Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia (review)

Cross-Border Marriages, Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia provides a fresh new look at international marriages and transnational marriages. Nicole Constable, astutely, argues in the introduction that these marriages are best understood as "marriage-scapes that are shaped and limited by the existing and emerging cultural, social, historical, and political-economic factors" (4). During the Vietnam War period, a body of literature emerged on marriages between American servicemen and Asian brides. These studies often aimed to develop cross-cultural counseling theories to address issues such as miscommunication derived from cultural misunderstandings. However, there has always been a broader range of international marriages taking place in the world, although not much literature on the subject. In the 1990s, such international marriages were on the rise and increasing, rapidly. Many of these marriages were arranged through internet match-making services. New critical studies on what has been referred to as "the mail order bride industry" began to emerge. Most of these marriages, though not all, still, reflect an earlier pattern of women migrating from poorer countries in the "South," to marry men in the wealthier "industrialized" countries of the "North." Nicole Constable and her colleagues look closely at the details of this new international marriage trend, by examining the choices some of these people have made in the contexts of their real lives. Each chapter unfolds a uniquely colorful and engrossing case study of ordinary people making difficult decisions within the strictures of their social, cultural, and economic circumstances.

What, sometimes, is omitted in studies on international marriages are detailed discussions on how these marriages are often influenced not only by individual economic interests but imagined human desires that include notions of emotionality, sexuality, gender, tradition, and modernity. Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia makes an important contribution in this direction by looking at issues of cultural economy and individual agency in context from an anthropological perspective. It surveys the unprecedented rise of cross-cultural marriages that are taking place not only between Asians and Non-Asians, but between Asians and Asians, within the broader region, and beyond. Each chapter provides a fresh ethnographic description and analysis of marriage migrations that cross borders, internally, within the nation-state, transnationally, and internationally. While at times, general explanations as to why Asian women, namely, Filipino, Chinese, and Vietnamese women, seek to marry men of foreign countries are collapsed into a single explanatory clause such as to "escape local patriarchal gender expectations," (7), and this is contestable as I go on to discuss, overall, each individual ethnographic chapter provides an exemplary case study that is specifically-grounded. The underlying bases around which gender roles are constructed in Southeast Asia differ substantially from those of East Asia. The Confucian family system underlying many societies of East Asia, place females in roles subordinate to males, while this is not the case in the Philippine family, where, traditionally, men's roles and women's roles, though different, were more horizontally aligned than in the ideal-typical Confucian family model. There are always exceptions that elude generalization. For example, Chinese men's roles and women's roles within the family domain were, theoretically, turned upside-down and inside-out, in an effort to make them more horizontal during Chairman Mao's communist regime. These gender relations within the structure of mainland Chinese families, today, may be undergoing yet another sea-change in relation to globalization as China has assumed a prominent position on the stage of global capital, although this is a subject for further study.

Nicole Constable and the contributors to this volume, rightly, criticize a widespread and popular misperception that "mail order brides' are transformed into mere objects (wives) for purchase by more domineering men. Each chapter provides an exemplary illustration of women who are acting, independently, on their own behalf in the face of constricting circumstances and constraining structures. These women are making decisions that often take into consideration their need to meet...