In “Romantic Love across Borders: Marriage Migration in Popular Romance Fiction,” Amy Burge focuses on two romance novels published in 2019 to explore how they combine migration, intimacy, and romantic love. Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test tells the story of Esme/Mỹ Tran, a Vietnamese American single mother, who is invited by the hero’s mother, Cô Nga, to travel to the USA from Vietnam to seduce him. Although Esme and the hero, Khải, eventually fall in love, at the end of the novel, she is naturalised through her relationship with her newly found father rather than through marriage. Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. features Filipina Liza, who is pursuing a green-card marriage with her American fiancé, Christopher. However, Liza breaks up with Christopher and stays in Manila to pursue a relationship with her best friend Jo. In these novels, migration via marriage is clearly shown as a possible route out of precarity and poverty, but it is not a route that either character chooses. However, the insistence that marriage migration must be directed by romantic love represents a mainstream yet conservative view of marriage migration, which frames a notion of authentic romantic love in accordance with western cultural convention.
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Both texts frame cross-border marriage as a union requiring love above all else. If love is not present, then marriage cannot take place. Esme concedes that “a one-sided love would destroy [her], not to mention set a horrid example for her daughter to follow” (Hoang 2019, chap. 21). Here, the novels follow romance logic: that love is essential for marriage. Both texts are clearly invested in marriage and long-term romantic partnership as a bond between two people who love each other, regardless of citizenship status and both protagonists choose love and turn away from a green-card marriage.
In fact, the novels conform so readily to the idea that marriage must be for love, and that love is the most important outcome for their protagonists, that they reframe the romantic love relationship as the primary goal. Love replaces the goal of migration for Liza and rewards Esme with settled status only after her love goal has been achieved. In both texts, the USA is associated with opportunity. (44)
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These novels further distance their romantic relationships from discourses of fake or sham marriage by using migration and movement metaphors to characterise the developing romantic relationships. (46)
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In these romance novels, love is the necessary ingredient for marriage migration. Reflective of contemporary policy discourse, both texts adhere to the idea that marriage must be undertaken only for love reasons, although they do acknowledge the range of economic and family needs sitting alongside such decisions. Bringing migration into a love story connects economics with intimacy in ways that are not usually seen in “pure love” relationships. (47)
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