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Notes -
Like I've said on here before, there's a sort of misery porn/revenge porn set of texts up on Youtube (see this for sample), and while it's ostensibly set in America, it's pretty clearly Japanese in inspiration (with some copy-cat other East Asian versions).
Granted, this is all exaggerated in the style of romance novels, but still: the expectations to make the set-up even remotely credible are:
(1) Your mother-in-law will probably be a thundering bitch who expects you to be a housemaid for her because 'that's how it's always been'; when you marry into a family, you now have to serve that family like your own parents
(2) This even extends to 'hand over your money'
(3) Husbands will likely be momma's boys who don't stand up to defend you, or check out because they don't want to deal with drama, they're too busy working
(4) Husbands will often not come home because they're attending drinking parties with clients/co-workers; this is normal
(5) Husbands will often not come home because they're working so much overtime so they stay in a hotel; this is normal
(6) Grandchildren are mandatory, you'll get a lot of abuse from in-laws if you don't do your Womanly Wifely Duty and pop out a sprog. Also it better be a son, because girls aren't good enough
(7) You get it in the neck whether you're a stay-at-home wife (lounging around living off husband's hard-earned money, plus lots of free time so you must obey mother-in-law's commands) or a working woman (not pulling your weight doing chores at home because that's the wife's job)
(8) Divorce seems to be way easier, it's just a matter of filling out forms and dropping them off, and divorce is a threat often wielded by the husband/mother-in-law
There does seem to be a cultural assumption that the in-laws have way more interference in the lives of married couples and that you don't get the cops/outsiders involved even in cases where we in the West would say "that's abusive". The role seems to be: be successful (there's a ton of snobbery around education and being a middle-school/high-school dropout or not going to the right kind of university), get a rich husband, run the house on a budget while keeping up standards, provide grandkids, and be at the beck and call of your in-laws for pretty much everything.
As I said, a lot of this is clearly (I hope!) exaggerated, but the background cultural setting that makes this plausible even as wish-fulfilment fantasy seems to indicate that married life for Asian women is more limiting in many ways than their Western counterparts.
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