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AsiaWeek July 29, 1999

Roy Des Ruisseaux admits that he had no luck with women. Nine years ago, at age 49, he found himself never-married and lonely, despite what he describes as a lifelong dream of settling down.

“I was the kind of guy who met someone I liked and would get too anxious, or I would focus on someone not right for me,” said the New England postal carrier. “I can look back on it now and laugh.”

That’s because Des Ruisseaux, of Upper Dardy, Penn., has been happily married for some six years to “the one” -- a Filipina whom he met through Sunshine International, an introduction service that links up American men with foreign women.

De Ruisseaux remembers when he first gave serious thought to using a service. One weekend some nine years ago, he was resting in a tent after completing a car race. He recalls thinking, “This is not what I want. Judging by the way I am, I’m not going to meet anyone.”

He had heard the stereotype that men who used “pen-pal” services “don’t date and are real losers,” but he thought: “Who cares -- if it works. I had no problem with wanting to get married.”

Des Ruisseaux said he sent off about six letters to women featured in the services’ catalogs, to which no one responded. Better results came after he paid $125 to have his name posted in four catalogs. Soon he began receiving letters, including one from Josie, then a 38-year-old living in the Philippines.

“She asked a lot of questions,” Des Ruisseaux recalls. “It sounds goofy, but questions like: ‘if you were on a deserted island, if you could meet one person in history ...”

He thought: “That’s me. I can write pages about that stuff.”

After corresponding for about a year, Des Ruisseaux traveled to Hong Kong, where Josie worked as a maid. Though her parents had long urged her to settle down, Josie, too, had never wed. “I didn’t meet the right guy,” she explained.

Recalling her first impression of her husband, Josie De Ruisseaux hesitates for a moment before replying. “He was OK,” she says during a phone interview, laughing as her husband chuckles in the background. “I don’t know why I chose him. I liked his name.”

She notes that she was skeptical at first, asking him how many other girls he was planning to meet on his trip. “I heard about other men who say they’re going to meet three ladies in Manila and pick out the best one,” said Des Ruisseaux. “No. To me that doesn’t make sense. I told her she was the only one here to see.”

Another year passed before Des Ruisseaux brought his fiancee to the United States in March 1993, during which, Josie says, her friends and family told her she was “crazy.”

She recalled thinking, “Let’s see what happens. I can always come back if it doesn’t work out.”

“She packed her bags, quit her job, then flew almost 9,000 miles away with the understanding that we’re getting married,” says De Ruisseaux, explaining his wife’s anxiety.

She wanted to get married almost as soon as her plane landed, he says. They did, some three weeks later. Today, Josie De Ruisseaux works as a seamstress, but has not applied for citizenship yet.

“I admire my wife to have the courage,” says her husband. “What did I do? I got married, but I live in the same house, have the same job. She moved in with a guy she barely knew.”

STATISTICS

An INS study, “The Mail-Order Bride Industry and its Impact on U.S. Immigration,” estimates that 100,000 to 150,000 women, including American women, advertise themselves for marriage through e-mail or other correspondence services.

The study, released this year, estimated that some 5,000 Filipinas come to the United States through mail-order bride services each year; just as many come from Russia, the other country leading the list. They are commonly recruited through local newspapers, women’s magazines and word of mouth. The study notes, however, that only about 1 in 5,000 marriages in the United States has its roots in overseas introduction services.

In the past five years, the Internet has fueled the boom. Though international correspondence services like the one Roy De Ruisseaux used have been around for well over 20 years, more men are logging in to sites like “Foreign Brides International” and “Asian Brides by Mail” to find their mates.

The “growth of [international Internet dating] services has been phenomenal.” noted the INS study, which cited the growth of goodwife.com, a so-called clearinghouse to introduction sites. As of mid-March 1998, it says, the site had 153 Web listings. Two months later, there were 202. By this spring, it had more than 340 listings, including 89 Asian sites and 168 Russian ones.

Traditional letter-writing services, however, remain popular -- a fact that the study explained by noting that many women searching for husbands are also looking for a means to escape poverty and have no access to computers. The ones who use online matchmaking services tend to be older, better educated, and more likely to live in a relatively developed country such as Japan or Russia, according to the INS report.

THINGS CAN WORK OUT

Cecilia Julag-ay, a professor at California State University-San Bernardino, is one of the few experts on mail-order bride companies -- or international correspondence services, as she and other supporters prefer to call it. ” ‘Mail-order bride’ is pejorative,” she explains. “It doesn’t do justice to the couples having very nice marriages.”

For her doctoral dissertation, Julag-ay, of Filipino and European descent, interviewed 40 people who had entered into correspondence marriages. “The vast majority were more or less along the lines as any other marriage,” she said.

Of the subjects, a third had been married to each other at least 20 years, usually in “good, stable marriages.” Another third, she said, had been married between three and nine years with “everything needed to have long-term marriages.”

She did concede, though, that unions among the other third “had definite exploitation of one spouse or the other.”

Julag-ay looked only at marriages in which the wife was from the Philippines, where the practice is more common than in any other Asian country. One reason for that, she explained, stems from U.S. colonization and neo-colonization of the Philippines.

“A lot of Filipino women are familiar with the English language and American culture and find it easier to take on U.S. norms” than do other Asian women, observed the scholar. Given widespread poverty and the fact that matchmaker-arranged marriages are already entrenched, especially in rural areas, the thought of meeting a mate through the mail, or e-mail, is worth considering.

“A lot of people need to help families in whatever way possible,” Julag-ay said. “By tradition, the eldest in the family is responsible for taking care of parents and younger siblings. A lot of times the eldest daughter will seek a marriage outside the Philippines to help the family,” possibly by sponsoring relatives for citizenship down the line or by sending financial help, she said. “Once you’ve left, you do have an obligation to send money back.”

“In the United States, there is higher expectation to find someone ourselves, fall madly in love and that’s going to be our marriage.” But in the Philippines, she said, “the idea of going through a correspondence service really isn’t out of line.”

IT’S NOT FOR EVERYONE

Without doubt, though, there are a lot of “ifs.” For one thing, while some services are legitimate, others may not be. “Asian Lovers & Mail-Order Brides,” for example, features women who all look like models and invites visitors to order literature like “The Fantasy Islands Guide to World Sex” and “Adult Travel and Mail Order Brides” -- just a mouse click away.

Abuse is another problem. The INS study notes that though the agency has no statistics on how often such wives are abused, “there is every reason to believe that the incidence is higher in this population than for the nation as a whole.”

The potential for conflict rises, it said, with every year that the women assimilate into American culture. “Authorities agree that abuse in these marriages can be expected based on the men’s desire for a submissive wife and the women’s desire for a better life.”

Becky Masaki, executive director of the Asian Women’s Shelter, agreed that women in such arrangements do face a greater risk of abuse. Though any kind of relationship could potentially lead to domestic violence, she cautioned that the risks are greater in an Internet or pen-pal relationship.

“The danger is not being able to fully know the person while you’re dating,” she explained. “Through e-mail, people who are abusive can disguise themselves. They can put forth a different persona.”

Over the past year and a half, Masaki said, the shelter has seen clients who met their husbands through the Internet. “I know of women who have escaped abusive situations who met their partners through e-mail,” she said. “Language is a big part of it. There is a potential for miscommunication.”

Masaki, who also refrains from referring to the women as “mail-order brides,” stresses that those she has met have not been gold-diggers. They “entered in the relationship in good faith. They didn’t enter the relationship just to come here.”

Abuse, in fact, is the one exception to the INS requirement that a spouse remain married to her American sponsor for years.

While men and women can divorce and then self-petition for citizenship as an abused spouse, proving a case is not easy. Someone seeking such an exemption should have her claim well-documented with police reports, notes from medical exams, photos and other information, said INS spokeswoman Sharon Rummery.

Still, some women’s advocates maintain that men who support the introductions industry are also perpetrating abuse. Dorchen Leidholdt, director of the Center for Battered Women Legal Services in New York City and co-executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking Women, said “This is a big international business that is about affluent, white Western men who want submissive women to meet their sexual and domestic needs, complicated with the fact that the women are often impoverished and entertain notions that Western men are nice and better than men from their own country.”

“The women are Asian, African and Latin American and the men are Caucasian, with a white-man’s fantasy of who these women are.”

“People are reaping profits by playing to the fantasies of the men,” said Leidholdt. “The women will not demand equal treatment. They will stay in the home and do what you want -- that’s the clear message.”

Several mail-order marriages gone wrong have, in fact, made headlines in recent years. Susana Remerata Blackwell, a Filipina, met her husband, Timothy Craig Blackwell, through a mail-order service but left him 10 days after arriving to the United States in 1994, alleging abuse. During divorce proceedings a year later, Blackwell, a 47-year-old computer technician, accused her of tricking him into marriage, and then shot and killed her and two of her friends, according to news reports. He was sentenced to life without parole.

Then there’s Terry Nichols, who went to the Philippines in 1989 to meet women who had responded to his newspaper ads. He was introduced to Marife Torres, a high schooler from a poor family. They got married just after she graduated, but soon after she came to the United States, her mother said Torres complained she had to work “like a maid.” Nichols today is behind bars in the Oklahoma City bombing.

“They have the money; they control the women’s immigration sponsorship,” Leidholdt said. “The women have to do what the men want or get out or get beaten.”

The activist, who has worked with the Women’s Crisis Center in the Philippines, said that many women end up going back to their country of origin.

“It’s another side of the story that rarely gets any public attention,” said Leidholdt, who estimates that her organization has represented around a dozen mail-order and Internet brides.

Even though President Corazon Aquino in 1990 signed a measure banning the production or distribution of material promoting the solicitation of Filipinas for marriage to foreigners, and even though the law says violators can be sentenced to up to eight years behind bars, it is difficult to enforce, given the number of firms outside the Philippines -- and the ubiquity of the Internet. Leidholdt notes that firms still offer that service as well as “sex-tours” arranged for the benefit of mostly white Westerners.

To Leidholdt, though, the bottom line is clear. “This is all about inequality. The men hold all the cards.”

THE GREEN-CARD TRACK

The INS study, though, indicates that the appeal of living in America is a significant factor for many brides and brides-to-be, even though it takes at least four and a half years for a overseas bride to become a citizen and often takes twice as much time or more.

“If someone lives overseas, once they marry an American, they are immediately eligible to immigrate here legally,” Rummery said. “If they are here already, they are immediately eligible to file to adjust their status to become lawful permanent residents.”

In 1996, 7,317 men and women petitioned for “fiancee visas,” including 3,468 from Asian countries and 1,274 from the Philippines alone, according to Rummery. Though she said the agency did not have a breakdown of where they were in the naturalization process, she did note that the INS usually holds so-called “bona fide marriage interviews” with one or both spouses only if there is a “good reason to question the marriage.”

The process begins when a spouse-to-be is issued the “fiancee visa,” a K-1 visa good for 90 days in which the applicant expects to be married. After the marriage, the new spouse, now classified as a “non-immigrant,” can continue her stay by petitioning to have her status redefined as a “lawful permanent resident,” a process that Rummery said takes 18 months.

After receiving permanent status, the spouse can petition for a two-year conditional green card, after which time she may apply for citizenship. However, as with the previous steps, the spouse must in most cases remain married to her American sponsor and must be “residing in marital union,” as Rummery said the government puts it. After two years, the spouse apply for a regular green card, which would allow her to apply for citizenship even if divorced.

Citizenship itself takes at least one year to process. For most applicants, gaining it requires successfully completing interviews and tests to assess good moral character, comprehension of English and knowledge of American civics and history.

“The idea is to make yourself into something you weren’t before, something new -- an American,” Rummery said.

Imperfect PERCEPTIONS

The INS study found that a top priority among would-be brides is the chance for a better, more affluent life with a man more likely to be faithful and nonabusive than a native-born spouse. It also found that women of Asian descent were markedly younger than their European counterparts, the study found: 61 percent of the Asian women were under 25, whereas only 31 percent of the Russian women advertised were under 25.

“Often there is an enormous age difference that exacerbates the inequality,” Leidholdt said. “Many times these men can’t make it with women in this country. Sometimes they are socially inept or just jerks.”

She added that the fact these men are unable to have equal relationships may indicate “they have serious problems.”

The INS report said that the men, a large majority of whom are white, wanted a wife with “traditional values.” American women are “thought to be more concerned with their own careers than being a wife, while Asian women are perceived to be content as homemakers.”

Though Julag-ay found that the men who sought Asian brides were “along the lines to what the popular media has presented - ultra conservative, basically not all that emotionally stable,” she adds, “that isn’t the full truth.”

Valuing traditional things in life means the men “tended to want a lifestyle in which they wanted to be the primary breadwinner,” she said. In many cases, she said, “it was a good fit with the social expectations of the women.”

DEFENDING BUSINESS

Cherry Blossoms, based in Hawaii, was founded 25 years ago. Today, it lists over 6,000 women at any one time. Half are Filipinas; Indonesians rank next. The biggest increase, however, has been in Eastern European women looking for love American style, says the owner, Mike Krosky, who bought the business five years ago.

“It is not a mail-order bride service, it is an international personal ad service,” says Krosky, who estimates that his company’s services result in over 1,000 client marriages per year.

“There are a lot of things I could do to improve profits, I could only publish drop-dead gorgeous, best educated and make more money,” he says. “But I’m trying to help people meet for love and marriage on their own values. We put out a great variety of looks and professions.”

Cherry Blossoms has recently put up a Web site, but Krosky says most of his business is still out of his print catalogs. Addresses cost $10 each or $395 for a one-year subscription, and women can advertise for free. Some 6,000 do each year, says Krosky; about 2,000 to 3,000 men use the service every year.

Though most of the women featured are in their 20s or 30s, Cherry Blossoms has been “getting more older, attractive women in their 30s and 40s,” Krosky says. He hopes to expand into publishing ads toward women who want overseas mates, he said.

“Women from all over the world are given greater opportunity to find men through letter writing than going outside their country,” says Krosky, who challenges contentions that his industry exploits women.

“Go back to Japan and watch how men interact with women. Especially modern women, women around the world recognize this,” he said.

In the United States, “we’re not living in the Flintstone days,” he says. “In general, there is an awareness [by the women] that there’s something better for me than what is in my hometown.”

In fact, Krosky met his wife, a Filipina more than 18 years younger than he, through his own service. “She’s way smarter then I am. She speaks six languages. I don’t try to mold my wife. My wife is her own person. There’s no molding or manipulation.”

Moreover, he says he thinks he is better suited for a younger woman. “I’m youthful in appearance and healthy and fit. When I look at women my age, they are not as attractive to me.”

He’s been interested in Asian culture for many years, he says. “When I was 12 or 13, I watched Kung Fu. Whenever I saw Asian people it was interesting to me,” he said. “I felt a connection to Asia. I’ve always had an interest.”

His interest expanded into attraction. “I’ve always been attracted to Asian women. I like their manners.”

His wife, Hilanie, says she’s not bothered by the age difference between her and her 42-year-old husband, with whom she raises his son. She says she “likes an old person, who knows about life is mature can share experiences.”

She signed up for Cherry Blossoms while she was a student at Saint Colunben College in the Philippines; most women at her school did too, she adds.

“People knew it was good, decent, not like other companies,” she explains. “You write letters and look at how they write and their interests, about life, what kind of woman they are looking for.”

Though she had had no boyfriends, she recalls, she was not necessarily looking for romance, but rather “just for a friend for correspondence.” After being introduced to her husband-to-be, she wrote him three or four letters a week for a year before they got married.

Mike was the first man she had met through such a service, said his wife, though she added that he had had “met a couple of women before me,” perhaps two to four Filipinas.

They didn’t work out, she said, “because he didn’t have attraction to them at all. They had no chemistry.”

“American guys are good husbands compared to the Philippines,” said Hilanie Krosky, who emphasized that her preference for American men and her feelings for Mike in particular were paramount in her decision.

“Most Filipino men are demanding. Most of the time they are violent. They beat and hit you. For me, most of the time Americans are good people, they care about women compared to Filipino men. Besides, in the U.S., you can not beat your wife. In the Philippines you can beat your wife.

“It has nothing to do with citizenship. “If I met him and I don’t have feelings toward him, I’m not going to get married to him,” said Hilanie. She liked her husband, “just because our chemistry to each other was there.”

Now a legal resident with a conditional visa, Hilanie is looking forward to next year, when she hopes to apply for citizenship. She says she does not plan to bring over other kin. “My relatives don’t like to come to the U.S.,” she explained. “My family lives a good life and has good financial support in the Philippines.”

Both said they are happy. “I want to begin to dispel the myths,” said Mike Krosky. “It’s not about mail-order brides.

“Hello, this is a global world ... We are a global population. We’re all connected.”

Janet Dang and Connie Hsiao contributed to this article.