Marriage migration to Denmark, the story of Aphinya

Aphinya Jatuparisakul is a visual artist and writer based in Copenhagen. As an introduction to her following story she says the following:

This is an edited piece I wrote in response to the movie'Heart Boundby Sine Plambech and Janus Metz, which focuses on Thai-Danish marriages and the migration of Thai women. The film shows a different side of marriage migration, sex and work than usually seen in Western media, where it is portrayed almost exclusively in negative terms. This type of migration is also scorned by privileged Thais, who never had to make the choices my mother or the women in the film faced. 'Heartbound' portrays my own background and family in a nuanced and human way, free of stereotypes and prejudices that usually lurk beneath the surface when marriage migration is mentioned.

Aphinya's story

I remember it like it was yesterday. In the winter of 2008, I sat on my bed with my legs crossed, channeling to distract myself from the loneliness that comes with being a 16-year-old girl thousands of miles from home. I remember my eyes meeting those of the woman on screen. The woman looking at me looked like my mother. She looked like the woman I grew up with in Isan, Thailand's poorest region. Her story was the story of my mother and her friends. This woman had come to Denmark to marry a white man.

My stomach hurt. The kind of pain that spreads from your stomach to the rest of your body when you know something bad is just around the corner. I thought there was no reason to look any further because I knew what was coming. The woman would be portrayed as submissive, weak and stupid. Someone who came from a poor country and didn't know any better married a white loser who wanted a young, subservient Thai woman. A live-in maid. I had heard and seen such a story played out countless times in the media since I arrived in Denmark as a five-year-old. Not once were the women and men portrayed with dignity, curiosity and respect. Not once had they come close to my family's face or my mother's migration story.

My mother came to Denmark as a marriage migrant. She received a tourist visa in Thailand, came to Denmark and placed an advertisement in the local newspaper with the headline 'Thai Woman Seeking'. The man who became my stepfather answered the ad. They got married and shortly after that I came to Denmark to live with them. Their love blossomed over time. It was a form of love that in all my years in Denmark I have only heard referred to as a wrong form of love. People have always looked down on my mother or felt sorry for her. They convicted my stepfather. And they felt misplaced sympathy for me.

There is a certain ambivalence to living as a reunited migrant child in the Western world, because we as migrant children eventually grow up. We are a whole generation of children who were reunited with our mothers in the 1990s. We are grown up now and live our own lives in Denmark, far away from a homeland that is further away every day.
I know I was lucky in many ways. I have used all kinds of opportunities to shape my own life because my mother made the decision to travel to Denmark and look for a husband. I am grateful for everything my mother sacrificed for me. But being the 'chosen one', the one who has left poverty for an opportunity in a more prosperous country, still has its price

Migration and motherhood are intertwined for the women of Isan

I miss Thailand and my grandparents every day. Some days the desire is physical. My chest hurts and it feels like I'm trapped under water and slowly drowning. I miss my grandparents even when I'm back home in the village, because my mother tongue has slowly eroded after all these years in the west. I find myself reaching for specific words and phrases as if they were items on the top shelf of a grocery store, painfully close yet out of reach.

I don't know what to do with such a desire. My mother traded her life and family for a better future and doesn't quite understand why I should long for the life she left behind. As the child of a migrant, you hover somewhere in between, caught between gratitude and longing, between your family's expectation for material support and your own westernized dreams and hopes. My mother's generation of women had only one goal: to migrate and create a better life for their children. How can you explain to them that you, as a young adult in the west, have different hopes and dreams without sounding spoiled and ignorant of everything they've done for you?
My Western friends do not understand how difficult it is that choices in life and their consequences for you are made by others. For the best reasons, in hope, love and a selfless effort to give your children better opportunities than they had themselves. Yet you are left with a daily, all-encompassing desire.

Migration and motherhood are intertwined for the women of Isan. I can't stop thinking about how much shared heartbreak we suffered in the quest for a better life. How it was never possible for mothers to raise their own children because they had to leave to find work. My mother worked in several factories in the suburbs of Bangkok before moving to Denmark, so my grandparents took care of me even as a baby. For a long time I thought they were really my parents because I saw my mother so rarely. When she came to get me after her marriage to a Danish man, I couldn't recognize her anymore. I screamed and screamed for my grandparents as she dragged me through Don Mueang, the old international airport in Bangkok. I didn't understand that she was my mother.

If my mother hadn't immigrated from Thailand, I would probably still be in Isaan today. I would have two or three children and work in my family's rice fields, in a factory, or have some other kind of low-paying job. Perhaps I should emigrate to Bangkok to take up an unskilled job in a factory, leaving my children in the care of their grandparents during those months when there is no work in the rice paddies. Maybe I should work in the sex industry in Pattaya and send money to my children and my mother, because sex work is the trade where you earn the most as an unskilled female worker.

Under the public eye

When I was a child I was ashamed of the way we had come to Denmark. In the part of Denmark where I grew up, I heard someone call my mother the 'mail order woman'. I was the daughter of the mail-order woman. I began to look at myself from the outside, just as a stranger would. With pity and repulsion. When I was a teenager, my mother asked me to help a Thai aunt with a dating site so that she too could get a Danish man. I asked my mother if she had no respect for herself. In response, she asked me why I didn't want my aunt to have a better life.

When you grow up as the child of a marriage migrant from Southeast Asia, you soon learn that there is a hierarchy between migration and hierarchies between people. It is considered more dignified to migrate for work than to marry. Disapproval and condemnation come from other minorities, including other Asians. I've seen women who are supposed to be allies, women who know what it's like to experience racist and sexist prejudice but who boast that they didn't migrate that way. They married a Westerner out of pure, 'real' love and not because they saw marriage only as a means of migration. I've heard other Thai women stress that they're not one of 'those' Isaan women, and that they certainly haven't worked in a go-go bar in Pattaya – as if that were a bad thing.

My mother lifted our entire family out of poverty with the remittances she sent to our village, yet she asks me if I am ashamed of her work.

Why are the women who change their lives by selling sex or getting married so despised? Why do so many people, including migrants, see it as the lowest step of the ladder? Why do we look down on women who simply take the opportunities they've been given? There is no right or wrong way to migrate. There are just women trying to create a better life for themselves and their children in any way they can.

In any case, migrating for marriage is also migrating for work. Apart from the task of maintaining a house, Thai women in Denmark often work physically demanding jobs in the service sector or as cleaners to send money to their families.

My mother has worked as a cleaner or in factories since the mid-XNUMXs. She is now a cleaner at Kastrup Airport. I think of her when I wake up at night and can't get back to sleep, wondering if she's lonely on her night shift or if her body can still keep up with the demands of the job. But most of all I think of how heartbreaking it feels when she comes to visit, nervous wondering if I'm ashamed of her, embarrassed to be seen wearing a uniform that screams to the world that she's a cleaner. My mother lifted our entire family out of poverty with the remittances she sent to our village. She is one of the strongest women I know. Still, she asks me if I'm ashamed of her work.

Taking care of the family, generation to generation

The women in my mother's generation of marriage migrants have now reached the age of 50 to 60. Their jobs have taken a toll on their bodies. I don't know what will happen to the wealth my mother brought to Thailand when she can no longer work. I don't know if it will be my duty to take care of a whole family in Thailand then. I don't know if that responsibility will eventually pass to my daughter.

I became a mother myself. I had my daughter a month ago. She will grow up with both her father and mother. Neither of her parents has to travel far to earn money.

I now understand my mother in a different way. My mom migrated so I wouldn't have to. My mother left me with her parents, so that I don't have to leave my daughter with my parents. My daughter is a baby and my partner and I are young. At the moment we are protected by our young age, but that protection also has an expiration date. I wonder how people will look at my daughter and her father when she is 15 and he is 45? Will they ask her if she is her father's wife, just like someone asked me and my stepfather when I was 12 years old?

Apart from my daughter, my mother is my only biological family in Denmark and I fear that her longing for Thailand will one day become too great for her to return home. Migrants always talk about De Dag when they return home. My mother has been talking about it since I arrived in Denmark. From the age of five I have heard my mother talk about The Day and how she looks forward to returning home when I am old enough to fend for myself. I don't know if that day will ever come for my mother, and I wonder if that day will ever come for me. Sometimes the longing tears me apart, but in my heart I know I will never feel completely at home in Thailand.

Translated from an article in the Isaan Record: isaanrecord.com/

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