GROOMS, WEDDING GUESTS FOR HIRE IN VIETNAM
HANOI— Kha’s wedding day looked perfect from the outside but she was hiding a dark secret, the 27-year-old was three months pregnant and her husband was fake, hired for a staged wedding to avoid the social stigma of becoming a single mother.
Breaking from tradition in a socially conservative Vietnam can come at a high price for the whole family.
“My parents would have been the first to be filled with shame if I was pregnant and without a husband,” Kha, barely showing, told Agent-France Press a month after the $1,500 fake marriage, which was quietly paid for by her baby’s father who is married to another woman.
The wedding-guests-for-hire business is growing in Vietnam—where some 70 percent of people over 15 are married—and not just among pregnant women like Kha looking for stand-in husbands.
Young couples are shelling out thousands of dollars to rent parents, aunts, uncles, godparents and friends to appease familial pressure to tie the knot or avoid clashes between in-laws who disapprove of the union.
Kha and her fake husband were never legally married—a formality often overshadowed by lavish wedding parties in Vietnam—but she is forever grateful to him for playing the part in front of her friends and relatives.
Generation gap
“I felt like I was about to drown but I grabbed a life jacket,” said a smiling Kha, whose name has been changed to protect her identity.
Her parents were in on the secret but Kha plans to tell the rest of her family that her ‘husband’ left her—preferring to be a divorced single mother than having a baby out of wedlock.
Relationship norms are changing fast among the youth in Vietnam, where more than half of the 93 million population is under 30.
More couples are opting to live together before marriage or shunning the family home afterwards and renting their own apartments.
Abortions are on the rise too, with as many as 300,000 officially documented last year, but the stigma remains high.
But when it comes to wedding ceremonies, many still feel immense family or social pressure to hew to tradition, especially from ultraconservative elders.
“People don’t have the courage to live true to their hearts, they face traditional habits and customs, cultures and views,” said Nguyen Duy Cuong, a psychology researcher.
“We should put ourselves in the shoes of those who have no way out,” he said, offering sympathy for those who paid for the actors to avoid causing a family rift.
Fake ceremony
That’s what led Huong and her boyfriend, Quan, to stage a fake ceremony.
His family shunned her because she came from a poor province, but Huong’s parents insisted she marry during the year of the rooster on the advice of a fortuneteller.
So the couple hosted a fake wedding in her home province of Nghe An, though they refused to say exactly how much they spent.
Her wedding guests were real, but his—father, mother, uncles, aunties, friends—were all hired.