Singkawang Brides
Apr 25th, 2008, in Society, by Patung
What Singkawang in Kalimantan is famous for, friendly people and wife selling.
Extreme Friendliness
The fair town of Singkawang in western Borneo, 140 odd km’s from Pontianak, is mainly known for two things. The first, as a classic Wikipedia article wiki discusses below, is the bloody 1999 pogrom by long-standing residents against recent Madurese immigrants:
…. the people of Singkawang are extremely friendly, and when the Madurese arrived with no belongings and nowhere to live, they were given permission to stay in any spare place like people’s front yard. As timed passed, the Madurese got accustomed to the local hospitality, offering nothing in return but rude comments. Soon they started to treat the small pieces of land they were lent as their own, in addition to getting into robbery, pity crimes and extorsion. As one local policeman said: “They started to behave like mobsters.” Soon, they were driven out of the city …..
The same authoritative source says that Singkawang is known as “City of Thousand Temples”, because about half of its population is Chinese (Hakka it seems), and this brings us to the second reason, and more proof of the “extreme friendliness” of the people there, the fairly common practice of bride selling to the highest bidder.
Amoy Singkawang
Maya Satrini, an activist in the town, says recent government efforts to reduce the incidence of bride selling or contract marriages among the ethnic Chinese section of the “Hong Kong of Indonesia” have not met with much success:
In 2007 there were over 100 cases, not much different from the previous year.
However she suggests that the 100+ figure is a considerable understatement, because those cases that get reported generally involve the girl being dumped, or having some other reason to complain about the outcome of the “marriage”, – because she was put to work as a prostitute, abused, or was simply very disappointed with life in the new country.
How to Get a Wife in Singkawang
Most of the men who come to Singkawang looking for young women to marry are from Taiwan, China, Malaysia, or Singapore. These men arrive, get in touch with a broker, the broker then approaches a family with a suitably aged girl and generally offers the parents about five million rupiah (a bit over $500) for her.
The overseas men of course pay the broker much more than this figure, with one 2006 Singapore source suggesting the fee is around 30 million rupiah (about $3,000). Often a time period is stipulated in the contract as well, like two or five years, or sometimes very short periods, and often there is in fact no legal marriage. newpaper.asia1.com.sg
Singkawang has a lot to offer.
What the “Amoy Singkawang”, or the girls involved think about all of this is something of a mystery.
Maya Satrini says the men who contract to buy wives in Singkawang tend to come from middle to lower class backgrounds, or are quite old, and are generally not the most eligible of bachelors, if they’re bachelors at all.
Economic hardship in Singkawang lays at the root of the problem, she says. antara
Find Indonesian Chinese brides, possibly from Singkawang, at Meet at IndonesiaMatters!
35 Comments on “Singkawang Brides”
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yaomo says:
Get a life Purba Negoro, your name properly define who you are, purba=ancient ! People like you should have been extinct long time ago in this modern society or you will pose a serious threat to mankind. Chinese scum? Why you hate Chinese so much that you have to resort to vilify other race for your own undoing ? Get your historical facts right, don’t blame death due to starvation on Chinese 200 years ago when it was the massacre of Chinese by so called pribumi Indonesian that occurred many time since independence of Indonesia with the most recent one in 1998. Even some sources revealed that government military also involved in the massacre. Chinese Indonesian has never systematically carry out genocide like pribumi Indonesian did, that is why some bloggers said that 2004 tsunami in Indonesia which wiped out all the coastal villages in Ache and almost 200,000 lives is a sign of wrath from God. Judging from the military attire that you are wearing and the hatred you have towards Chinese, Mr Purba, i believe that you must have participated in the massacre or at least you are a strong supporter of it.
Hey Mr Purba Ancient, have you ever wonder why now Indonesia is 100% ruled by pribumi Indonesian, a country with vast resources and land but still seriously poor, deficient in development and rife of corruption as compare to Singapore where it is governed by a Chinese majority government ??? Answer me ? Why majority of Indonesian are jobless in their own country and have to work as cheap labours and housemaids in Singapore and Malaysia? You know what ? I have a Indonesian Javanese maid working for me and my family.
Talking about prostitution, why are there so many Indonesian women working as prostitute in Malaysia and Singapore ? A significant number is from Java, you want to blame it on poverty too Mr Purba ?
What do you feel if i label all Muslim Javanese or Malay related races genetically lazy and corrupted like a anonymous anthropologist used to tell me ? of course i have doubt in it because unlike you, i’m not a bloody racist! -
JonyBangBang says:
Very few people are lucky enough to be born into wealth, or to earn it by skill’s in the financial industries, (successful stock broker, real estate mogul, business owner) but in this particular wife market the man should have his act together before buying a wife.
The problem for most of these men is the US feminist movement which is causing an 80% divorce rate there in the first 5 years of marriage in the US.
The women there don’t look at the male population as human, they look at them as a paycheck, meal ticket, shopping spree etc, feminist’s there were able to achieve this by sexual manipulation of thier political and judicial system through sexual manipulation of the democrat party. Most democrat politicians are openly sexualy perverted, (clinton, charlie wilson and many more)
So in the US if you put a ring on it you immediatly have a gun pointed at your head, and this feminist political philosophy is being transfered to the rest of the planet, you can always tell where feminist have taken hold by the massivly high divorce rate.
So for men who live under this, the appeal of having a REAL human being as a wife has its appeal to say the least. Buying a hakka woman at the least saves alot of time and energy trying to find a human being to marry. Otherwise get ready to do what american men are forced into, and believe me, you really dont want to go there. -
Nay says:
The women there don’t look at the male population as human, they look at them as a paycheck, meal ticket, shopping spree etc, feminist’s there were able to achieve this by sexual manipulation of thier political and judicial system through sexual manipulation of the democrat party.
I would argue that women everywhere have always seen men as either nuts on a conveyor belt, and being as replacable as broken piston rods. We have natural selection to thank for that, where a womb is crucial to reproduction and excess phalluses are not. So many men get left out of reproduction, and women view themselves as superior.
Women rule over men by allowing men to think that they are in charge…. and then start giving him orders. All the while playing “damsel in distress” helpless victim, and by boosting up a man’s ego to do all the grunt work for her that she doesn’t want to do.
By and large, this worked fairly well for a long time. Men still felt that they had at least some power over their lives, at least to make them comfortable making that commitment.The difference in the western feminist world is that women there no longer let men believe that they are in charge. Their arrogance makes them think that they can “have it all”, by having a man work for them by trapping him in marriage, ON TOP OF working and supporting themselves.
This is going to backfire long term. Men are seeing women take assertive positions in society and are waking up to realize that they no longer need to look after women at all, and are in fact idiots if they do.
In fact have men only have one use to a woman remaining… and that is as a sex partner AND NOTHING MORE.Marriage is truly on the way out. Any sane man these days stays single and sleeps around as much as possible.
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Lee says:
Don’t marry a girl who submits to you just because you had bought her but secretly she doesn’t have any love for you in her heart. Unknowingly you’ll be badly affected by her body’s aura which might cause serious health problems for you later in life. Only marry a girl if there’s genuine mutual love between the two of you.
Comment on “Singkawang Brides”.
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So i go to indonesia with $10,000 american dollars and leave with a beatuful asian wife on a contract? Nice! Where do i sign up? Do i contact families first to arrange a viewing of the potential brides?