It is mid-morning in the Land of Smiles, and Mildee Sornbunthong has already married off a pair of her clients.
Several times a week she heads to an office in downtown Bangkok to witness no-frills weddings between a Thai woman — often a hard-bitten bar maiden — and the Western man who has been smitten by her.
”She is a good girl; I’ve known her 10 years,” Mildee says of the woman who tied the knot this day. Others, she admits, are products of the notorious nightlife districts in Bangkok and its accessory party resort to the south, Pattaya.
”Some of these bar girls have four, six, even eight children,” she says. ”They need a foreign husband to love and look after them.”
Mildee is a veteran of Bangkok’s ”marriage agencies”, the multi-tasking offices where mergers have been negotiated, signed, sealed and delivered on a daily basis since the height of the Vietnam War, when thousands of Americans were stationed in Thailand.
Some 12 000 Thais married foreigners over the past year, and the figures are rising at an annual 10%, according to the foreign ministry’s legalisation division, which certifies documents for all international unions.
But the agencies are finding that a proliferation of Internet websites and a jump in competition on the ground is pinching profits in their once lucrative business.
”Before, we worked so hard on marriage services,” says Mildee, proprietor of Express Translation Service and Travel Company. ”But our marriage requests are going down these days. I need to do many more translations of regular documents just to survive.”
Her cluttered office, where agents tap away at computers or confer with young Thai women wearing bell-bottom jeans and macramé mobile-phone holsters, is squeezed in among a dozen other agencies and the Ploenchit VD Clinic.
Their start-to-finish marriage business revolves around the translation of documents, such as declarations of marital status, and acting as intermediary with Thai officialdom.
Yet these are services also provided in growing numbers by firms whose Internet web sites, with names like BangkokWife.com, are accused of siphoning away clients.
The mail-order bride business has been active in Thailand for decades, but the advent of the Internet has facilitated international matchmaking, says Lawrence Lynch, founder of Thai Professional Introduction Services.
”We’ve had a lot of successful brides in the last few years,” Lynch says, adding that some 400 of his clients have taken Thai wives since he launched the website four years ago. The British-based businessman dismisses concerns that his and other websites are putting the squeeze on Bangkok’s marriage agencies, but the veterans of the business are not so sure.
”Some days we have a few customers (seeking marriage assistance), but other days we have none,” says Bhinyo Vongklednak, whose Professional Translation office is conveniently located between the British and US embassies.
”Some of them meet these women and in just one week they get married,” he adds.
In those cases, nothing beats face-to-face business, says Bhinyo’s brother Banyat, a lawyer who doubles as a private detective.
Banyat concedes that foreign men are willing to part with extra cash to speed up the procedure.
”Thailand depends on who you know, not what you know,” he says, adding that a well-placed payment can cut total processing time down to two days.
Of the 12 000 Thais who married foreigners from July 2001 to this June, 2 500 of them married Taiwanese men.
”These marriages are increasing,” said one representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, Taiwan’s de facto embassy here, adding that Thai brides may prefer Asian cultures more similar to their own.
The other largest sources of grooms were Japan, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States, according to foreign ministry figures.
Adding his name to the tally is George Allen, a 78-year-old retired civil engineer from Kent, England.
After a 40-year marriage ended a decade ago with the death of his wife, a lonely and hard-drinking Allen was handed a catalogue of potential Thai brides.
”I could have had my choice of 300 ladies,” he recalls. He snipped one photo from the back page and hopped on a plane to Bangkok in late April. He located Parnom, the 43-year-old woman in the picture, a day later.
”From that day, I told her I loved her, and we’ve been together ever since,” he says, patting her knee proudly. ”I’ve never felt better in my life.”
Within days, Allen went from drinking a ”bottle of whisky a night” to being cared for by a virtual stranger. Romance, and its apparent benefits, bloomed quickly, he says.
”She keeps the apartment spotless, and lays my clothes out on the bed each morning. Thais are the most caring women in the world, you see.”
Acquiring a visa to Britain proved difficult for Parnom, a child of Bangkok’s streets who speaks little English and can hardly read or write Thai, so they rushed a marriage earlier this month in order to better the chances of visa approval.
”Mildee got us married in three days. Miss Cupid, I call her,” says a love-struck Allen.
His four grown daughters have given their blessing, he says. They have already received what he determined was their just inheritance entitlement.
”The rest of it now will go to Parnom.”
Thai and international authorities say they are on the lookout for couplings that are less than love-inspired, and that has deeply complicated the process, particularly in terms of acquiring visas for Thai spouses.
With the number of economic migrants and trafficking in people on the rise, embassies across the board have tightened visa approvals for single and newly married Thai women, leading some activists to cry foul.
”They are scrutinising Thai women with discrimination,” says Chantawipa Apisuk, founder of Empower Foundation which supports the rights of women in the sex trade.
Thrown into the mix are unscrupulous agents milking thousands of dollars from naive clients, and, of course, a host of ill-intentioned brides-to-be.
”Some marriages are true love, for sure,” says Mildee, ”but others are business arrangements no matter which way they are cut.”
The agencies which help bring these starstruck couples together are sometimes enlisted to break them apart, according to Banyat. He says about 10% of his marital work consists of foreigners’ divorce papers.
”Most are okay,” he explains, ”but some, they don’t understand each other.” – Sapa-AFP