How much does age difference really matter?

[driftwood]

I was listening to a story on Marketplace about a Vietnamese Marriage Broker. At the end of the story the female marriage broker said she would not want her daughter to go through this type of service but what was important for her daughter was "the man should love my child, be well educated and polite and not too much different in age".

 

I know the story is about Vietnam, but are the cultural difference that far off from Thailand. I know people who swear up and down the any age difference does not matter in Thailand, but the more I see for myself the more I don't believe it. Where I'm from there is a loose rule of thumb of half your age + 10 is considered acceptable. Is their a Thai (or Asian) equivalent to this, or is this a total western notion?

 

You have to listen to the story with the link on the web page to hear the above quote, it is not in the web page text.

 

 

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/segments/working/marriagebroker.html

 

When I first met Hang Nga, all she could do was giggle. She had just walked out of a back office at an open-air coffee shop in Hai Duong, an hour's drive from Vietnam's capital, Hanoi. When she saw me, she covered her face and laughed.

 

...... When I first heard about the idea, I was mildly disgusted. I could just picture it: dozens of girls, lined up in party dresses with numbers pinned to their chests, like I had seen in brothels and karaoke halls during my time as a reporter in Southeast Asia. Then a man swoops in, points to the prettiest girl, and whisks her away to a country where she has no friends or family and doesn't speak the language. In other words, all business and no love.

[Hugh_Hoy]

clicked link: "page not found".

 

HH

[cavanami]

...another reporter parachuting in to expose the evils in SE Asia!

[HeartThais]

Where I'm from there is a loose rule of thumb of half your age + 10 is considered acceptable. Is their a Thai (or Asian) equivalent to this, or is this a total western notion?

 

The feeling I get in Western cultures is that the age difference limit exists to chastise the older man seen to be taking advantage of a younger, inexperienced girl. So, once a girl gets past a certain age, let's say 27, the age difference doesn't matter.

 

In Asia, the age difference is embarrassing for the girl because it means that either she isn't attractive enough for a younger man or that she's desperate to get married. Same for a man who marries an even slightly older girl. He loses face because it sends the message he couldn't do better.

[wonderlust]

Although the perception in the west is that Asian women marry older men, I see very little of this. Such relationships are usually secretive mia noi or prostitution type affairs and are not socially acceptable. I don't think the "face" thing has anything to do with it, women are just not comfortable with or attracted to much older men. The only real exception is old falangs and young Isan peasant girls but they stick out like a sore thumb.

[driftwood]

clicked link: "page not found".

 

HH

 

I double checked the link and it comes up for me, not sure why it will not come up for you. Maybe country, ISP or computer setting?? I don't now.

 

You can try to download the full show at:

 

http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/marketplace/pm/2009/02/12/marketplace_cast3_20090212_64.mp3

 

The intro to the segment is at 18:30 minutes

 

Here is the full text, from the web page description. Once again it is different from the audio segment:

When I first met Hang Nga, all she could do was giggle. She had just walked out of a back office at an open-air coffee shop in Hai Duong, an hour's drive from Vietnam's capital, Hanoi. When she saw me, she covered her face and laughed.

 

"She's shy," said my interpreter, Thuy. "She doesn't want to talk."

 

Oh no, I thought, and gave Thuy a look.

 

"Don't worry," said Nga's boss, Yong-jae Cho, following Nga out of the office. Tall and smiling and confident, he motioned me to a chair. "She will talk." He then sat Nga down, ordered juices and thick, dark, sweet, iced coffees, and whispered in Nga's ear.

 

"What we do is not illegal," Cho said after a few minutes. "So there is no need for her to be afraid. Besides, it's good for our business to publicize what we do!"

 

Even still, we decided to take it slowly.

 

Nga told us how she moved to Seoul, South Korea, when her Vietnamese husband started an import-export business there. She studied Korean language and eventually worked as a translator for Vietnamese girls who'd married Korean men and settled in Seoul.

 

In 2007, Nga and her husband returned to Vietnam. One day she was riding on a bus, speaking Korean on the phone. A man approached her and asked her how she learned Korean. That man was Cho.

 

"He told me he had a trading business... and also a marriage business," Nga told us, with a grin.

 

For years Cho had been running a business to pair South Korean men with Vietnamese women. But he was looking for a new Vietnamese partner. He offered Nga a job for $1,000 a month â?? a huge salary in Vietnam. Nga talked it over with her husband and finally accepted.

Now, Nga and Cho bring half a dozen Korean men to Vietnam each month on "marriage holidays." These are three-day packages that include everything from choosing the bride to the honeymoon.

 

When I first heard about the idea, I was mildly disgusted. I could just picture it: dozens of girls, lined up in party dresses with numbers pinned to their chests, like I had seen in brothels and karaoke halls during my time as a reporter in Southeast Asia. Then a man swoops in, points to the prettiest girl, and whisks her away to a country where she has no friends or family and doesn't speak the language. In other words, all business and no love.

 

For the people involved, though, the process is more practical than it is appalling. For them it's a question of numbers. In rapidly developing countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and parts of China, falling birthrates and a preference for male offspring means there's a shortage of women. In poorer countries like Vietnam and Cambodia, an abundance of women from struggling, rural families look to marriage as a way to improve their economic standing.

 

That's where Cho and Nga come in. They say they're just here to help these two groups find each other.

 

Of course, it's not quite so straightforward. To find the girls in the first place, Cho and Nga have to rely on a network of â??madames.â? These are women who recruit poor Vietnamese women from the countryside. If a woman is chosen to marry a Korean man, her family must pay the madame a fee â?? usually more than $1,000. Poor families often take out high-interest loans to pay for this, on the promise that their daughters will send money home once they reach South Korea. Which, in fact, they generally do.

 

Sadly, there's not always a happy ending for the brides. Some shady madames match brides with fake grooms, and after the couple is married, the bride never sees the man again. Instead, she is shipped to South Korea and forced to work without pay â?? in a factory, or, worse, in a brothel.

 

I asked Nga about the madames, and she giggled again.

 

"The madames told me not to tell about their business," Nga said. "I made a promise not to do them any harm."

 

The madames are the illegal part of the marriage business in Vietnam. The government accuses them of selling women. But that has hardly stopped the practice, so the authorities recently announced a plan to legalize and regulate the marriage business. In the meantime, police continue raiding marriage events organized by madames. Nga hinted to us that corrupt police also shake madames down for bribes.

 

The Korean groom I met is a humble man of 40, who comes from a rural area and is getting a PhD in philosophy and ancient palm reading. His family had paid $10,000 for him to fly to Vietnam and spend three days finding and marrying a bride.

 

His marriage package began in a shabby hotel restaurant, in the northern Vietnamese city of Haiphong.

 

The 32 women who lined the room were not wearing party dresses, as I had imagined, but simple jeans and flimsy tops that showed off fancy lingerie. There was no makeup or perfume. And they didn't have numbers pinned to their chests.

 

The groom seemed less interested in their looks than in their character. Using Nga as an interpreter, he interviewed the women, asking if they would be good and loyal wives.

 

"His father is 87 years old and has a farm," Nga told the candidates. "Are you willing to tend the old man and the farm?"

The women nodded their heads in agreement. The groom narrowed his choices to three, asked them a few more questions, and then chose his bride: a 21-year-old who works in a local supermarket.

 

The room swelled with applause, then the rejected women, and the madames who brought them, grabbed their purses and left. Over the next day, I watched Nga transform from a shy and giggling assistant to a shrewd bargainer and party planner.

 

Everything had been arranged beforehand. Nga shuttled the wedding party to a jewelry store, where she had already selected a set of wedding rings; a traditional market, to haggle over a new set of clothes for the bride; and back to the hotel, where a makeup artist waited with two dresses for the bride to choose from.

 

Nga spent the hours before the wedding making arrangements for the next marriage package.

 

The ceremony was short. Afterwards, the bride's family packed leftovers into Styrofoam containers and headed home. The bride had kept her jeans on underneath her wedding dress, ready for the one-day honeymoon.

 

In the end, it still seemed businesslike. But it was hardly as seamy as I had imagined. Everyone involved â?? Nga, Cho, the bride, the groom, the family, and the madame â?? considered this to be a successful transaction.

 

And for them, maybe that is a happy ending.

[khunsanuk]

Hi,

 

The link was messed up originally, but I fixed it after seeing HH's post.

 

Sanuk!

 

[driftwood]

The feeling I get in Western cultures is that the age difference limit exists to chastise the older man seen to be taking advantage of a younger, inexperienced girl.

 

We have a real double standard in the U.S. with "cougars". Older women are very flattered if they are considered cougars, and their seems to be no negativity to the term. I don't hear the term cradle-robber used with women any more.

[driftwood]

Hi,

 

The link was messed up originally, but I fixed it after seeing HH's post.

 

Sanuk!

 

Thanks! sorry about that!

[cavanami]

In the US the term is "boy toy".