‘Tired of pampered, cold, uptight Yank females? Then try our beautiful passionate senoritas.’ An American ad set the misogynistic and seedily exploitative tone of a ‘modern form of serfdom, if not of slavery’ when the Observer investigated mail-order brides on 20 September 1987. Thai and Filipino women (‘attractive and unsophisticated coffee-coloured ladies’, another advert leered) were treated like merchandise in ‘any other import/export deal’, briskly bought and sold.
In the Philippines, where 70% of the population lived in poverty, the draw of being able to offer their family a better life made these uneasy matches an economic prospect women struggled to refuse. That the westerner ‘with the Hawaiian shirt and the bulging wallet’ might turn out to be ‘a night-shift factory hand living with his parents in a bleak part of the Midlands urban sprawl’ could come as an unpleasant surprise. Culture shock, intense loneliness and unsuitable, sometimes abusive, partners contributed to ‘very deep suffering in some cases’.
The investigation found a few apparently happier marriages. ‘Kindly and affectionate’ Terry was left alone when his mother died with ‘a house, a car, a steady job – and no one to share it with’. He devoted himself to helping Thai schoolteacher Anya settle, finding her Thai food and contacts with other Thai women; driving her to the temple and sharing chores 50:50. ‘My son and I have got a better future because we’re here,’ Anya said, calling her husband a ‘gentleman’.
Charles Black had few illusions about himself as a prospect: ‘I’m fat. I’m an old man! In Britain, let’s face it, a girl of 26 wouldn’t marry me, or even look at me.’ He and his wife, Deer, married in Bangkok within 48 hours of meeting, an experience so happy for Black he created his own agency, offering a £3,000 marriage package with a ‘two-year aftercare service’. What his wife – 30 years his junior – thought remained opaque: ‘Deer sits quietly on his sofa in Chislehurst in a baggy Mickey Mouse T-shirt, carefully peeling oranges.’
