WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION, MARRIAGE AND TRAFFICKING…
but that I must let her take my daughter in exchange. I said
that I would never sell my daughter, so please leave us
alone. Then on September 9th, 1998, she came again and
took my daughter away [in secret]” (Relative of a trafficked
victim).
She explained that her daughter was watching television then.
When she returned home, the woman had taken her away. The trafficker
later told the mother that it was her fault of “not letting her
daughter to go with her”, so that she was kidnapped “by someone”. By
2002, the mother received a letter from her daughter and realized that
it was precisely that woman who did the kidnapping.
Indeed, trafficking is a profitable business. Information from a
group discussion in Ha Long show that the price of a trafficked
woman varies from 5 to 7 million Vietnamese dong (US$ 700 to
US$ 900), but can be much higher if the trafficked is young and beautiful.
Another study reported that to marry to a “beautiful” Vietnamese
woman, the cost is only about 7,000 to 8,000 Chinese yuan (US$ 880-
1,000). If the woman is considered not to be beautiful, the cost is
about 3,000 to 4,000 yuan (Vu and Nguyen, 2002).
4. Life and work in China
4.1. Women trafficked for the purpose of marriage
Women married to Chinese men were both wives and domestic
workers for the family they lived with. Moreover, nearly one half cultivated
the household land plot. For most of them, life was very hard.
As admitted by a returnee:
“You know that agricultural work is very hard. I am their
daughter-in-law, so I should work” (Returnee). “No one
asked me. I left by myself. It turned out that life there was
so hard. I could not stay. I returned home after a few
months”.
Despite their hard work, only 12.1 percent of the returnees had
some savings–which was about 10 percent of what they had made.
Very few (3.8 percent) were able to send remittances home which had
no significant influence on their family income. In Vu and Nguyen’s
study, none of the study participants had been able to send remittances
to their families of origin (Vu and Nguyen, 2002).
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