跨国婚姻大势所趋:德国先生娶法国太太,英美小姐嫁西班牙丈夫

Victims or opportunists?
受害者还是投机者？
Marriage between girls from poor countries and older men from rich ones are controversial. As Sang-lim Lee of the International Organisation of Migration centre in Goyang says, when men pay the brides’ family “they tend to think they have bought a good. If it has a defect, they think they can send it back.”
但是，发生于贫穷地区的年轻女孩和富裕地区的大龄男子之间的婚姻却是饱受争议的了。正如Sang-lim Lee of the International Organisation of Migration centre in Goyang说，当给新娘家付了钱后，他们就会认为自己买了一个商品，要是有什么瑕疵或是意图逃走，还可以将他们退回。
It is certainly true that the men tend to be older, often much older. Doo-Sub Kim finds that Korean husbands are on average 17 years older than their Vietnamese-born brides. They usually have around three years’ more education as well. One fifth of Korean husbands have been married before. All this is very different from the typical pattern in native Korean marriages.
的确，丈夫的年龄太大了，比新娘年长许多。Doo-Sub Kim发现韩国丈夫平均比越南新娘大17岁。他们通常受过三年左右的教育，其中五分之一结过婚，完全有别于韩国本土的婚姻形式。
It is also true that some young women are victims of cruelty, neglect, physical abuse and trafficking. Women in strange countries are almost always vulnerable. A Vietnamese interpreter married to a Korean man complains that “if I run away here, my parents will be embarrassed in Vietnam.” That, she explains, would leave her unable to return home, but with “no place to go here”. The media in Vietnam tend to portray migrant brides either as victims of trafficking or people driven by desperate poverty to migrate. Children of international marriages in South Korea have more health problems than average. In Taiwan, they do less well at school—something that occurs in European countries, too.
事实确实是一些年轻女孩成为了家庭暴力的受害者，承受身体上的虐待，处于社会忽视的边缘，加上交通上的不便，处境悲惨。偏远地区的妇女几乎毫无反抗之力。一个越南女人充满怨恨地亲口对我们“我要是逃跑，会让我在越南的父母蒙羞的。”她的回答解释了她不能回家的原因，当然也没有别的容身之所。越南当地的媒体更愿意把她们描述为落后交通的牺牲品或是为了摆脱可怕的贫困而走上移民之路的新娘。相对于平均水平，跨国组合的婚姻结晶的身体问题更多一些。在台湾或是欧洲，在学校这样的孩子都表现欠佳。
Yet this is not the dominant pattern, still less the sole one. International marriages often seem to work for the couple involved—at least if the longevity of their union is any guide. And they seem to have social benefits, as well as costs, for both receiving and sending countries.
这仍然不是主要类型，更不是唯一类型。跨国婚姻似乎对于婚姻双方来说是行得通的，至少从维持的时间上就可以得出些端倪。无论是新娘“输出国”还是“输入国”，都在尝到甜头的同时，付出了代价。
Though the gap in background, age and education between spouses in international marriages is greater than in those between compatriots, it does not seem to affect these unions’ durability. Doo-Sub Kim plotted the time that cross-border marriages have lasted in South Korea against the couples’ ages and educational backgrounds. Amazingly, the bigger the difference, the longer the marriage. It is hard to know why this should be. Maybe those who marry foreigners invest more in their marriages. Or maybe younger, poorer wives find it harder to leave.
尽管婚姻双方在背景、年龄、受教育水平上都有巨大的区别，非同胞可比，但这似乎并没有影响到婚姻的长长久久。Doo-Sub Kim绘制出了关于跨国婚姻的持续年限与夫妻双方的年龄、教育背景之间的关系的图。令人吃惊的是，双方差异越大，婚姻越是维持长久。原因我们不知，也许是投入婚姻的精力更多吧，又或是那些年轻又贫穷的妻子们觉得离开不易吧。
Vietnamese girls are seen in much of Asia as the paradigm of the submissive foreign bride. But a study of their role in Taiwan by Ms Bélanger shows that many are married to men whose companies trade with Vietnam—and they are vital to the companies’ future. As one man told her, revealingly: “I have six trusted subordinates. One is my wife. One is her younger sister. They will not betray me.” Remittances to their families help keep the practice alive in Vietnam, even though many young men there dislike it and say they have been driven out of their villages by the shortage of brides and forced to migrate to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Similarly, marriage abroad is seen as so desirable by the Punjabi diaspora that the press in Punjab is full of advertisements offering to arrange marriages abroad.
亚洲大部分地区都把越南女孩视为恭顺的外籍新娘。但是Bélanger先生关于台湾地区的越南媳妇的研究表明，那些娶了越南媳妇的男人们多数都在越南做生意，联姻对公司的未来至关重要。一个男士向其透露，“我有六个值得信赖的下属，其中我老婆和她的妹妹就不会背叛我。”把生意交给家里人对生意的持续兴隆有好处，就算很多当地适婚男子不喜欢这种状况，声称新娘的短缺将他们去赶出了家园，被迫移居到Hanoi或胡志明市。同样，聚居在旁遮普省(印度、巴基斯坦的)的犹太人迫切希望和外国人结婚，以至于媒体上充斥着跨国婚姻的广告，安排提供相外国亲的机会。
Not all international marriages in Asia are those of poor brides in rich lands. In a “reverse migration” Japanese women from rich Tokyo have married into poor peasant families in South-East Asia—especially in Bali and Thailand—and settled down to live a more “authentic” rural life, perhaps as a way of escaping the strictness of Japanese family life. That same impulse may well be behind the surprising growth in the numbers of Japanese women married to Africans in Japan (probably as many as 3,300 in all). As one wife told Djamila Schans of Maastricht University, “I had doubts marrying a foreigner but he waited for me at the station every day. Sometimes even with flowers! A Japanese man would never do such a thing.”
在亚洲并不是所有的跨国婚姻都意味着生活在富饶土地上的贫穷新娘。在“反移民潮”中，来自日本的女人，离开东京，远嫁东南亚的小乡村，尤以巴里岛和泰国为甚，定居当地，过着“真正”的乡村生活，这也许是就是逃离日本严厉紧张的家长式生活的方法。同样的冲动也可见于数量惊人攀升的“日非”婚姻（大约总数为3300）。一个和非洲人成婚的日本新娘向Maastricht大学的Djamila Schans讲述，“我本对嫁给一个外国人持怀疑态度，但是当看到他每天都在车站等我，甚至有时拿着鲜花，我不再怀疑了！日本男人永远不会如此。”
Most demographic trends are irresistible forces. It is rare that government policy can make a big difference. But international marriage is sensitive to public policy. In the mid-2000s, Taiwan’s government, for example, took alarm at the number of foreign brides coming into the country. It did not slam the gates but started to wrap the marriage process in licensing and permits, insisting on better treatment of immigrant women. This reduced the number of foreign brides by more than half between 2003 and 2010. Malaysia also maintains an array of secular and religious permits which foreigners must get not only for marriage, but also for residence and work. It seems effective: less than 2% of all Malaysian marriages involve a foreigner, against almost 40% in neighbouring Singapore.
人口的大潮无法阻挡，政府政策总是收效甚微。但跨国婚姻却对政策敏感。例如，21世纪的第一个十年的中期，台湾政府向境外新娘的数量发出警告。这项政策并没有直接“砰”的一声关上跨国婚姻的门，但是开始将此类婚姻“保护”在发放证件环节，并坚持用更体贴的方式对待移民妇女。这样，2003至2010年间的境外新娘数量降低了一半。马来西亚也设置了一连串的宗教的和非宗教的许可，不仅包括婚姻，更针对居住权和就业工作。结果似乎有效：相较邻国新加坡几近40%的数字，马来西亚仅有不到2%的婚姻属于跨国婚姻。
Governments impose restrictions in the belief that cross-border marriages can destabilise their societies. Sometimes, their fears are understandable. In Taiwan, the share of international marriages doubled in five years. But such rapid change is highly unusual. By and large, marriage between people of different nationalities has grown more slowly than immigration. In the past few years, the increase in marriage has slowed further, probably reflecting global economic problems.
政府强行管制，是因为坚信跨国婚姻不利于社会稳定。有时候看，这种担忧是可以理解的。台湾地区这类婚姻所占比重五年内翻番，引起的变化是极不简单的。总的来说，其增速慢于移民增速。近几年，其增幅减速，大概也反映了全球经济问题。
International marriages are often attacked as exploitative, because they typically take place between an older richer man and a younger, less well-educated woman from a poor country. Terrible examples of abuse do exist. Yet the evidence suggests that international marriages often last longer than average and that migrant wives come to play important roles in their husband’s host country.
跨国婚姻总是背着剥削的骂名，之所以这样的原因就是它总发生在一个年迈的富人和一个生于贫国的缺乏良好教育的女人之间。极端的虐待的例子的确存在，但证据却表明此类婚姻历时更久，也表明了移民了的女人在其丈夫所在国渐渐扮演着重要角色。
Marriage remains, for the most part, an institution that promotes economic improvement and personal happiness. It also tends to boost social assimilation—the main exception being when a second-generation immigrant weds a girl from a village his parents had left long before. Over the next few years, international marriage is likely to continue its quiet upward crawl. Governments should protect its victims—but not prevent the process.
大多数国家中，婚姻始终是促进经济发展、提升个人幸福的一种制度。现在也趋于促进社会同化，唯一的逆势的例外就表现在移民的第二代和一个来自其父母远离已久之处的女孩结婚。以后的几年内，可能跨国婚姻的步伐依旧平缓而向上，政府要做的不是阻碍其进程，而是想办法保护这过程中的受害者。