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Marriage is currently the number-one reason people migrate to the United States, and women constitute the majority of newcomers joining husbands who already reside here. But little is known about these marriage and migration streams beyond the highly publicized and often sensationalized phenomena of mail-order and military brides. Less commonly known is that most international couples are immigrants of the same ethnicity.

In For Better or For Worse, Hung Cam Thai takes a closer look at marriage and migration, with a specific focus on the unions between Vietnamese men living in the United States and the women who marry them. Weaving together a series of personal stories, he underscores the ironies and challenges that these unions face. He includes the voices of working-class immigrant men dealing with marginalization in their adopted country. These men speak about wanting "traditional" wives who they hope will recognize their gendered authority. Meanwhile, young Vietnamese college-educated women, undesirable to bachelors in their own country who are seeking subservient wives, express a preference for men of the same ethnicity but with a more liberal outlook on gender-men they imagine they will find in the United States.

A sense of foreboding pervades the book as Thai captures the incompatible viewpoints of the couples who appear to be separated not only geographically but ideologically.

This issue addresses how laborers within intimate industries—those who do interpersonal work that tends to the sexual, bodily, health, hygiene, or care needs of individuals—are shaping Asia’s growing role in the global economy. The contributors investigate how intimate industries support relational connections for consumers while disrupting laborers’ relationships, as in the case of migrants who perform intimate labor away from their families and communities of origin. The articles collected here include examinations of such trade-offs and their complex meanings and implications for the workers. The authors explore these social processes through the lens of industries that organize, enable, or delimit the trade in domestic labor, marriage migration, companionship and romance, sex work, pornographic performance, surrogate mothering and ova donation, and cosmetics sales. This issue puts people, as embodied subjects, back into narratives of economic change and offers a perspective on globalization from below.

Contributors: Danièle Bélanger, Hae Yeon Choo, Nicole Constable, Daisy Deomampo, Akhil Gupta, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, Pei-Chia Lan, Purnima Mankekar, Eileen Otis, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Rhacel Parreñas, Sharmila Rudrappa, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Rachel Silvey, Hung Cam Thai, Leslie Wang