Making Global Marriage Work
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As a couple who’s spent most of their relationship far from home, it’s no surprise that Alyssa Worsham and Bretton Dimick met during a summer abroad program in Dublin.
Although just friends during that summer in Ireland in 2003, they started dating when they returned to school at New York University in the fall. Months later, when Alyssa got the call that she had gotten a job at the Vietnam News in Hanoi, their relationship became even more defined.
“It’s kind of a big decision to move to Vietnam,” Alyssa says. “I wasn’t sure he was really coming until he got off the plane.”
For two years they worked side by side at the Vietnam News editing stories for the newspaper, the only English language daily in the country. Alyssa, who had a master’s degree in journalism from NYU, made USD5 more a day than Bretton, who had a bachelor’s in ethnomusicology, even though they did the same work.
While editing stories about Vietnam’s transition from a centrally planned economy to a global one, Alyssa decided she’d rather draft economic policy than write about it and began to consider law school. Bretton, a musician since childhood, wanted to pursue a doctorate in ethnomusicology — the study of music as a part of culture.
In August 2006, they moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan, trading the chaotic streets of Hanoi for a loft apartment in the heart of Midwestern tranquility. Over the next three years, Alyssa spent her days in the law library while Bretton picked up master’s degrees in Southeast Asian studies and musicology while completing the coursework for his doctorate.
During the summers they returned to Vietnam, where Bretton did research and Alyssa worked for US Aid’s STAR project, a program to help Vietnam reform its laws to comply with the US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade and WTO agreements to open its market to outsiders.
Through her work with US Aid, she met Fred Burke, Baker & McKenzie’s managing partner in Vietnam. The Firm, which has been in the country since 1994, does extensive pro bono work with US Aid helping the Vietnamese government draft more business-friendly laws.
Through that connection, Alyssa was granted an international clerkship in the Firm’s Ho Chi Minh City office, where she helped write an ABA reference guide on Vietnamese labor law for American companies doing business in the country.
Meanwhile, Bretton had become increasingly interested in ca trù, an ancient form of Vietnamese sung poetry. A month before they were married in Alyssa’s hometown in Charleston, S.C., in May 2009, he won a Fulbright fellowship to write his dissertation on ca trù, which he had been drawn to since they first moved to Vietnam.
Today Alyssa is an associate in the Firm’s Hanoi office advising American telecom and Internet companies on setting up businesses in Vietnam while Bretton takes ca trù lessons from a local family and interviews ca trù musicians to compile an English bibliography on the genre.
At a time when many couples struggle with whose career ambitions to follow, they’ve managed to pursue their unique professional interests together – with the help of Baker & McKenzie.