Cheap brides for Sale! Get your bride here!

I'm going to meet my wife's friend's fiancee tonight. This is interesting for more than one reason. Let me explain.

Over the the last five years or so, you see "marriage to a foreigner" signs everywhere. They'll usually say something like "Let's get married" or "Vietnam brides" or something along those lines, and they're normally stretched between trees out in the countryside. Marriage to women from other countries -- China, Vietnam, etc -- has become a huge thing. A massive percentage of rural Korean marriages were with foreign (meaning Asian but not Korean) women.

There's a reason for that: Korea has become a country centered in its cities. Which pretty much leaves Korean farmers in the countryside wishing to get married high and dry. The women desert the rice fields for the cities, and who can blame them? Cinemas, shopping, coffee shops, neon lights! Don't see much of that out in the rice fields. So Korean farmers can't get married. The solution to the problem? Import women.

Such women often have a hard life: the cultures are so different, and problems abound. I often see newspaper articles that detail such problems. On a whole, it doesn't seem like a very good deal, especially for the women.

So. My wife's friend is 48, and unmarried. He imported a bride, paying BIG (!!!) money to do so. The money apparently went to the businessman who set it up, and the woman's family. In this case, the woman is from Vietnam, and from a poor family in the country.

My wife met her last Saturday, and said she was very quiet. She couldn't speak either English or Korean. She's 24 and apparently very short.

We're having dinner tonight in a Vietnamese restaurant downtown. My wife suggested that we show her where the international store was, where she could buy foods from her home country. Her friend's response was (and this is what makes me think this marriage will not work out) "I don't want her to go there. She has to forget her own culture."

Boy, does he have a lot to learn: as one-half of a multicultural marriage, I can say that with some authority. But learn is what he'll have to do, or watch his marriage (later this month) go up in smoke.