Marital Immigrants In Cultural Adaptation

Vietnam is a country adjacent to China. Benefiting from the geographical advantages and ethnic similarity, people living in the border areas of these two countries made the transnational marriages possible. The phenomena have lasted for a long time, and relevant studies have obtained great achievements. However, the studies on inland transnational marriages have not incurred such wide attention because of its dispersion. We can find that the inland and border areas do have large differences through the comparison of geographical environment, language or cultural practices. Therefore, the inland transnational marriage female immigrants will face more difficulties and challenges in cross-cultural adaptation.Qi town, which is located in north of Henan Province is my fieldwork location, the local transnational marriage families are my study objects, I use field research method in anthropology to collect information., describe and analyze the current situation of the transnational marriage, the cause and the process of marriage establishment, meanwhile giving special observation and analysis to cross-cultural life of female immigrants, based on the Theory of Cross-Cultural Adaptation.From the result of the fieldwork, I figure out that the local transnational marriages were initially driven by economic globalization. The local people opened plants or got job in Vietnam. When they came back, they brought the first batch of Vietnamese brides, and transnational marriages began to emerge. The study makes it clear that the local men marrying Vietnamese women is not completely out of voluntary choices, but under the background of the gender imbalance, they have encountered marriage squeeze in the marriage market because of their limited conditions, they have no choice, but on the whole, these transnational marriages are successful, family relationships are stable. Compared with the border areas, transnational marriages in the region are mostly legal, local residents would rather take more time and money to perform legal procedures, in order to give their families and wives legal statuses.My study find that during the adaptation of cross-cultural in inland, Vietnamese wives face more difficulties than border female marriage immigrants in the aspects of climate, food, language and others, but on the whole, their cultural adaptation is in good condition, they are satisfied with current life, compared with in Vietnam.Specifically, daily life, family life and interpersonal communication show good trends as time goes by, Vietnamese wives adapt to the local life-style gradually and establish good interpersonal relationship. However, the psychological status experiences greater difficulties, which presents wave-like uplift or spiral rise. Such as the potential safety concern and national relations would be the special moment or fact that makes psychological adaptation go backward. So the tempo of adaptation will be slow. In different cultural environment, Vietnamese wives flexibly use of integration, assimilation, separation and marginalization strategy, they not only adapt to the life passively, but also build a new life actively. During the interactive process, both sides have respective ethnocentrism and deny each other’s ideas and behaviors about "clean", "infant care", leading to conflict. Cultural tolerance do not pursuit the accordance, it shall recognize cultural differences and accept the resulting differences of thinking and practice. I think that holding cultural tolerance attitude and overcome ethnocentrism hard will contribute to harmonious coexistence.In the end, I reflect the deep causes of the emergence of transnational marriages and the difficulties that faced by the transnational marriage families. Besides the objective factors such as economic ties, sex ratio imbalance and people’ own condition, the appearance of transnational marriages are related to the view of people on marriage and the bride price. The strong atmosphere of marriage commercialization and perverted mind on marriage lead to rise of its cost, which prompts the appearance of the demand of transnational marriages. In real life, without Chinese nationality, Vietnamese wives still have to face identity dilemma, lacking of social security and political participation being indirectly deprived, which lead to the sense of belonging and identity lacking in China. But on the other hand, they are eager to get Chinese nationality, which is a kind of double ambivalence. Because of the differences of language and culture, they are unable to tutor their children on learning. The status quo that they are left-behind leads to the result that they obtain few social supports. The transnational marriage families will also face the judicial dilemma once breakdown happen. We should pay close attention to these problems.