Matchmaking in Korea: Mentally Ill Grooms Need Not Apply

BEIJING, July 16, 2010 -- The 20-year-old Vietnamese bride had been in South Korea for only eight days when she was stabbed to death at her house July 3 in Busan.

Police investigators identified the suspect as her husband, Jang, 47, whom they would identify only by his last name. Police described Jang as a psychiatric patient with 57 cases of schizophrenia treatment in the past five years.

Before bringing his bride home from Vietnam, Jang was hospitalized for five days, police said. They also said he had been charged with assaulting his parents in 2005.

"I committed the murder after hearing a voice from a ghost," he told police during the investigation. "He told me to kill my wife."

The bride was from a farming family in Vietnam that has been receiving government aid and housing. The couple met through a Korean matchmaking company and got married in Vietnam in January, police said. The woman followed Jang to South Korea this month with the hopes of living the Korean Dream.

The case prompted the Women Migrant Human Rights Center of Korea to sue the matchmaking company for providing too little personal information about the husband.

"It's a sort of a warning to the society and other matchmaking companies," Mi-ju Kown, a team counseling leader at the human rights center, said. "Such marriages shouldn't be allowed unless personal information on both sides is fully provided."

In an effort to avoid future crimes, government officials will enact a law to force companies to provide marriage, criminal, and medical records to the couples.

But many Koreans are skeptical because matchmaking is so lucrative that companies are likely to resist.

"I knew that bringing foreign wives was one of the social problems these days but I was never aware that the system in international matchmaking companies is so poor," Bumjoon Shin, a college student in Seoul, said.