Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion has made a running joke out of the quite real difficulties Minnesota farmers have in finding wives. Since the 1970s, at least, Minnesota farm girls have moved to Minneapolis to be Mary Tyler Moore, leaving a lot of lonely farmers behind.
Similarly, in the Coen Bros.' "Big Lebowski," Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid), formerly Fawn Gunderson, the straying hooker wife of an elderly Southern California millionaire, is being searched for by a detective hired by her parents in Minnesota who want her to come home. The snoop pulls out a black and white photograph to show The Dude:
Private Eye: "The Gundersons told me to show her this when I found her. The family farm."
A bleak farmhouse and silo are the only features on a flat snow-swept landscape.
Private eye: "Outside of Moorhead, Minnesota. They think it'll make her homesick."
In South Korea, the problem is even worse, due to extremely low birth rates (a total fertility rate of 1.1) and aborting girl babies. From Barbara Demick in the Los Angeles Times:
Jeong Ha-gi, 46, flew to Vietnam on a tour organized for South Korean bachelors. He was looking for a wife who would be tough enough to withstand the rigors of life on a rice farm. Trying to distinguish among all the women with the numbers pinned to their shirts, he decided the one with a bad complexion might be made of sturdy stuff. They were married three days later.
Today, they live together in sullen silence, a chasm of cultural differences between them. She speaks no Korean, he no Vietnamese. They communicate — barely — with a well-thumbed phrase book. Nguyen Thu Dong, who turned out to be only 20, doesn't like getting up at 5 a.m. to do the farm chores. She turns up her nose at kimchi.
"We have a lot of issues between us," said the burly Jeong, who in his undershirt resembles a Korean version of the young Marlon Brando. "Our age difference, our culture, our food. But I wanted a wife and she is who I got."
John Derbyshire writes to me:
I couldn't help but think of the archetypal New England farmer whose wife died after 50 yrs of marriage. A neighbor went over to offer condolences.
"Guess you'll be missing her after all them years, Zeke."
"Can't really say so. Never did get to like her much."
The LA Times article goes on:
Despite the obvious pitfalls, South Korean men increasingly are going abroad to find wives. They have little choice in the matter unless they want to remain bachelors for life.
The marriage market in Asia is becoming rapidly globalized, and just in time for tens of thousands of single-but-looking South Korean men, most of them in the countryside where marriageable women are in scant supply. With little hope of finding wives of their own nationality and producing children to take over the farm, the men are pooling their family's resources to raise up to $20,000 to find a spouse abroad.
The phenomenon has become so widespread that last year 13% of South Korean marriages were to foreigners. More than a third of the rural men who married last year have foreign wives, most of them Vietnamese, Chinese and Philippine. That's a huge change in a country once among the most homogenous in the world.
Mark Steyn goes on and on about how the low birthrate of Europe is caused by socialism, long vacations, and general decadent Eurowimpery, but how does that explain the even lower birthrate of South Korean farmers?
By the way, there's a widespread assumption that the high sex ratio of males to females in Asia will lead to massive violence by frustrated males. Yet, if we look at the most violent regions of America, the black inner cities, we see a very low ratio of males to females, due to so many males being in prison or dead. In the ghettoes, men don't have to behave like good prospective husbands to get women because there is so little competition. So, perhaps the assumption about East Asia is dubious?
The globalized wife market: A reader who lives in Japan writes:
I'm just back from the Philippines where there is no shortage of children. It's catholic and mostly poor, so people have not picked up modern values. After being the source of cheap workers for the world for decades, it now the source of cheap wives. They are exported to Japan and other Asian countries as wives for farmers. Lots of Filipinas also come to Japan to make good money working as hostesses in bars. They have a good reputation. They are fairly cute and don't make trouble. A fair number end up snagging a Japanese husband. But, the Philippines is crawling with middle aged or older men married to young Filipinas. Unattractive, divorced white men with nominal pensions can live there quite comfortably. There are also oodles of older Japanese men, who may or may not be divorced, pumping cash into the economy thru young female companions.
For some reason the Philippines is now also very popular with young Koreans. Well, it is close, cheap, and they can tell their parents they are studying English, although it looks like they are majoring in computer games. There are lots of stores and restaurants with hangul characters on the outside. The Koreans are young and don't seem to be "dating" Filipinas very much yet. There is the inevitable language barrier and there seem to be a lot of young Korean women hanging around too. Probably these are city kids, not farmers.
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Low Asian birthrates: A reader who lived in three East Asian countries for a decade writes from China:
As with the rest of the world, young people are deserting the farms to go live in the cities. The young men who remain on the family farm cannot find wife in their home country (Japan, Korea, Taiwan). So, they go for mail order brides from China, Vietnam, and Thailand. However, China is no good anymore because China also has bride shortage as well. This leaves Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Indonesia is out because it is Muslim.
However, the birth rate is rapidly declining even in Thailand and Vietnam as well as the rest of South East Asia.
The 800 lbs explanation that Mark Steyn overlooks for the decline of Asian birthrates is because it is now expensive to raise kids in Asia (except in the poor parts of S.E. Asia). This is partly due to urbanization, but also to the great expectations required to properly raise kids in Asia, mainly high education. Schools (primary, secondary, and university) are even more expensive, relative to mean income, than they are in the U.S. Housing is also more expensive (relative to income) than in the U.S.
(Medical care is cheaper. That's because it is less regulated and bureaucratized than in the U.S.)
Housing in Asia does not mean single family detached housing in leafy suburbs, as it does in the U.S. Rather, it refers to the luxury 3 bedroom condominium in the fashionable high-rise. Compared to U.S. suburbs, urban high-rise living is not conducive to having kids.
The reason why even the poor people in Asia are no longer having kids is because, in Asia, it is great shame to have kids and not provide decent upbringing to them. To have kids without being financially prepared for them marks one as being "low class" and is a source of shame.
Lastly, fewer people are having kids because, in the high-rise urban environment, there is lots of fun to be had by traveling and partying a lot.
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