A 1000 year old culture of mystical thinking
Desperate poverty
TV

^^^ recipe for a million "willing" slaves.

(imo only, and from what i have seen) the Huge Thing that so many overlook, even the women themselves before they leave, is the broken connection and close contact with family. That is akin to cutting out a Khmers heart.
Sure, they are going to focus on the material,
and sure they are going to reassure loved ones back home that everything is roses.

Khmers are good at sucking eggs and smiling on the surface, in the midst of absolute misery.
Even tho she "wants" to move to the West - i reckon it would be indulging the cruelest deception in the world if i ever allowed my wife to do that.
She would still smile and tell the family all about the roses tho'.

Just a thought
And for sure it does work out well for many.

I don't like this attitude that Khmer women can't cope outside Cambodia, and actually this whole thread has been reminding me of this: https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50775664/m ... marriages/. It reeks of superiority and contradiction, and even surveillance ("The embassy must keep information records on the women who come to their country following marriage to help them when they have problems"). Good intentions or no, this kind of ultraconservative nonsense is not a positive direction for the country, I feel. You'd think if they really wanted Cambodian women to stay, they'd make it more appealing to do that so that they wouldn't sometimes rush off with these arseholes (who exist regardless of ethnicity or location anyway), instead of pasting the media with anti-foreigner generalizations.

Personally, the only three Khmer I know who have been living outside Cambodia for at least 5+ years are doing very well. A bit of culture shock would be their biggest complaint.

Edit: The whole $2500 law shits me as well. Why shouldn't Cambodian women have the option of being sugar mamas?

Yeah i agree techno - that ^^ is nearly as bad as thinking every escape from Cambodia to the West, or to anywhere else, is automatically a big pos+.
and that is even more deeply embedded in many minds.

So yeah, 'good to discuss and tease out the different angles.

The reality is that literally millions of Khmer are looking for prospects outside of Cambodia for good reasons. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en ... d%E2%80%A6

From the above article that siliconlife was mentioning.

“She said the embassy should contact the women first and have regular gatherings for them, or at least for Khmer New Year.”

I wonder does the embassy also care for the well being of the hundreds of thousands of overseas Khmer (aka former refugees). as well? I don’t hear the Cambodian embassy in the US sponsoring lots of outreaches to them.

Thailand may be an easier transition for Khmer. Similar food, similar customs. Almost the same rice. Plus lots of Khmer (before) working in various jobs for them to gossip with.

phuketrichard wrote: ↑Sun Nov 22, 2020 7:52 am

The whole $2500 law shits me as well.

Wasn't that cancelled awhile ago?

No, only the age restriction for blokes over 50.

newkidontheblock wrote: ↑Sun Nov 22, 2020 8:26 am Thailand may be an easier transition for Khmer. Similar food, similar customs. Almost the same rice. Plus lots of Khmer (before) working in various jobs for them to gossip with.

I'm not saying it's necessarily any better for them anywhere, it all depends on circumstances. For example, a much bigger problem than the marriage market is the slave market in Thailand's fishing industry (https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018 ... the-crisis). But the fact remains that the Cambodians who were duped into such conditions were done so because they were in vulnerable positions in their home country in the first place. I have met many returned Cambodians who loved living and working in Thailand. You certainly don't see Thais flocking to work over here.

So I don't think that it is just an "embedded mindset" that life in other countries is going to be better than in Cambodia by default. I think most of them know that making a move entails its own set of risks and disadvantages. They are, however, genuinely hoping for better lives and willing to make the gamble.

siliconlife wrote: ↑Sun Nov 22, 2020 4:55 am I don't like this attitude that Khmer women can't cope outside Cambodia, and actually this whole thread has been reminding me of this: https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50775664/m ... marriages/. It reeks of superiority and contradiction, and even surveillance ("The embassy must keep information records on the women who come to their country following marriage to help them when they have problems"). Good intentions or no, this kind of ultraconservative nonsense is not a positive direction for the country, I feel. You'd think if they really wanted Cambodian women to stay, they'd make it more appealing to do that so that they wouldn't sometimes rush off with these arseholes (who exist regardless of ethnicity or location anyway), instead of pasting the media with anti-foreigner generalizations.

Personally, the only three Khmer I know who have been living outside Cambodia for at least 5+ years are doing very well. A bit of culture shock would be their biggest complaint.

Edit: The whole $2500 law shits me as well. Why shouldn't Cambodian women have the option of being sugar mamas?

I agree with you generally and am against authoritarianism, and abusing people's freedoms in the supposed name of their own best interests, but it's also worth keeping in mind that there are so many single Chinese men that numerically can't find wives and they are scouring places like Vietnam and Cambodia looking for women. And second, in Cambodian culture the parental generation believes that their children are like their property that owe them a debt, and that they also have the right to dictate the course of their children's lives in order to get material benefit from them. Then add on top of it that this older generation (especially the poorer ones) are often some of the most poorly educated, uninformed, conservative, sometimes just outright abusive people.

So yes, I do think that there is a serious risk of human trafficking, and I would say it's positive for the Minister in the article to attempt to warn people of the dangers. The second person is from an NGO and her solutions do seem to be extreme, I don't support some of her ideas, but again in Cambodia there is a trend of authoritarianism and paternalism. Given that the Cambodian Embassies are probably underfunded and poorly managed, her request is likely to fall on deaf ears.

I still think the solution to the marriage problem is for people to get married overseas to avoid the corruption here, and then the Cambodian government has some method to determine whether it's a legitimate marriage that they will recognize. Refusing to recognize marriages conducted overseas is wrong, in my view.

PSD-Kiwi wrote: ↑Sat Nov 21, 2020 7:14 pm

newkidontheblock wrote: ↑Sat Nov 21, 2020 2:19 am So she married a farmer. And she’s a farmer’s wife.
Sounds like she’s working alongside her husband. And her husband’s a bit of a loner. As long as she’s happy.
Is that any different from the Khmer who married Khmer Americans and are now working long hours making donuts with their husbands, too?
They are sharing the dream together and working hard to make it a reality.

No, she married a businessman who works in Seoul and has dumped her on the provincial farm with other farm workers and family members, she is not allowed to leave the farm without a family member escorting her, she has no access to her passport, she has no access to money and if there is anything she needs she has to ask. She married the guy, as many Cambodian women do, believing that she would escape to a better life, which in a way she has as she does not need to worry about where her next meal is coming from, but not the dream life she was expecting.

This sounds like borderline human trafficking to me. If the man is not really interested in her then it was a sham marriage. It would be interesting to know whether she would like to leave the farm or come home, and is being prevented from doing so.

In some cases with Cambodians, it seems that they themselves are somehow bound to the traffickers, and feel little motivation to leave, like Stockholm Syndrome, or some kind of sense of owing the traffickers. There have been cases like this with the donut shops in the US, I believe.