wanted him to change professions; he didn’t. She suggested she get a job; he scoffed.
“She wanted me to just settle for flipping hamburgers, pumping gas,” Vu said. “She wanted to start working, and not stay home with me. That wasn’t the supportive wife I married.”
After the breakup, Vu dated extensively. He vowed that when he remarried, his new wife would have been raised in Vietnam.
During a 1992 visit, Vu found Van. He courted her--via letters--for 18 months after he returned to the United States.
Vu is pleased that Van wants to remain in Vietnam with her parents; it is “a proof,” he said, of her love for him and not his ability to bring her to America. His new wife’s decision also ensures “she won’t be changed by American ways,” he said.
Some Western feminists may find such statements jarring. But Emily Honig, a professor of women’s studies and history at UC Santa Cruz, says that what may be offensive to American women is considered normal to some women from other cultures.
“It’s so patronizing to say that I find this practice deplorable or insulting,” said Honig, whose research focuses on 20th-Century Chinese women but who also teaches about women in the Third World.
“What we should understand is that even if some of these men are looking for a traditional wife--whatever traditional may mean to them--the women, by marrying these men to go to a better life, are by no means the passive victims we’re assuming that they are. They actually come up as quite calculating . . . in that they are manipulating the situations that actually promote their own interests.”
Despite all the planning and cultural support that goes into these marriages, the relationships sometimes fall apart when they hit U.S. soil.
“Husband and wife frequently get disillusioned because they realize all is not what they thought it would be,” said Mai Cong, who chairs the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc., a refugee service center.
Some men become disappointed and angry when their “traditional” wives adapt to the progressive ways of their new country. “The women will want to get jobs, maybe go back to school to better themselves,” Cong said. “If the husband is insecure, he will try to prevent her from doing so. No happy endings here if there is no compromise.”
Often, it is the women who become disenchanted.
In impoverished Vietnam where stories about the richness of America abound, people sometimes dream unrealistically of what their new life will be like.
One woman who this year joined her husband in the United States wrote home of her rude awakening. Her story was mirthfully reported in Cong An , a government newspaper in Ho Chi Minh City.
According to the newspaper, a man from California had typed “ danh ca ,” meaning “fisherman,” on an immigration form requiring a job description. Because his typewriter had no accent marks--which can give the same Vietnamese word different meanings--his wife believed she had married a singer. The husband never corrected her misconception. On her arrival in California, she wrote home bemoaning the unglamorous fate of a fisherman’s wife.
The impersonal, not to mention unromantic, idea of Vietnamese American men leaving the United States in search of a spouse may raise some eyebrows. But the practice is perfectly legal, immigration officials say.
The new couple must use records, letters and other material to prove to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service that their relationship is long-term and legitimate. Given the red tape, it takes nine months to three years before a spouse can come to the United States.
Despite this stringent process, fraud can occur. In both Orange County and Vietnam, stories are told about Viet kieu men who are paid to marry or become engaged, just to bring women to the United States.
On the other hand, Vietnamese community leaders talk about one man who arrived to meet his bride at Los Angeles International Airport with a dozen red roses only to watch her blithely wave goodby before she left with friends for San Jose.
How many of these Viet kieu marriages will succeed?
“It’s too soon to tell because people have only been doing this in the past five or so years,” Mai Cong said. “But marriages of convenience are nothing new in our culture, and they have worked for centuries.”
“Time has changed and life here in the U.S. is different, so no doubt people will change as well,” Cong added. “Many things can go wrong, but if people are willing to take the chance, why not?”
“I know there are risks,” said Henry Phuoc Pham, the groom from Garden Grove. “But many of my friends have done it and it works for them.”
After years of bachelorhood, Pham was ready to settle down. Vo Ngoc Dai wouldn’t talk about why she married a man she barely knew. But her relatives said she did it to please her mother, who wanted her youngest daughter to have a comfortable life far away from a thatched hut in a Vietnamese village.
To hear the couple recount the prelude to their wedding, it almost seems romantic.
Pham had gone to Dai’s tailor hut to have a suit made. He noticed the seamstress’s demure smile and eyes that wouldn’t quite meet his as she shyly took his measurements.
After he picked up the suit the next day, the manicurist casually told Dai that he was looking for a wife. When he returned on the third day--his slacks were a tad too big and needed hemming--Pham stuttered out a proposal. Dai said she had to ask her mother first.
Within a week, the two were married.
“It’s really not as fast and hurried as it sounds,” said Dai, 24, several days after the wedding. “We talked extensively for a couple of hours each of those days, so we did have an opportunity to get to know each other.”
The mothers of the bride and groom are concerned about the brevity of the courtship, but each says she is pleased with the match and with the way her child would benefit.
“I can now rest easy when my son goes back to the U.S.,” said Tran Thi Kim, 72, who lives in Ho Chi Minh City. “My son will have a wife who will take care of him.”
Huynh Thi Le, 58, said her daughter “knows how lucky she is to have this chance to go to America. But (Pham) is also blessed because he has a wife who was brought up to cherish the family.”
“The marriage is a good one and has all of our blessings,” Le added. “Bride and groom both get everything that they want.”