The victims of marriages between Vietnamese brides and foreigners who meet and marry each other after a couple of meetings via matchmaking, are not always the brides.

Many Vietnamese brides who are already divorcées intentionally come to matchmakers to meet foreign men, mostly Chinese and South Korean. They are seeking marriages with foreigners merely for money.

Even worse, the brides have ‘tactics’ to separate from their husbands to marry others and take advantage of the difference of laws in the two countries to bring troubles to their husbands by refusing to sign documents of divorce.

Looking for wife to divorce

A Chinese man named Ly Trang, 47, from the central Chinese province of Hubei, came to Vietnam in early May to look for his Vietnamese wife, Nguyen Thi Thuy H., who is in her 30s.

Ly told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that he ‘bought’ the Vietnamese woman residing in Tan Phu District of the southern Vietnamese province of Dong Nai for 60,000 Chinese Yuan Renminbi, or US$9,700, two years ago.

The mechanic honestly admitted that he knew nothing of his wife before marrying her, except that she had had a husband and divorced him before meeting Ly.

Ly met Thuy H. and came to Thanh Tho 3 Hamlet in Dong Nai’s Phu Lam Commune to marry her via a matchmaker in Hubei, he said.

The Chinese recalled he was happily living with her in China for the first year when she was not fluent in Chinese.

After she could communicate fluently with locals and knew the streets in Hubei, she insisted on returning to Vietnam. Ly refused and she asked for a divorce and left Hubei for the Southeast Asian country early this year.

He had to travel to Vietnam for the second time to look for his wife.

“Initially, I just wanted to take her back to Hubei because we haven’t had a child after two years. It cost me a large sum to have her and I haven’t paid off my debts,” Ly said frankly. “But I am tired of her now.”

He said he came to her house in Thanh Tho 3 but did not meet her. A woman in the hamlet took him to local authorities to report the case but they could not help because their marriage was not registered in Vietnam and Vietnamese authorities were not officially informed of their marriage being approved by their Chinese counterparts.

Being tired of spending such a long time in Vietnam looking for his wife, Ly said now he just wants to meet her to have her signature for divorce on returning to Hubei.

Otherwise, it will take a longer time for Hubei authorities to try his case in absentia, Ly noted.

Many Vietnamese brides intentionally decide not to register their marriages in Vietnam to prepare for the ‘legal situation of divorce later’. That way, they can jump to other foreign men within months to recycle a new marriage.

The case of Ly Trang and Thuy H. is definitely not a rare case.

Another Vietnamese woman named Be Em, 35, in Co Do District of Can Tho City in the Mekong Delta married two Chinese men by that way, certainly one after the other.

Be Em said she married a Vietnamese husband and divorced him soon after that. Then she married a man from Fujian in the southeast of China. She left him after six months and returned to Vietnam for three months before marrying another man, also in Fujian.

Less than a year after that, her neighbors in Co Do saw her return.

“I asked the latter to divorce but he refused, so I just came home,” Be Em said bluntly. “If he dares to come here, he must beg me so that he can have my signature for divorce.”

Kneeling to wife’s family to ask for his child

In the last four months in O Mon District of Can Tho, locals have known of the case of a Taiwanese man named Cheng Yin Chun, 26.

He married an O Mon girl named Tran Hoai T. four years ago and has a son who is three years old.

One day, Hoai T. suddenly carried their son back to Vietnam, returned to Taiwan alone, and moved her luggage to live in a different house.

He said his wife was granted a Taiwanese passport, has a stable job, and wants to stop the matrimony with him.

Missing his son, Cheng and his parents flew to Can Tho to beg his parents-in-law to take the child back to Taiwan but he was rejected.

Neighbors said they often saw Cheng Yin Chun kneel in the morning in front of the house to be allowed to receive his son back.

He said he asked for help from lawyers but was informed that there is a difference in laws between Vietnam and Taiwan, which is definitely not in his favor.

Vietnamese laws do not consider the act of separating a son from his father a crime of kidnapping. And even in the case of divorce, an infant of three years old or younger must be kept by his mother.

Nguyen Thi Phuong Thu, chief registrar of the Can Tho Department of Justice, said that it is not rare to see a Vietnamese bride take her children home against the will of her husband.

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