“You are not Chinese, you are sixteen years older than me and you have a daughter born out of wedlock. She will never work between us. ” This is what I wrote to Charles after our third date.
We met at a dinner with mutual friends in Manila. I lived there, he was passing through for work. He arrived late, sat across from me and left fifteen minutes later. Before leaving (to call his daughter, who remained in Tokyo), he invited me to accompany him to the theater the next day, to see the musical Avenue Q.
For him it was a date. Not for me. I was sure he only had one more ticket and he didn’t want to lose it.
The next night, we laughed heartily at songs with hilarious, sometimes sassy, even raunchy lyrics. I squinted at him, thinking it wouldn’t hurt to date someone who could laugh at candid comments about pornography, racism, and poverty. [des thèmes évoqués sur le ton de l’humour dans la comédie musicale].
prohibitive factors
During intermission, we talked about the food bank he ran in Japan. “I am not responsible for the misery of the world, he told me. I’m not trying to save people.”
I replied that we all had our share of responsibility for the world’s woes and that it was therefore our duty to fight poverty. Wasn’t his work, at least in part, guided by this sense of duty?
He later revealed to me that it was the way I had stood up to him that attracted him the most that night. That and my frank laugh.
When he returned to Japan, we started exchanging emails. If he didn’t hide his feelings for me, I couldn’t ignore the three prohibitive factors mentioned above.
As a granddaughter of Chinese immigrants to the Philippines, I grew up thinking that only a he is alone (“one of ours”), i.e., also a descendant of Chinese immigrants, would be an acceptable husband.
In my community, Filipinos are often called Huan-a. At best, this word can be translated as “foreigner”. But for the more extreme it is a way of designating an “inferior race”. Those who marry a Huan-a they are disowned by their families and ostracized by the community.
An impossible story
Charles is not really a Huan-a. It’s a or tear, a white American, a rank far above that of Filipinos. But this small difference didn’t weigh much on the other two obstacles. An age difference of three or even five years is tolerated. Eight years is starting to be a lot, but sixteen was inconceivable, even for me. The presence of a child born out of wedlock further complicated the situation.
