Latest news feedRefugees Magazine Issue 147 ("The Excluded: The strange hidden world of the stateless") - Lose a husband, lose a country
The stateless brides of Viet Nam
by Kitty McKinsey
In danger of being ostracized as an "old maid" in Viet Nam at the age of 27, Loan thought she had found the ticket to an easy life when an older Taiwanese man asked to marry her and promised to whisk her out of poverty.
"My father and mother thought the man looked honest, so they advised me to marry him," she says ten years later. She is now back living under her grandmother's roof, with her two small children, deserted by a husband who won't even take her phone calls. Worst of all, even though she is in her home country, she is now stateless – deprived of all the rights she grew up taking for granted.
Loan's plight is far from unique. Thousands of poor Vietnamese women who have married Taiwanese (or other foreign) men over the last 10 years have seen their dreams of a good life crumble. Some tell tales of alcoholic, abusive husbands, cruel mothers-in-law, linguistic confusion, cramped living quarters, deprivation, abuse and economic exploitation. When they arrive back to seek refuge in the land of their birth, they find that they – and often their children too – have become stateless.
Between 1995 and 2002, more than 55,000 Vietnamese women married foreigners, with the figure approaching 13,000 in 2002 alone, according to Viet Nam Ministry of Justice statistics. The bridegrooms – mainly from Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore – are often older, badly off workers who are unable to attract a woman or afford the required elaborate wedding in their own prosperous countries.
Loan's husband was 37 when they married in 1997."He lived with someone else before, but he couldn't get married to her because his economic status was low in Taiwan," Loan explains frankly."That's why he came to Viet Nam to find a wife."
Few of the foreign husbands or Vietnamese wives enter these marriages with romantic illusions. The Viet Nam Women's Union of Ho Chi Minh City, which tries to advise women heading into foreign marriages, and to help those whose unions collapse, found in a survey that 86 percent of such marriages are contracted for economic reasons, with the women dreaming of a better life abroad. Nowadays, with prosperity on the rise at home, women in the booming southern Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) have fewer reasons to contract economic matches. So would-be foreign grooms are now trawling the impoverished Mekong Delta for desperate, uneducated brides.
For many, the legal problems start to arise when the wife applies for naturalization in her husband's country. In Taiwan, for example, the process requires her to renounce her Vietnamese citizenship first; as a result, if the marriage fails before she acquires her new citizenship, she ends up stateless.
That's exactly what happened to Loan, who dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief as she tells her story, sitting in a sewing machine shop that her grandmother rents out. At her husband's request, Loan renounced her Vietnamese citizenship and was on track to become Taiwanese. But she became pregnant for the second time just as her husband's company went bankrupt, so he sent her back to Viet Nam to have the baby.
They were already having problems. Her mother-in-law, she says, hated foreigners. They lived all crammed together with other relatives in a tiny home. And although Loan learned to speak some Chinese before the marriage, "we could only talk on the surface of a subject, not deeply on matters between a husband and a wife."
But as Loan tells it, the final blow to her marriage came when the second child (like the first) turned out to be a girl – not the son her husband was desperately hoping for."He came here to visit me, but when he saw that I gave birth to a daughter, he left and disappeared forever."
In the four years since he deserted her, her life has been a bureaucratic nightmare. Stateless women like Loan have lost the very right to have rights – to work legally or to get social assistance. Without Vietnamese citizenship, Loan and her daughters are adrift, not entitled to the vital family-book identity document essential for every transaction between citizens and government institutions in Viet Nam. Her older daughter, now seven, is Taiwanese and therefore not eligible for free education in a Vietnamese state school. Like many other stateless mothers, Loan is facing high charges for the private schooling for her children.
Since her husband abandoned her in 2003, she says wearily, "I have to go back and forth to the department of justice and the Taiwan office, and the immigration office, to apply for a visa for my children and arrange education for them. I hope we can get the paperwork done so my first child can go to school."
Although justice department authorities in Ho Chi Minh City say they are working hard to restore citizenship to stateless women whenever they hear of such cases, abandoned stateless brides often have no idea how to set about getting their citizenship restored – and some fall prey to the same type of unscrupulous intermediaries who sold them into marriage in the first place. Loan says a local lawyer she consulted wants US$ 5,000 to help her get her citizenship back – an unimaginable sum for her.
The UN refugee agency is also working to prevent and resolve statelessness not only in Viet Nam, but around the world."We have considerable experience on such issues which we can share to address these problems," says Hasim Utkan, the Bangkok-based regional representative for UNHCR responsible for Viet Nam."It is good to see the issue is being handled by the government with so much transparency."
Restoration of citizenship now looks on the cards for Nguyen Thi Diem Chi, an elegant, self-assured 33-year-old who says she married her Taiwanese businessman husband for love, not money. Fluent in Chinese, she had worked for him as an interpreter in Ho Chi Minh City before their marriage, and then moved to Taiwan, where she had two children.
Speaking of her former husband without rancour, she says the marriage fell apart because "we were incompatible – my husband couldn't understand me." She said her husband asked her to give up her Vietnamese citizenship but then, to her consternation, blocked her efforts to become naturalized in Taiwan. Now back home with her two children, to whom she still speaks Chinese, she is not wasting time feeling sorry for herself. Instead she has been busy building herself a new life, with a good job as manager of a seafood restaurant and a well-furnished upscale home of her own.
Even so, she says, life without citizenship is a struggle: "It's difficult because I don't have an ID card or a family book, but I am trying to get my Vietnamese citizenship back and I think I am about to get it," she says, cuddling her baby daughter." Then life will be better."
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 147: "The Excluded: The strange hidden world of the stateless"
(September 2007). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (1.8 Mb) here or high-resolution (6.8 Mb) here.
