Learning to Be a "Good" Wife: The Challenging Lives of Marriage-Immigrant Filipinas in South Korea

• In Event: 14.035 - Marginalized Women and Their Quests for Better Lives: Themes of Disequilibrium, Learning, and Adaptation

Abstract

“I got sick because my mother-in-law kept forcing me to go to the fertility clinic. And then … they gave me shots. I had to take a lot of medications that I wasn’t able to take. When I took it, suddenly, my liver was damaged. I was in the hospital for two weeks because I had stomach pains at the time.”

Since the 1990s, international marriages, particularly between foreign women from third world countries in Asia and older Korean bachelors, have dramatically increased in South Korea. The ratio of international marriages compared to the total number of marriages in Korea peaked at 13.5% in 2005 and has continued to hold steady at approximately 10% since 2005.

Given the emergence of new adult learners in South Korea, this study aimed to understand the experiences of the marriage-immigrant women’s acculturation process in Korea and to investigate their learning needs in the new cultural contexts of South Korea. Acculturation contexts for these marriage-immigrants in South Korea are much different from family immigrants or international students who migrated alone, in that acculturation has to occur not only outside the home but also inside the home as they have to live with their Korean husband and sometimes with some other in-law family members.

This study employed interview-based qualitative methodology. Marriage-immigrant wives are defined as non-Korean women who married a Korean husband and migrated to South Korea to live with their husband. For cultural and linguistic reasons, marriage-immigrant wives from the Philippines were purposely selected for this research, and they were recruited by network sampling. Subsequently, 20 Filipina marriage-immigrant wives were interviewed. The interviews were primarily conducted in English. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed. The constant comparative method guided the researcher to find reoccurring themes and code them accordingly.

Four themes emerged during the analyses. Although space precludes explication, I list them here:
• Learning to be a “good” Korean traditional daughter-in-law: Women learned from their husband and parents-in-law about the role of daughter-in-law in Korea; given their lack of knowledge and information about current family model in Korea, they are compelled to accept within-family oppression that many modern Korean women would find unacceptable.
• Learning to deal with Koreans outside home: Women had to learn about native Koreans’ image of Asian marriage-immigrants and how to deal with some Koreans’ disrespectful attitudes and discrimination.
• Accommodating Koreans’ perception of Asian marriage-immigrants: Participants reacted to negative characterization of marriage-immigrant wives in different ways. Some tried to be more like Koreans, and some worked to demonstrate that they do not fit the stereotype of marriage immigrants.
• Learning to be a parent in Korea: Being a mother in Korea is generally hard due to Korean culturally-based oppression on motherhood; being an immigrant mother is worse. They have to fight against native Koreans’ discrimination against their children; additionally, they have to fight against their own children as the latter seek to develop culturally comfortable identities.

Author

• Jihyun Kim, University of Georgia