The interdisciplinary literature on gender, intermarriage, and transnational migration has often compared the social phenomenon of intra-Asia marriage migration with either the transnational marriages of mail-order brides or with the gendered migration of live-in care workers, with a strong tendency to examine its negative consequences for marriage migrants who choose to migrate from poorer to richer countries within Asia through transnational marriages. To date, however, we have limited understanding of the determinants of marriage migrants' wellbeing in the marriage and migration processes.
To further examine the positive social and health consequences of intra-Asia marriage migration, this dissertation uses the National Survey on Multicultural Families in South Korea (N=69,394), forty-eight in-depth interviews, and a year of multi-sited fieldwork working with sixteen migrant organizations in both rural and urban settings, to answer one major research question: how do transnational marriage and gendered migration affect the wellbeing of Asian women migrants in Taiwan and South Korea? I found that gender dynamics, socioeconomic status, and social integration are three key and interconnected determinants of marriage migrants' health and wellbeing.
Specifically, marital power dynamics between marriage migrants and their husbands have a direct effect on marriage migrants' self-rated health, life satisfaction, and views on marriage migration; marriage migrants' exposure to gender-based bias affects their propensity to marry across borders through different channels, while the flexibility of gender structure in the marital families is critical in marriage migrants' double transition of becoming married women and becoming migrants. On the one hand, the socioeconomic status of marital families is more important to marriage migrants' self-rated health and life satisfaction than the education of their husbands. On the other hand, the social standing of natal families reveals little effect on marriage migrants' post-migration wellbeing, yet marriage migrants' own education has a reverse effect on how they value the experience of transnational marriage migration.
In terms of the various dimensions of social integration, social relationships with the native populations affect marriage migrants' health in a positive way, yet social relationships with co-ethnics turn out to influence their health negatively. Overall, marriage migrants' gendered social roles--as wives, daughters-in-law, and mothers--in the marital families allow them to better negotiate their individual agency, which is defined as their ability to act independently and make free choices. The sense of belonging gained through participating in these family roles serves as a strong foundation for marriage migrants to further integrate into the host societies as migrant groups through taking on social roles as community members and citizens.
By using multiple measures of gender dynamics, socioeconomic status, and social integration, I show both (1) the quantitative significance of these factors to the health and wellbeing of marriage migrants from different Asian ethnicities/countries of origin in South Korea, and (2) the qualitative importance of these factors in shaping the life trajectories of Vietnamese marriage migrants in Taiwan and South Korea who met their husbands through different marriage channels at different stages of their lives.
In conclusion, this dissertation illustrates the diverse experiences of intra-Asia marriage migrants and emphasizes the importance of marriage migrants' wellbeing to their marital families, host societies, and the developmental trajectories of their bi-ethnic children. Using the case of transnational marriage migrants, whose social positions are marginalized by multiple social hierarchies of gender, class, ethnicity, nativity, and capitalist globalization, I suggest that more empirical research is needed to improve the wellbeing of other marginalized populations.
