“matched par avion”

Some initial findings on, reflections from, archival research on Asian mail-order brides in the US

The Asian mail-order bride business reached its peak booming in the late 1980s in the U.S. as well as in Europe and Australia. By 1987, there were at least over 1000 such organizations in the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, and Australia. According to the record of the US-based mail-order bride firms, they matched thousands of men with “oriental women” annually.

Around the late-1980s, about 50-60% of mail-order brides came from the Philippines, followed by women from Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan. Among these women, marriage to a “westerner” was considered a ticket away from poverty and political repression. Many coveted green cards, which allow them to live and work in the U.S.

Mail-order catalogues depict the Asian women as exotic sexual playthings and subservient and docile housekeepers that some conservative, white, middle-class, often divorced, customers are seeking. It’s important to note that those Asian mail brides symbolized, or were deemed as, the antithesis to white women whom many white male “customers” viewed as "aggressive, uncooperative, and greedy."

Around the 1980s, the Asian mail-order bride business became extremely lucrative enterprises. Advertisements became more widely spread and more numerous in newspapers, popular periodicals and "girlie" magazines, as well as on the radio and t.v. “Clients” pay $5 to $10 for a few addresses to thousands of dollars for more complete services. Some clients are reported to have spent as much as $10,000 for travel and legal fees. Catalogues contain photographs of the women with a brief profile for each picture - age, height, weight, education, hobbies and some enticing statement from the prospective bride. The women answer questionnaires which ask intimate details about the body, habits, and attitudes. Clients receive much advice and information, but the women get no publications or information about these men.

Here are things worth contemplating.

First, the traditional ideas and practices of ‘domesticity’ and ‘respectability’ powerfully shaped the way that how these clients saw Asian women and also the ways in which Asian women developed their selfhood and their perceived role in the family and society- who remain loyal to their husbands and to their ‘home-making’ work in the home. For example, men clients expected their future partners to embody the Asian female stereotypes -- gentle, submissive, eager to please. Naturally, a common complaint of men was that their Asian wives are not too loyal and dependent on them. Thus, it promoted a racially segmented and gendered ideas/practices of Asian womenhood. Plus, the fear instilled in the brides due to their illegal or tenuous immigrant status subjugated them to control by husbands. Asian women had few options and ways to seek aid when they are battered, raped, or even psychologically abused.

Second, this racially-segmented, gendered business was built upon notable religious, more specifically, religio-racial structures. Many of the mail clients who “ordered” Asian mail brides were white and Christian. And they often believed this practice as a “godly and biblical” way to reinstate White masculine control and power over Asians and women. For example, one of the owners of the Asian mail-order bride business said,

“what we are doing here is providing a traditional matchmaking service that goes back to biblical times."
- John Broussard, Owner of Rainbow Ridge

This reveals the complex and intricate ways that race, gender, and religion have co-constituted in the gendered racialization of Asian women as racially foreign and unassimilable, sexually excessive and promiscuous, and morally and religiously perverse and deficient.