One killed herself. Another was beaten to death. A third was divorced after her duty as a surrogate mother was fulfilled.
No, these are not stories about ill-fated black women before slavery was prohibited in the United States. These are tales about Vietnamese women married to Koreans over the past few years ― tragedies that might recur unless something is done and very quickly.
It all started when some rural officials tried the job of matchmaking for bachelors not fortunate enough to win Korean spouses, by seeking brides in China, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Their intention was good enough, but things didn't always go as well as they might have hoped, particularly because of their money-thirsty agents. For these brokers, marriage is not the bonding of two people with their own personalities but a business transaction, and a very slapdash one at that.
Signs hung on regional roads advertise such phrases as ``Vietnamese brides never run away," or ``Even the handicapped can have virgins.'' When the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination cited these as the examples of rights abuse and human trafficking recently, Korea's international image hit a new rock bottom.
The Vietnamese are not alone, and there are many similar stories of Filipinos, Mongols and Kazaks, among others, about 50 of whom visit a counseling center for migrant wives in Seoul each day. This is too much, although one in almost three marriages in rural areas involved a foreign spouse last year.
In Sweden, one of the advanced group of nations Korea wants to join, the government provides foreign wives with a free, six-month program, which teaches language and other essential knowledge for living in their new homeland. The training period is regarded as leave, during which time the government subsidizes their living.
If this scenario sounds too far-fetched, our government should at least get tougher in cracking down on unlicensed marriage brokers. A bill on this and other matters for improving the treatment of migrant wives, submitted by Rep. Kim Chun-jin of the Unified Democratic Party, has been sleeping at the National Assembly since 2005. Parliament should waste no more time. Before that, however, local officials need to at least remind the would-be bridegrooms that they are not ``buying'' their brides but choosing lifetime partners.
All this must have something to do with Koreans' xenophobia based on fictitious ideology that they are a homogeneous people, while there are as many as 25 sub-races in this nation. In addition, the inferiority complex and paranoia, rooted in their experiences of so many foreign invasions, are presented in two contrasting ways ― unfounded awe of white people and the even more groundless contempt for people with a darker skin.
``We didn't have the capacity to realize the small, pretty dream of a Vietnamese bride to become a wife in this country,'' said judge Kim Sang-jun of the Daejeon High Court, before sentencing the wife-killing husband to 12 years in prison. ``We all must confess to inner barbarity trapped under the guise of an economic, cultural power of the 21st century."