July 6, 2011
By Bryan Kay, Correspondent
The Christian Science Monitor
Seoul, South Korea
To put it simply, says Renalyn Mulato, the daughter of a Filipina immigrant married to a South Korean man here, the key to happiness in her multicultural home is love and understanding.
That may seem like a painfully obvious prerequisite for most marriages, but for many immigrants in South Korea, it doesn’t always work that way.
South Korea has been grappling with shifting demographics that have left many middle-aged men – particularly in the countryside – cut adrift amid a potential-wife deficit in a country that prizes the rosy picture of marriage.
As young – and now assertive – Korean women flock from their hometowns for careers in the big cities, the men left behind are increasingly looking overseas for brides. That has meant an influx from poorer Asian nations such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Mongolia. Government figures show the number of Koreans marrying foreign spouses increased from 4,710 in 1990 to 33,300 in 2009. And numbers are expected to continue rising.
This influx of foreigners has sped up multiculturalism in Korea. But many of those marriages don’t turn out well, as shown by a few recent incidents of violence.
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