One of my favorite articles from this past year was the February New York Times piece Korean Men Use Brokers to Find Brides in Vietnam  written by Norimitsu Onishi.

It tells the story of two Korean men, Kim Wan-su  and Kim Tae-goo, who, through matchmaking services,  travel to Vietnam in search of brides. Anyone who’s lived in Korea more than a couple years has been privy to the unfolding of this fascinating phenomenon.

In most Korean cities both large and small, you’ll can find banners advertising agencies expert in finding out-of-country females, typically, and due mostly to similar cultural values in regards to family, from Vietnam. As this market has grown thin, agencies representing other Asian countries and the former Russian republics (where many ethnic Koreans live) are cropping up. There are even four or five agencies, that for twice the price of a normal arrangement will introduce spouses from North Korea. Surely this will eventually grow to overtake the Vietnamese market.

Until recently I’d never seen this phenomenon in action, first-hand. I’d seen couples on the street that I suspected were mixed race unions, but I’d never known anyone personally. For the past few years I’ve read articles like the New York Times piece, which would make one think that such marriages were happening every day.

In addition to the increase in advertising I’d seen the TV documentaries,  the newspaper articles, and a growing number of portrayals on television, which have evolved  relatively fast when compared to, say, the portrayals of homosexuals on American television during the late 90s, and the portrayal of blacks on television during the 80s.

The first entertainment drama to tackle the subject was Hanoi Bride, a two-part series from 2005 about a Korean doctor who meets and falls in love with a half-Korean, half-Vietnamese woman (played by a Korean)  while he’s  in Vietnam. The following is a music video from the series, but you can get the gist of what the program was about.  

Then there  is  Golden Bride, a  drama about  a half-Vietnamese/half-Korean woman (again, portrayed by a Korean) named Jin Joo who marries  a Korean man in part, so she can come to Korea and look for her biological father who abandoned her. In this clip Jin Joo phones home.

The most recent program started in late October, and for the first time stars an actual Vietnamese woman, Hawang Hiyen (excuse the transliteration), who had already achieved some stardom on the Korean program Chatting With Beauty, which, quickly, is a program where Korean men interview foreign women about their lives in Korea.

The new drama is titled In the Countryside Beyond the Mountain (산너머 남촌에는 in Korean for those who want to give it a search)  and is about a man in his 40s,  who, much like the the New York Times piece illustrates, travels to Vietnam  to find a young bride to bring home to the Korean countryside.

The program  bills itself as the only current Korean TV  Drama set in the countryside, an idea that is resonating with viewers. While the show is  still relatively new and hasn’t yet become a sensation,  I can report that after  seeing it playing for the first time in a noodle restaurant  on night last week, I found  people viewing on six-out-of-six televsions  as I walked past storefronts toward my apartment in Ulsan.    

Almost without fail Koreans will still claim this concept is relegated to the countryside — farmers living in areas where Korean women simply don’t want to live. Understandable, it happens all over the world. Greek farmers import women from the Balkans and former Russian republics, Scandinavian men in Sweden and Norway import women from the Baltic States, and businessmen in Hong Kong bring in women from rural China.

But according to the NYT piece, the industry is “thriving” in South Korea, which would indicate it’s not just the odd farmer here and there. This article pegs the number of foreign marriages in Korea between 11-14 percent and the same Web site (Korea.net) claims four out of ever 10 marriages in rural Korea involve a foreign spouse.

Until recently I’ve always lived in Busan, the second largest city in Korea. I’ve witnessed the number of adverts increasing. About a year ago an agency was set up right next to my apartment, perhaps not coincidentally, in one of the poorest urban areas in the city.

I first met…I’ll call him Kim…at a Dol, which is a Korean celebration of a baby’s first 100-days after birth. Kim works as an engineer for a construction company with my friend Jae, whom I’ve  known for two years.

Kim sat across from my wife and I at the Dol and the three of us ended up talking together most of the evening. As it turned out Kim was an amateur astrologer (of the Buddhist variety —  Saju), and offered to do our fortunes. He started taking down our information…names, birthdates, time of birth…on a paper napkin.

It was clear from the get go that Kim was eccentric, in a way I find uncommon in Korean men. I liked him straightaway. My wife thought he was funny, like a Korean comedian. Comedians tend to look the part over here, that is to say —  they look funny. Goofy. And this guy Kim certainly fit that profile. To me he looks like a real life version of Nelson from The Simpsons. His teeth are kind of jagged and knife out from his upper lip. And he has this wild, curly hair.

And  he’s genuinely funny. He was also in his late 30s. To generalize, there aren’t a lot of unmarried Korean men in their mid 30s. Sure, they exist, but not as they do in Western countries. When my wife asked him if he was married he laughed in this exaggerated maniacal chortle and shouted  ”impossible!” in English.  Kim  is also very self-deprecating – a big part of his sense of humor.

The fact that Kim is an engineer, which in Korea, means he  makes pretty decent money   and has a highly sought-after,  stable job, made his bachelorhood all the more surprising.

A few weeks later he emailed my wife our fortune, which read like any other Korean fortune. A personal aside: I hate the stuff. My wife’s mother, upon hearing of our plans to marry, rushed my wife to one of these fortune tellers, who dutifully  informed them we  would divorce if we did marry. Only when my wife became hysterical did her mother take her to a second fortune teller two weeks later. They didn’t tell that fortune teller I was a foreigner and viola; lifelong happiness comin’ your way).

I didn’t see Kim to much over the next few months, but occasionally bumped into him. And, because I liked him, I’d sometimes ask Jae about him.

Sometime last year he started doing ma-seon, or just seon,  which is a fairly serious form of  matchmaking that hearkens back to the days of when nearly all Korean marriages were arranged. In fact, my parents-in-law met by this method in the early 70s.

Of course, Ma-seon is strictly Korean-on-Korean action, and, I would venture to say, is a little looked down upon by young Koreans. It’s just not the option you want to have to resort to. Although plenty of Koreans (mostly conservative types) still do.

But again, Kim didn’t have much luck with Ma-seon. I don’t know many details, because I’ve only briefly seen him a couple times since the baby party. I do know one woman pulled the ol’ went-to-the-bathroom-and-never-returned trick. And he did tell me at one point, when I bumped into him on the street in August, something to the effect of “I’m not fit for Korean women.”

I can believe it. Although usually, from what I’ve ever seen, economic power tends trump  all else  somewhere along the line.

Last week Jae started to giggle when I asked about Kim. He told me Kim had signed up with a South East Asian Women agency and in December was headed to the Philippines and  Vietnam on a three-week wife finding trip (according to the Times piece these trips cost roughly $10,000).

Jae said Kim had been corresponding with several women since the summer  and would likely return with a wife. Of course, Jae added that he was surprised someone who wasn’t from the countryside was relegated to registering with such an agency. Like me, he’d never known anyone first hand to get married in such a way.

The part that shocked me was that the company Jae and Kim work for  is subsidizing part of Kim’s  trip. The times piece says that in rural Korea the local governments will sometimes help pay for such trips, because it’s in their best interest to supplement rapidly declining populations, but I’ve never heard of a company footing the bill.

According to Jae, Kim was more-or-less saving face just prior to the trip, saying things like “I’m tired of Korean women” and “Korean women don’t fit my personality.” Indeed that may be true. I’m not sure what it is about  Vietnamese or Filipino women that will, but apparently someone down there is willing to come to Korea and find out.

He  leaves next week.