Abstract
A significant strand of cultural and social studies research on late modernity has focused on intimacies; in particular, ‘mediated intimacies’ (Attwood et al., 2017; Barker et al., 2018; Gill, 2009), exploring how the media, in its various forms, represents and affects intimate relationships. Romance fiction, the most popular global genre, offers a key source text for exploring intimate and romantic relationships and the ways culturally and politically specific forms of intimacy are shared transnationally. Of particular interest is the increase in the twenty-first century of romantic stories that deal with the intersection of intimacy and migration.
This article brings together critical work on intimacy and affect, scholarship on popular romance, and research on migration and transcultural exchange to explore how contemporary Anglophone popular romance fiction mediates intimate relationships in the context of migration. Focusing on two romance novels featuring South East Asian migration to the USA — Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019) and Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) — I explore how these novels represent marriage migration and its relationship to and impact on intimacy. Both novels are aware of existing stigmas around marriage migration (the risk of abuse or fraudulent marriage), but the association of marriage with ‘authentic’ romantic love in the romance genre ultimately serves to uphold such stigmas, rather than challenge them. The texts pay equally close attention to the performativity of romantic love, noting how heteronormative, western norms of romance are required for migrants but, in the case of You, Me, U.S., can also be queered. These texts are concerned with the movement of people and cultures while themselves travelling across borders as products of a transnational, global publishing market. These fictions, then, showcase how their particular articulations of intimacy offer new insights for scholars interested in marriage migration.
Introduction
Of all popular genre fiction, it is the romance which is most concerned with intimacy. Romance novels, which “center around a love plot that holds the promise of a future with a unified emotional life for two or more protagonists” (Kamblé et al., 2021: 2), are global products, shaped by changing gender and sexuality norms, as well as western neocolonial and neoliberal ideologies. In romance fiction, the expression of intimacy reflects this shaping, and is typically incorporated into “a modern concept of romantic love” characterised by “sexual desire and passion”, “mutuality, partnership and companionship”, and monogamy and commitment (Teo, 2021: 460), often through marriage. Such definitions draw, in part, on Giddens’s definition of the ‘pure relationship’ — “a relationship of sexual and emotional equality” (2) — generated by romantic love. A growing number of popular romance texts published in recent years have focused on themes of migration and the ways in which intimacy and migration intersect. Such texts can generate ‘mediated intimacy’ — the idea that “media of various kinds play an increasingly important role in shaping people’s knowledge, desires, practices and expectations about intimate relationships” (Barker et al., 2018: 1337). These romance texts, therefore, have a role in creating knowledge and awareness around migration and intimacy. But when critics talk about ‘migration literature’, this does not usually include texts like these, despite romance’s position as the best-selling sector of the global book market. 1 However, I suggest that romance fiction, with its global market and specific tropes, offers a unique and untapped resource for exploring representations of migration and intimacy.
Intimacy has been of equal interest to migration scholars. Since Mai and King (2009) called for a greater focus on love and sexuality in migration studies, dozens of studies have explored the subject primarily through citizenship, family and legal frameworks. Much of this research has focused on “how marriage, as the main cause of migration, has shaped migrants’ well-being and life choices” (Yeung and Mu, 2020: 2867). 2 Particular threads emerge from this research. Intense legislative scrutiny of marriage migration is a key area of scholarly interest. 3 Others have noted the emergence of sanctified and (un)sanctified intimacies in immigration policy and procedure, structured around heteronormative ideals of romantic love [or ways of doing love (what D’Aoust calls ‘technologies of love’ (2013)] that are based on Giddens’s ‘pure relationship’ (Turner and Espinoza, 2021: 374). 4 Immigration procedures – interviews, paperwork, and documentation – create “[a] subjective conceptualisation of ‘true’ romantic love” that shapes intimacies for migrating couples (Odasso, 2021: 77). Mai and King argue that “emotions, especially love and affection, [sit] at the heart of migration decision making and behaviour” (296). Love and affection, or the development of a loving relationship, are similarly the core of a romance novel.
Emotions are key to interpretations of how popular texts represent and transmit intimacy and migration. Texts generate affects: what Ahmed calls the “emotionality of texts” (2014: 13). Tyler and Gill consider public reaction to Gamu Nhengu, a participant in the UK X Factor competition who was ‘outed’ as an ‘illegal migrant’ after she was voted off the show. They argue that “an understanding of intimacy as mediated makes possible a conceptualization that can make room for different affects, emotions and attachments which might in turn extend postcolonial insights about the entanglement of power, oppression and desire for the Other” (81). Similarly, for Davies, intimacy “provides a key conceptual apparatus through which to interpret a range of feelings and structural proximities” (2013: 11). Both romance and migration have an affective value or impact. Romance novels are in the business of creating positive affect – they promise happiness for characters and readers. Arguably, romance novels act as what Ahmed calls “happy objects”, which circulate as social goods with “positive affective value” (2010: 21) – they make you feel good. On the other hand, narratives of migration more often act as ‘unhappy objects’; in a study of anti-migrant political speeches, Ahmed observes how migrants are often associated with “bad feeling” (2014: 3). What happens when migration is brought into the love story, and expressed through romance genre tropes? How can a happy object (the romance novel) co-exist with an unhappy one (anti-migration discourse)? Do popular romance novels challenge discourses around marriage migration, or do they uphold them? This article seeks answers to these questions through a case study of two contemporary Anglophone romance novels – You, Me, U.S. by Brigitte Bautista (2019), and Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) – each of which deals with migration from South East Asia to the USA. Drawing from current research on migration, intimacy, and affect, in particular in the work of Sara Ahmed, I consider how these novels represent marriage migration, and the ways in which they use their genre tropes and genre definitions of romantic intimacy to shape their articulations.
Bautista’s and Hoang’s texts are diverse in their settings but share similar themes and approaches to marriage migration. Published by Berkley (a Penguin imprint) on 7 May 2019, The Bride Test is the second in Hoang’s three-part series focusing on members of the Vietnamese-American Diep family. The novel opens in Vietnam, where the hero Khải’s mother invites Esme/Mỹ Tran, a Vietnamese-American single mother, to spend a summer in California to try to seduce her son. With encouragement from her family, Esme agrees, intending to locate her American father and, either through marriage or naturalization, to remain in the United States and seek a better life for her family. While she and Khải do fall in love, she refuses his offer of a ‘marriage of convenience’ and is ultimately naturalized through her relationship with her newly-found American father. The Bride Test was popular – selected as a Goodreads ‘Big Book of Spring 2019’ (Goodreads, n.d.), it placed fifth in the 2019 Goodreads Choice Awards and was a 2019 Amazon Editor’s Pick. It has been published in 41 editions, including translations into twelve additional languages.
Bautista’s You, Me, U.S., published just 22 days earlier on 15 April 2019, was supported by #RomanceClass, a group of readers and authors of English-language romance in the Philippines (see McAlister et al., 2020; Parnell et al., 2021). #RomanceClass works, including Bautista’s, are self-published: an innovation embraced by romance writers, and an indication of the genre’s responsiveness to changing publishing markets and practices, according to McAlister, Parnell and Trinidad (2020: 405). The texts are becoming more popular outside of the Philippines, with the increasing visibility offered by a group rather than an individual author (McAlister et al., 2020: 411–12), and are also characterized by the way they unflinchingly address social issues (McAlister et al., 2020: 405). 5 Bautista had pitched You, Me, U.S. to local and international publishers, “but ultimately decided to self-publish with #RomanceClass after getting editorial feedback that would have taken the book in a very different direction to the one she wanted” (McAlister et al., 2023: 62). #RomanceClass books correspond to the main genre beats of western romance (“must have romance as the main plot” and “must have a happy ending”) (#romanceclass, n.d.). You, Me, U.S. tells the story of Filipina Liza, whose long-held dream is of migration to the USA via a ‘green-card’ marriage. 6 While she does become engaged to her American boyfriend Christopher, it is her increasingly intimate relationship with her Filipina housemate, Jo, which is the focus of the romance plot. Eventually, Liza breaks off her relationship with Christopher and chooses to stay in Manila with Jo.
In addition to their almost simultaneous publication, these two novels share contexts which make them particularly suited to an analysis of the intersection of migration and intimate relationships in the context of marriage migration. Both focus on South East Asian migration to the USA. Asian-born individuals constitute 41% of the global migrant population (Yeung and Mu, 2020: 2864) and Vietnam and the Philippines accounted for 24.3% of all Asian immigrants living in America in 2019 (Batalova and Hanna, 2021; see also Constable, 2003: ch. 2). The USA is home to the largest numbers of overseas Filipinos and Vietnamese (over 2 million and 1.34 million, respectively) (Batalova and Harjanto, 2021; Batalova and Hassan Gallardo, 2020). Marriage migration is a key route abroad for many Filipinos and Vietnamese; Constable notes that “[i]n the 1990s, an average of 17,000 Filipinos went abroad annually as spouses or fiancé(e)s of foreigners”, 92% of whom were women, and almost 40% “were married or engaged to U.S. nationals” (121–22; see also Meszaros, 2017). These texts are clearly reflective of real-life demographic patterns.
In this article, I will outline how these two novels depict marriage migration, and the ways in which their representations correspond to scholarship on marriage migration and intimacy. I’ll begin by looking at how each novel addresses the stigma around marriage migration, and the ways in which the solutions offered serve to bolster such stigmas, rather than breaking them down. I then move to show how the idea of marriage is shaped in accordance with heteronormative, western norms of romance – an echo of the performativity required for spousal and fiancé visa applications. I will show how the texts are aware of such performativity and of the burden of ‘proof’ on romantic couples; in You, Me, U.S., the intimacy created by the visa application is interestingly used to queer the process. Finally, I explore the concept of ‘toxic ties’ and the risks of marriage migration as shown in each story.
Stigmatising marriage migration
Migrant couples and families across the world are subject to damaging discourses of marriages of convenience or ‘sham’ marriages (Bonjour and de Hart, 2021): those arrangements deemed “insufficiently ‘genuine’” by immigration officials (Wray, 2015: 142). Intense scrutiny of cross-border marriage in many countries has coincided with an increase in legislative attention on fraudulent marriages. 7 Yet, “[c]ross-border marriage is highly valorised because it is one of the few remaining channels to citizenship and migrant legality” (Andrikopoulos, 2021: 356). The issue is also gendered; Bonjour and de Hart note that in the 2000s, “‘import brides’ replaced migrant grooms as the most unwanted category and as the all-but-exclusive focus of debates on forced and arranged marriages.” (2013: 68; see also Block, 2021). There is also a distinctiveness about marriage migration to the USA, where “cross-border marriages have not been politicised […] in the same way as they have been in Western Europe.” (Chauvin et al., 2021: 434). Patterns of migration in the USA follow neocolonial pathways; Filipinas were the most numerous nationality represented by the recruitment agencies Constable analysed in the USA (3), even though such ‘mail-order’ marriages account for only a small number of spousal marriage migrations to the USA (2.7–4.1% of female such migrations in 1996) (So, 2006: 396). Yet stigmas remain. Constable notes that “depictions of mail-order brides or immigrant wives […] as passive victims and sex slaves” and “on the other end of the spectrum as hyperagents and calculating opportunists who seduce and take advantage of naive and unsuspecting western men […] fuel arguments for stronger policing of U.S. borders” (93).
The Bride Test acknowledges the stigma associated with migration via marriage. Accusations – “she’s after him for his money and a green card” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 15) – are expressed by distant family members. The fact that Esme had “known these kinds of conversations would take place” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 15) indicates how widely held such views are, even as she maintains “she wasn’t a gold digger” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 15). Esme’s friend Angelika, a Russian national engaged to a sixty-year-old American man, rues that “[h]is children hate me. They are older than I am” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 23). The children – who ask Angelika to return to Russia and want their father to get a vasectomy – are concerned about losing their inheritance: clearly the worry is that Angelika is taking advantage of their father. While Angelika describes her fiancé as “a good catch” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 23), the novel is careful to articulate that the couple love each other, and that Angelika’s motives are purely romantic – she has signed a “pre-nup” and “always wanted a family” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 23). As Constable remarks, “[t]he […] association of foreign partners with wealth and symbolic and ‘network capital’ does not preclude the possibility of love” and may indeed catalyse it (134). Furthermore, Andrikopolous suggests that defining marriage as either “sham” or “genuine” and nothing in between obscures the complexities of marriage migration (345; see also Scheel, 2017: 402).
However, neither The Bride Test nor You, Me, U.S. embrace such complexities. They instead endorse stigma by associating successful marriage only with romantic love, in alignment with the romance genre’s tropes. As Esme and Khải get to know each other, he offers her a marriage of convenience, saying “I wouldn’t mind you staying with me long enough to get your naturalization papers. After that, we could have a quick divorce. That would work out for both of us, I think” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 21). But Esme refuses, “[b]ecause she loved him. If it was just a cold arrangement between strangers, maybe she could have done it. […] But not if it destroyed her […] first” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 21). This aligns with her statement in the opening chapter, where she declared “I can’t marry him just for a green card”, calling Khải “a person, not a stack of paper” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 1). Liza similarly refuses Christopher in You, Me, U.S., saying “I can’t do this with you. I can’t marry you out of guilt or obligation” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 16). Early in the novel, Liza hopes a current American boyfriend is “the one” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 1), indicating that she is primarily seeking love, rather than migration. When a man Liza is chatting to online turns out to be eighty years old (rather than thirty as claimed) she tells Jo, “Of course I said no! He was three coughs away from death!” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 2). While Liza actively seeks marriage with an American, clearly not any American will do. 8
For both Esme and Liza, a marriage of convenience is presented as an impossibility. They both tell their respective partners “I can’t marry you” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 16; Hoang, 2019: ch. 21), positioning the decision as something beyond their control. For both protagonists, following romance novel logic, marriage is only possible if love is present. The Bride Test draws on its genre tropes to underscore the commitment to romantic love marriage. While Khải’s offer of marriage is made on the basis that “[s]he needs a green card” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 21) the very fact that Khải is willing to make the offer is an indication that he does love her (even if he says he doesn’t), which is picked up on by his brothers, who ask him: “[w]hy are you willing to do all that for her if you’re not into relationships?” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 21). Khải’s autism is given as the reason he believes he cannot conform to romantic love ideals, yet his behaviour here and up to this point– providing for and protecting Esme, finding her intensely attractive, having sex with her, developing an intimacy – demonstrates for the reader that he is already performing romantic love, even if he does not know it. Thus, the act of offering a marriage of convenience itself emphasizes The Bride Test’s adherence to romantic love marriage and, at the same time, leaves the stigma of marriage migration unchallenged or, at least, oversimplified.
Normativity, performance and intimacy
It has been widely documented that migration processes and procedures shape intimate relationships into structures and norms set by the state. In research on Norwegian family reunification law, for example, Muller Myrdahl notes that the “fairytale-ness of dominant Western narratives of love […] is the cornerstone on which marital legitimacy and therefore the legitimacy of any immigration application stemming from the marriage—rests” (103–4). Certain intimacies that correspond to western heterosexual romantic intimacy (D’Aoust, 2014: 334, see also 2018) are legitimized through migration and visa processes, while others are delegitimized: what Block calls “proper” and “improper” relationships (2021: 381). A “proper” relationship is typified through mutual attraction between partners, consummation of the relationship, and marriage or a betrothal. Bonjour and de Hart argue that, in the context of migration, “the only ‘valid’ ground for two people to enter into marriage is romantic love” (2013: 71). Romance similarly creates an idea of “proper” and “improper” relationships, predicated on a western ideal of romantic love that incorporates sexual desire, equal partnership, monogamy, and commitment. 9
Berlant and Warner argue that “the normativity of heterosexual culture links intimacy only to the institutions of personal life, making them the privileged institutions of social reproduction, the accumulation and transfer of capital, and self-development” (553). Real-life sexuality and (romance) narratives are connected “as expressions of a figuratively heterosexual reproductive ideology in twentieth-century Western culture.” (Roof, 1996: xxvi). The narrative structures of popular romance fiction correspond to the ideologies of romantic love that inform visa decisions: “[c]ulture is defined by or defines the story” (Roof 1996: xxvi). Ahmed points to compulsory heterosexuality as “the accumulative effect of the repetition of the narrative of heterosexuality as an ideal coupling” (2014: 145). The narrative of heteronormative, linear life stages required for visa applications maps onto the structure of the romance plot, wherein the central couple meet, are attracted to each other, overcome barriers, declare their attraction, and live happily ever after (or happily for now), often through marriage and children (see Regis, 2003). Happiness — in romance and in marriage migration — is dependent on and structured by heterosexuality.
Both novels recognize the heteronormative requirements of romantic love that inform both the romance genre and the marriage migration process. In You, Me, U.S. Liza and Christopher embark upon “the Liztopher Romance Tour”, creating “Love team branding” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 7) from their names as “[p]roof of their loving relationship” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 10). Enlisting Jo’s help, Liza “kept cutting photos […] making them fit into a legal-size bond paper” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 10) – a reminder that their relationship will need to be shaped into a legible form for the visa application. Looking at their engagement photograph, Jo considers How happy they looked; Liza beamed like she was sunshine in the flesh. Snip, snip. Here was Christopher, bending down on one knee, while Liza extended her hand and fought back tears. She glued that shot on the center of the paper. (Bautista, 2019: ch. 10)
The proposal photograph is central (literally) to the established narrative of heterosexual romance required “[f]or the visa application” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 10). Turner and Espinoza note how “only particular codifications of ‘love’ are conceivable as ‘real’ to state officials” (362), and such codifications must be linguistically and culturally legible. In The Bride Test, while Esme speaks exclusively in Vietnamese to Khải throughout, her declaration of love is made “in clear English” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 21). This conforms to the performative and legible processes of relationships sanctioned by the state – relationships should be culturally meaningful and understandable on American terms.
Yet while these texts are cognisant of the necessary performativity involved in marriage migration processes, they both challenge and draw attention to their constructedness. While Esme declares her love for Khải in English, he makes his declaration, at the end of the novel, in Vietnamese – “Anh yêu em” – at which Esme was “too shocked to speak, to do anything. Even in her wildest dreams, he told her in English” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 28). It is significant that this declaration, which breaks Esme’s expectations of romantic conventions, comes just after she has been reunited with her American father, meaning she has “options”; Khải tells her, “You don’t have to marry if you don’t want to. Now that we’ve found your dad, your paperwork will be easy— well, easier” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 28). Esme is no longer reliant on Khải for her immigration status, and thus their relationship is no longer subject to the same scrutiny or structure and they are free to love as they wish (indeed, they remain unmarried at the end of the Epilogue, which takes place three years later). In You, Me, U.S., at the point in the narrative when Liza and Christopher are engaged and planning her visa application, she and Christopher begin to drift apart, at precisely the time that the documentation – the happy photographs – suggests they are growing more intimate. The day their petition receives “the stamp of approval” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12), Liza is clearly no longer invested in their relationship. When they talk via video call, Liza has to remind herself to “focus”, and keeps “spacing out” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12). Where Christopher’s anecdotes and activities “used to interest Liza”, “[n]ow, they tasted like sickbed crackers laid to melt in her mouth” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12). The talk switches to impersonal topics such as “the weather” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12) and Christopher’s now intrusive voice “boomed all around Liza’s new place” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12). When Christopher signs off with “I love you” Liza hesitates with her reply – “I—,” – and when “the line went dead”, “[s]he didn’t bother calling back” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12). The emotional closeness and intimacy of that proposal photograph is no longer evident and Liza and Christopher’s relationship has transformed from a love match to a “sham” marriage.
The reason for Liza’s change of heart is her growing intimacy with Jo. Liza explicitly acknowledges this as she muses: A few months ago, she would have been gushing with the sweetest words for him. She would have been as red as a tomato, the way he made her blush. The prospect of living in America with the man she loved should feel like a fairy tale. But when she kissed Jo, she’d felt something inside her unravel. This strange and new intimacy between them scared her. (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12)
Even before their kiss, Liza and Jo share an intimacy which conforms more closely to that recognized as ‘real’ by state bureaucracies than her relationship with Christopher. You, Me. U.S. is filled with references to such moments of intimacy between Liza and Jo. They have a shared history; Jo “was there through all the breakups” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 2). They have memories of “[w]aking up in each other’s clothes” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12), as they share “a tiny space” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4). Jo is, in many ways, a perfect version of the kind of boyfriend Liza wants – a better version of Christopher. She is repeatedly placed in situations where she is asked how Christopher would act. When Liza and Jo are waiting for Christopher at the airport, Liza asks, “You think he’ll show up at all?” and Jo replies, “You looking like that? […] I mean, shit, I would” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 6). Jo lists things that Christopher would do if he were “half the decent man you say he is” – “give you the softer side of the bed”, “make you breakfast and get your coffee right”, “sing you to sleep” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4) – all of which are things Jo already does for Liza. The text continually compares Christopher to Jo, and she wins each comparison.
When Christopher visits Manila, the three go for dinner at his hotel. Over dinner, Jo and Liza discuss their shared memories of visiting the places Liza and Christopher are going to visit on their trip. They know each other’s stories, speak at the same time, and finish each other’s sentences. In response to one story, “Christopher fidgeted in his seat and kept looking at his watch. He called the waiter to bill them out” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 6). Here, it is Christopher who doesn’t fit into the intimacy between Jo and Liza. Later, on holiday with Christopher, Liza tells Jo “I wish you were here” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 6). For Jo, she “needed the familiar” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12) represented by Liza – the relationship to the word ‘family’ seems not coincidental, and the phrase is repeated three times in quick succession. Liza tells Jo about her engagement over lunch at Mang Larry’s, the “roadside carinderia where “[t]hey always marked life events” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 9). Yet Liza’s “diamond ring”, a symbol of her American fiancé “was out of place among the water-stained walls and the chink of cheap aluminum spoons” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 9). While Liza still fits, the symbol of marriage migration does not.
You, Me, U.S. further undermines Christopher and Liza’s relationship by using the visa application process to bring Jo and Liza closer together with an interesting take on what Turner and Espinoza call “intimate archiving”. The act of archiving and collating evidence for immigration services as proof of the intimate relationship can be “experienced as … moments of often unrecognised intimacy” (Turner and Espinoza, 2021: 367). Yet, while the intimacy created by the visa application process encourages the applicants to perform “the heteronormative ‘romantic couple[-dom]’ of western liberalism” (Turner and Espinoza, 2021: 368), in You, Me, U.S, the visa process breaks this performance associated with Christopher and the west. The more Christopher and Liza talk about “interview schedules and document fees”, the more distant they become: “[h]is voice felt as if it were behind a door” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12). Christopher remarks that Liza “seem[s] out of it”, “his shoulders tensing […] his eyes narrowed” and Liza replies “[t]his petition is making me nervous” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12). Instead of the petition bringing Christopher and Liza closer together, it actually creates a distance between them. While flatmates Liza and Jo are not the subjects of the visa application, when they sit down together to cut and stick photographs of Liza and Christopher’s recent trip, this is a notable moment of intimacy between the two of them which leads to their first kiss in the following chapter. Liza increasingly chooses to spend time with Jo rather than work on her “arts and crafts” (as Jo calls it) (Bautista, 2019: ch. 10). Ultimately, Liza chooses to break off her heterosexual relationship in favour of a queer coupling with Jo.
Judith Roof argues that lesbian characters create “narrative perversity” in fictional works which “threat[en] to truncate the story [and…] distort […] the narrative, preventing the desirable confluence of sexual aim and object and male and female, precluding the discharge of sexual substances, and hindering reproduction” (xxi). Viewed in this way, Jo represents the perverse – she is the queer ingredient that threatens and disrupts the reproductive potential of Liza and Christopher’s heterosexual relationship. In choosing Jo over Christopher, Liza is rejecting her reproductive heterosexual future and its associated narrative of productive migration. The privileging of heterosexuality in romance and in migration processes and expectations positions its distinctive markers – marriage, babies, monogamy, commitment – as the route to achieving happiness (and being permitted to migrate). As Ahmed puts it, “[h]appiness involves a form of orientation […] a way of being aligned with others, of facing the right way. The points of alignment become points of happiness” (2010: 54, 45). For Liza, a heterosexual relationship with Christopher represents “the [literal] straight and narrow […] the future” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12). Facing away from Christopher, from her family’s wish for her to migrate, and from her own life plan, is the ‘wrong’ way – Liza is going “astray” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12) by following her desire for Jo. As Liza and Jo pursue a relationship, they appear to move away from happiness to become what Ahmed terms ‘unhappy queers’.
Yet, for knowledgeable genre readers, You, Me, U.S. signals that these disruptive moments are not, as they might appear, barriers to the heterosexual romance. They are, in fact, moments of developing attraction between Jo and Liza. It is helpful here to return to Ahmed’s metaphor of facing the “right/wrong” way. From one perspective, You, Me, U.S. is a story about a heterosexual couple, Liza and Christopher, whose plans to marry and migrate are disrupted by the ‘perversity’ of the lesbian character Jo. Reading the story in this way – where Liza’s goal is migration via a heterosexual relationship with Christopher – does not lead to happiness for Liza or, by extension, the reader. This is clearly the ‘wrong’ way to read this story; the ‘points of alignment’ between Liza and Christopher do not become ‘points of happiness’. However, from the alternate perspective (namely, the ‘right’ way to read the story), You, Me, U.S. is a story about Liza and Jo’s developing relationship, where Liza’s familial obligations, desire to migrate, and relationship with Christopher are the barriers she must jettison. If we instead align Liza with Jo, the ‘points of alignment’ between them quite clearly become ‘points of happiness’, and are legible as genre markers for the developing relationship between the two women. Thus, the narrative structure of the romance novel is here used in service of the queer romance, rather than the heterosexual one.
Toxic ties and vulnerability
If the “proper” relationships in these novels are based on equality, commitment, and desire (namely, western romantic love), the texts also acknowledge the possibility of “improper” relationships and the risks of marriage migration. Although most marriage migrants are men, “the ‘victimisation’ of women remains at the centre of most studies of marriage migration” (Al-Rebholz and Apitzsch, 2021: 381); Block notes the extent to which women are often framed as “victims of so-called ‘forced marriages’” (382). 10 Constable notes that “[a]nti-trafficking NGOs often include mail-order brides among the ranks of trafficked women” (64). At the start of The Bride Test, Esme remarks “[s]he’d heard the horror stories about strangers. Was this sweet-looking woman trying to trick her and sell her into prostitution in Cambodia?” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 1). Turner and Espinoza note “the […] sense of dependency that the visa reproduces with highly gendered consequences” (369). Bonjour and de Hart note that “[i]f intimate relationships become ‘toxic ties’, this position of power and privilege may result in abuse and everyday violence from the sponsor towards the migrant partner” (2021: 13). Such views are expressed in The Bride Test as Esme declares “[s]he hated this. She didn’t want her life […] to depend so much on someone else’s choices” (Hoang, 2019: ch. 20). You, Me, U.S. also draws attention to the vulnerability of women who migrate via marriage. Liza bumps into Annie, an old friend who migrated to the Middle East, where she met her husband. Liza thought Annie “had it made” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4), but Annie has aged beyond her years – “[s]he should be close to thirty or thirty-one now, but could easily be mistaken for a forty-year-old” – and bears marks of domestic violence: “[a] scar under the right eye” and “circular scars” from “[c]igarette burns” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4). Annie has fled back to Manila with her children and remarks, soberly, “[o]ne day more, and it would have been a casket flying back here” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4). She is “scarred and bitter”, filled with “shame and regret” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4). For some women, migration can be life-threatening.
Hearing Annie’s experience has a profound effect on Liza. Her emotional response is experienced as physical pain: “[h]er heart gave out a little lurch, as if she, too, were peppered with a half-spent stick of Marlboro” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4). Reflecting on her friend’s experiences, “Liza couldn’t imagine the pan-wielding husband without seeing Christopher’s face […] couldn’t unsee Christopher stubbing out a cigarette on her wrist. Or hitting her with a frying pan. Or maiming her on the side of the head” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4). Later that day, Liza and Jo watch a horror movie which accentuates Liza’s fears: her “face turned into a ghastly shade of purple” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4). She asks Jo, “Do you think Christopher’s a monster?” at the moment when “the slasher flick was at its home stretch. The last chase through the woods” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4). Indeed, while she does comfort Liza, “Jo had long feared that Christopher might be a monster” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4), and that it might be “safer to stay here and try her luck” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 4) in Manila, indicating the perceived dangers of marriage migration.
In the following chapter, Jo is reflecting on the vulnerability of sex workers like herself, with one fate being “[d]eported with scars on their bodies” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 5). While Annie is not a sex worker, the echo of women with scarred bodies being deported just one chapter later connects the dangers faced by sex workers and those who marry foreign men. This fear does not entirely disappear. Later, when Liza tells Jo that Christopher has proposed, her immediate response is “fear that forced her heart to clench” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 9). While it is not explicitly connected to Christopher, it is significant that the sense of vulnerability evoked by Liza’s conversation with Annie never entirely disappears. While Christopher is never violent towards Liza, the conflation of international men homogenizes them and universalizes the dangers of such intimate relationships – Annie’s experience could easily have been Liza’s, and the patterns are repeatable. By emphasizing the vulnerability of women who migrate through marriage to intimate partner violence, You, Me, U.S. is playing into stereotypes of victimhood in marriage migration. Such stereotypes uphold the stigmas around marriage migration in the USA, in particular the representation of “all correspondence marriages as ‘trafficking’ or ‘buying and selling’” (Constable, 2003: 83) and the representation of women who migrate for marriage “as passive victims and sex slaves” (Constable, 2003: 93). Constable argues that “[b]lurring foreign brides with other categories of people who are exploited, abused, or oppressed obscures crucial differences and denies many possible degrees of choice and self-determination in any particular woman’s decision to correspond with foreign men” (95).
Such views of sex workers have been challenged by activists and researchers – and such a challenge is visible in You, Me, U.S., where Jo’s job as a sex worker is represented as nuanced, realistic, and acceptable, to herself, to Liza, and to others around them. Liza finds “being her own boss […] strangely liberating” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 3) and remarks on her “liberty of choice” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 3) in clients. On a date with Lara, who expresses “disgust” at Jo’s profession, Jo “refused to offer apologies”, labelling her date a “hypocrite” and noting the “double standard” whereby “[n]obody batted an eyelash when an upper-class lady sauntered into a bar and flirted with a stranger” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12). Jo determines: She did not warrant or deserve disgust. They had no right to tell her what she could and couldn’t do with her body. […] sex work was a choice she made of her own will, and she would never be ashamed of it. (Bautista, 2019: ch. 12)
While You, Me, U.S. does raise the vulnerability of sex workers who work for “some cheapskate pimp” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 5), self-employed Jo is quickly dissociated from female sex workers who are “[d]rowned in the toilet. Shipped off on a fishing boat to God knows where. Deported with scars on their bodies, or worse” (Bautista, 2019: ch. 5). The novel offers a view of sex work as a deliberately chosen profession, pleasurable, and sometimes joyful, and which offers financial stability and independence. Constable has proposed that a similar challenge needs to be made for mail-order brides, in order to see their decision to pursue a transnational marriage as deliberate, thought-out, and empowered. Yet, You, Me, U.S. is less invested in showing the positive side of transnational marriage.
Conclusion
While migration scholars have offered explorations of intimacy in migration policy and practice, it is clear that literature can “plug the gaps” in existing sociological and anthropological studies (see King et al., 1995). Lau and Mendes, in their study of Arundhati Roy, argue that the ‘romantic’ can be used “as a tool of analysis for postcolonial novels” (107), and Davies argues that there is much to be learned about sexual, racial, and national identities from what she terms “global romance” (2). However, popular romance texts like the two analysed here are not usually included in the category of “migration literature”. Such a label is almost always reserved for works deemed more “literary” (Burge, 2020). Yet, what I have argued in this article is that exploring the collision of the ‘romantic’ (romance genre tropes and motifs) and migration in these popular romance novels reveals particular attitudes and articulations of intimacy which offer new insights for scholars interested in marriage migration.
Bautista’s and Hoang’s novels explore marriage migration in similar ways to other texts classified as migration literature. Both The Bride Test and You, Me, U.S. describe the stigma of marriage migration, and show awareness of the cultural construction of the romantic ‘proof’ required for spousal visa applications. You, Me, U.S. is particularly invested in offering a queer reworking of intimacy, using the visa application process and the tropes of the romance genre to undermine the anticipated western, heteronormative romantic relationship, offering a perspective on the straight bias in marriage migration scholarship (see Gorman-Murray, 2009). Yet, ultimately, these texts present a view of marriage migration that remains conservative, and which sustains certain prejudices – the idea that marriage should be motivated only by love, and that women who migrate are particularly vulnerable to violence.
Returning to Tyler and Gill and their study of discourses of migration that arose around public reaction to Gamu Nhengu and “Gamu-gate”, they argue that “[i]n becoming visible as an illegal, Gamu polluted the space of reality TV with politics and history” (83) and created “heated debates about immigration and postcoloniality among the most unlikely of audiences” (92). These two popular romance novels are, I would argue, showcasing a similar impulse – “polluting” the perceived apolitical space of popular romance fiction with discourses around migration. Of course, no form of fiction is entirely apolitical, but just as Gamu-gate created a way for the public to “see through […] the wall of stereotypes about irregular migrants” (Tyler and Gill, 2013: 87), so too do these romance novels make visible the “entanglement of power, oppression and desire” (Tyler and Gill, 2013: 81) embedded in marriage migration discourse. Furthermore, reflecting on the outpouring of public sympathy for Gamu, who had been a popular contestant on the show, Tyler and Gill argue that the format of reality TV – “the spectacular irreality of emotion-laden reality television” – created a “manufactured intimacy” which “became the catalyst for unexpected modes of collective sociality and attachment, generating forms of online activism which troubled the prevailing xenophobic political consensus around African economic migration from the postcolonies” (86). They call this “precarious empathy” (86). Connecting this to romance fiction, I would certainly argue that popular romance can be similarly “emotion-laden” in its depiction of intimate relationships, generating an affective response. In fact, I suggest that romance, as a genre invested in creating and representing emotions, is particularly suited to manufacturing such affect, for characters, and for readers in the context of migration.
The affective power of these texts is an important part of their impact in a global marketplace. Ahmed argues that “[t]he more happy objects circulate, the more they accumulate affective value, as signs of the good life” (2010: 38). Affect is increased through repetition and accumulation. Gibbs points to the mass media as “amplifier… of affect” who “extend its reach to the point where it is now almost global” (n.p.). Popular romance fiction’s popularity and global circulation means its texts can capture and disseminate mainstream discourse. Like migration literature, romance fiction sells (White, 1995: 9, 5) – and exploring the specific narratives circulating in global genre texts reveals something about the way these marriage migration discourses similarly circulate transnationally.
More specifically, the collision of migration and romance in these two novels illustrates how they are differently implicated in the creation of affect. Ahmed proposes that “[w]e can think of narrative as a form of affective conversion” through which “the promise of happiness is located as well as distributed” (2010: 45). Romance bears that promise of happiness, for its characters and its readers: returning to Kamblé et al.’s definition cited at the start of this article, a romance novel is shaped around “a love plot that holds the promise of a [happy and fulfilling] future” (2). Narratives of migration, on the other hand, as Ahmed and others have shown, tend to produce a different affect – one of fear, anxiety, hate and unhappiness. Yet, Ahmed argues that “[i]f something is close to a happy object, then it can become happy by association” (2010: 25). Does the proximity of migration and romance discourse in these two romance novels result in the “happy-fying” of migration? Can we claim You, Me, U.S. and The Bride Test as examples of “happy migration objects” (to borrow from Ahmed)? Are these texts, to borrow Davies’s question, using “the accessibility of ‘the popular’ for politically radical ends?” (9). Unfortunately, I would suggest the answer to all three questions is no. These two romance novels replicate and sustain a series of heteronormative, western ideological structures for happiness. You, Me, U.S. and The Bride Test locate happiness in finding a romantic partner and committing to a life with them (living happily ever after, or happy-for-now). In terms of migration, happiness can only be associated with ‘authentic’ marriage migration (associated with heterosexual ‘pure’ love relationships) — ‘sham’ marriages are aligned with domestic violence and exploitation and must be rejected for happiness to be found through other means (as in The Bride Test), or elsewhere (as in You, Me, U.S.). The “happy” affect of romance thus upholds narrow ideas about migration, supporting ideologies that sustain migration more broadly as a narrowly defined, “unhappy” discourse.
