Many women on a so-called “Taiwanese island,” located off the southern Vietnamese city of Can Tho, have now given up on their dreams of turning over a new leaf by marrying foreigners and settling in their husbands’ home countries. 

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Over 10 years ago, a wave of women marrying foreigners hit Tan Loc Island, now known as Tan Loc Ward, which is administered by Thot Not District.

The locality has since been dubbed “Taiwanese island,” as the number of local women getting married to Taiwanese men and living in their husbands’ homeland ranked among the highest compared to others across the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam.

According to Do Trung Ngon, vice chair of the Tan Loc Ward People’s Committee, Tan Loc Island is around 32 square kilometers in area.

Prior to 1990, locals earned their living by growing sugar cane, processing it into sugar, and making honey wine.

However, the craft ended in bankruptcy due to a lack of modern technology.

The fad of marrying foreigners shaped up in this “dark age,” Ngon said.

Girls from families whose business fell apart or from a poor background and with inadequate schooling then ventured out and married Taiwanese men, who were generous enough to provide their in-laws with money to buy motorbikes and build houses.

Rumors soon spread and brought on a new trend.

The local government later shifted the locality’s economy and provided auspicious conditions to develop different crafts and farming businesses in order to create more jobs for local women.

Farmers gradually came up with the island’s new specialty produce including plums, mangos, guavas, and various kinds of vegetables.

Several craft villages of weaving, sewing, seafood processing, and fine arts came into being around the same time.

Nguyen Phuoc Thu, the owner of a two-hectare plum orchard who hires some 10 workers a day, is positive that there are plenty of seasonal jobs on the island now, as crops of rice, guavas, and peanuts keep alternating within a year.

“Labor corporations” are formed and recruit between 70 and 80 hands, who are mostly women.

Abundant, well-paid jobs have considerably improved Tan Loc women’s incomes and boosted their optimism about a bright future within reach right in their hometown.

That has also helped deter them from gambling on their life by marrying foreigners and living far away from home.

“I find it much more reassuring to marry a person from the same locality. I can also stay near my parents and relish the plain yet priceless familial and nuptial bliss,” Kim Trinh, a local woman, said.

She added that she is paid over VND100,000 (US$5) for picking plums for some hours, and joins her husband in growing vegetables on their 1,500m² land plot.

Le Thi Kieu Lam, of Tan Loc Ward’s Women Association, divulged that in the past few years, her association has offered free training and kits for embroidery, cooking, and makeup work to some hundreds of women.

Many of them now work for textile companies or earn over VND250,000 ($11.4) per day as seamstresses, Lam added.

The woman noted that over the past several years, she and other members of her association have been active in providing counseling for women who plan to marry foreigners.

“We’re neither supportive of nor against their intentions to tie the knot with foreigners. We mostly supply them with adequate information and sound advice instead and leave the final decisions to them. Fortunately, around eight out of every 10 women who receive our counseling have been put off the insecure prospect of marrying foreigners so far,” she added.

According to Thot Not District’s Women Association, as of January 2015, over 3,000 women in the district were married to foreigners. Among them, 1,680 wed Taiwanese, while 1,198 others espoused South Koreans.        

Thirty-two of the 3,000 brides later returned to their hometown for good or are re-married.

“The number of women marrying foreigners tends to be on the steep decline. Previously over 100 women in the district did so per annum, and the figure dropped to only 45 last year. Over 60 percent of local women give up on their dreams of marrying foreigners each year,” said Nguyen Kim Phuong, the association’s chair.

Le Thi Hang was one of Tan Loc Island’s first women to marry a Taiwanese and moved with him to his country 17 years ago.

Hang, now 40, runs a thriving business in Taiwan and is blissfully married with a 15-year-old son.

Over the years, she has sent home quite a lot of money to help her parents pay off their debts, build their current house, and contribute to the construction of bridges and roads in their neighborhood.

Hang, who said she will move back to her hometown later, said that much of the inherent social stigma against women marrying foreigners has now been removed.

Many other Vietnamese brides are not as fortunate as Hang.

In recent years, there're relentless reportings of such women suffering brutal domestic violence and sexual abuse by their foreign husbands and in-laws, with some even losing their lives.

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