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Comment by alisonatwork | Hacker News Reader

In China there is already a gender imbalance in the favor of men thanks to the one child policy, which means straight young men can struggle to find a romantic partner. When older, richer foreigners come along and snap up local women - who are already in short supply - it definitely breeds resentment. Tangled up with that is the existing problem of human trafficking, where brides are shipped in from Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar etc. It's easy for an increasingly nationalistic culture to blame foreigners for exacerbating these issues.

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I can see how that is the case in China. My wife is from a country where there is no shortage of women. Probably 90% of the people speak passable English, so there is no language barrier. I don't see a lot of hostile resentment to be honest.

The presumption is more of a practical and amusing one. Many of the villages are funded in part by remittance from US and this country was saved by US from literal mass rape by Japanese in WWII and unlike other countries we never seriously fucked them afterwards so the people overall are very cheery in dealing with Americans in my experience.

You can just say the Philippines, not sure why you are obscuring the country name.

The Philipines is has a long and notorious history of mail-order brides[1]. Parent's incredulity on peoples attitudes rings a little hollow when that's explicitly spelled out.

1. The term predates the world-wide web to a time when women in developing counties would be in a literal catalog, and correspondence was done via mail.

Another word for the process of getting a mail-order "bride" in the context of the current day is "internet dating", which everyone does. The other term is still used to evoke some historically charged negative emotions due to the implication that perhaps people are bought or relationships are started for the wrong reasons, but the modern dating scene has the exact same problems. What is left then is racism (it's "bad" because the parties are from different countries and perhaps even have different skin colour), and deserves to just go straight out the window.

You're skipping over the power dynamics- the brides are often very poor and dependent on spouse for financial support, the lack of support network (bride leaves family & friends thousands of miles away),as well as the precarious visa situation (real or perceived). Other than that, it's just like internet dating, like you said.

So what are you going to do? Ban these brides from seeking a husband abroad? What is the point of complaining about mail order brides?

You can educate them on all these things (many of these brides surely already know this) and yet many would still choose on their free volition to proceed ahead.

Trying not to prejudice the audience, I know that anyone familiar with the country will know what it is. Not really trying to obscure it.

> It's easy for an increasingly nationalistic culture to blame foreigners for exacerbating these issues.

But they are the ones who created the gender imbalance. It's completely self-imposed.

Really? The 30-something Chinese guy who's delivered packages his whole life and has no impact on policy created this scenario?

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