My parents took a very long time to accept Mr. Warrior. In fact, it took about a decade. When we first started dating in 1992, I was 19 and he was 44. Add in the fact that he was not Chinese and I knew my parents would go ballistic. So, the first 6 months or so of dating, I didn’t tell them. It was not hard to do because my relationship with my parents wasn’t a very communicative one. But, one day I just decided I didn’t want to live that way anymore. It wasn’t about wanting to be closer to my parents, it was wanting them to accept me for who I was no matter how much they disapproved. And, I was tired of keeping things from them just because I was afraid of upsetting them. I was tired of doing things the traditional way, where the negative and the unpleasant is not talked about in an attempt to make them nonexistent. When I called my mother up to tell her about Mr. Warrior, she was calm at first, asking me all sorts of questions, trying to gage the situation. I answered everything honestly and we got off the phone. Then I waited. Because I knew I wouldn’t get my parents real reaction until after she had processed it all and talked to my father. Sure enough, she called back several hours later and it all exploded. There was yelling and crying, yelling and pleading, yelling and lecturing and then just plain yelling. It was exhausting, but all along I knew it was the right thing to do. A week later, they asked me to come home to “talk” to me. I think they wanted to get me back into their territory because they believed Mr. Warrior was brainwashing me. (Years later I would learn that they were afraid he was part of some syndicate where the men tried to seduce young, Asian college women to con their families out of money.) When I went home, they wanted me to drop out of college, come home and figure things out with them about what I how I was to handle my relationship with Mr. Warrior. Well, I KNEW how I was going to handle my relationship with Mr. Warrior, it was my relationship with my parents I didn’t know how to handle. Of course I refused. I made plans to have Mr. Warrior come get me out of their house if they weren’t going to drive me back to my apartment 2 hours away, but for some reason at the end of the weekend they did. Then followed weeks of various family members calling me and telling me how much my parents were hurting and to break off my relationship with Mr. Warrior because it was causing my parents so much pain. No calls from my parents, but plenty from all my relatives. During this time, they also asked Mr. Warrior to speak with the matriarchs of the family at one point (very strange, since it was always the males in my family who made the big decisions when I was growing up). This included my grandmother who spoke no English, my father’s sisters and my mother. Mr. Warrior (who was very patient through all of this and supported me the whole time) went. It was a lot of questions about his intentions and he answered honestly. That he didn’t know where this was going or if it meant we were going to be married eventually, but he cared for me very much at this point and had no intention of doing me or my family any harm. That was not what my family wanted to hear and I think they came away from it very dissatisfied. After a month or two, I guess my parents just go to the end of their rope. My mom called me up, crying and gave me the ultimatum. Them or Mr. Warrior. I couldn’t have a relationship with both. I told her, yes, I could have relationship with both, but if they chose not to have a relationship with me because of Mr. Warrior, then that was their decision, not mine. My father came up the next day and told me I had to withdraw the money they have given me to put into a bank account for my college tuition. He told me it wasn’t just because I chose Mr. Warrior over them, but because they were having financial troubles and needed the money. (I think he said that second part to “throw off” Mr. Warrior because they were still afraid he was after their money. Also my parents figured if I didn’t have any money for college, I would eventually have to return home). I told him, I’m sorry he’s having financial troubles but I needed money to continue school and to live in general. That I know the money was their hard earned money and I would find a job to support myself and eventually give them their money back. I just couldn’t give it all back right now. We drove to my bank, I withdrew half the money I had in my account and gave it to him. And that’s how I came to be disowned by my parents.
Eventually, I got a job and Mr. Warrior lent me $2000 so that I could get through my last two years of college and graduate. After some time, my parents started speaking to me again. First my mom, then eventually my dad. (My mom would make surreptitious phone calls, telling me she wasn’t supposed to be talking to me but that she just needed to know if I was ok. I would tell her I was ok, she would cry then say bye and hang up.) For years, though, we did not ever talk about Mr. Warrior. They kept to their “if we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist” philosophy and I went along with it. I spent Thanksgiving with Mr. Warrior’s family and saw my parents for Chinese New Year’s. My family always celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve, so I would go by myself to see my parents a few days before Christmas, then drive home Christmas morning to spend Christmas day with Mr. Warrior and his mom. Then, in the summer of 2003 my parents decided to visit us. By this time we had moved to Southern California and they flew in for a day and a night. It was the first time they spent any time with Mr. Warrior in the 11 years we had been together except for my mom when she saw him at the matriarch meeting. My brother and his girlfriend, now wife, came to visit also. We were a bit apprehensive at first, but it turned out well. Since then my parents and I have developed a better relationship and a more communicative one. I finally felt I could be completely me with them and be accepted by them. They still had their issues, but I could see them trying to respect my choices and keep their opinions to themselves. Mr. Warrior was finally invited to Chinese New Year’s in early 2004 and officially accepted into the family. A few months later when I found out I was pregnant, I had expected my parents pressure us into getting married. Instead, my mom told us to do what we thought was best but she knows how tiring it can be to be pregnant and advised us to wait until the baby was older to get married. She was sincere and I believed she felt like Mr. Warrior was my de facto husband and trusted him to take care of me and our baby, no matter what legal status we had. My parents were both devastated when I told them about the miscarriage. Apparently, they had already started thinking about Chinese nicknames they wanted to call the baby (my mom kept suggesting names for a boy and my dad objected since he was convinced it was going to be a girl). At my brother’s wedding this last summer, in the four days we were there, my father spent more time with Mr. Warrior than I did. Because he kept insisting on taking Mr. Warrior along wherever he went. By the time we had set a date for the wedding, they were probably more in love with Mr. Warrior than I was.
Which was why it was such a shock to be finding ourselves angry at my parents four days before our wedding. We had planned a Saturday morning breakfast at a nice restaurant for Mr. Warrior’s parents, my parents and our siblings. In fact, we had a private dining room all to ourselves. We planned for just the immediate family because our parents had never met before and even though we knew we would be crazy-busy with last minute preparations, we thought it would just be plain uncomfortable for them, and inconsiderate on our part, if the first time they met was at our wedding with 75 other people around. And since more than half of those people would be my relatives, we thought it would help Mr. Warrior’s parents feel less overwhelmed by my family. We couldn’t do it any earlier, because my parents weren’t arriving until 10:30pm the night before the wedding, so the morning of the wedding was when it was going to have to be. I put together a slideshow of pictures of us and our families for the wedding, and Mr. Warrior suggested we show it to our parents at the breakfast to take the pressure off of the first meeting. When I first told my mom about the breakfast, her first response was that we had to invite her brother who they were flying in with. I explained to her that this was going to be a quick breakfast and the point was for them to meet Mr. Warrior’s parents and having other people there would just be a distraction. She told me it wouldn’t look good if my uncle knew about it and wasn’t invited. I told her he wouldn’t be upset if he didn’t know about. Two days later, four days before the wedding, my father calls back. He says they have to bring another uncle, his brother-in-law, because he was going to be in town by then and my parents promised his wife, my dad’s sister, they would make sure my diabetic uncle ate properly and timely. I told him I’m sure my uncle could take care of himself being that he has had diabetes for years and if he couldn’t, surely his daughter, daughter-in-law and grandson, who were in town for the wedding, could take him to breakfast that morning. My dad then told me how my uncle does not wish to see any members of his own family at this wedding but I was not to tell my cousins about it. Now, how my uncle was going to avoid seeing his daughter, daughter-in-law and grandson when he came to our wedding which was going to be held in our 3 bedroom, 1700 square feet house, I’ll never know. But this is when I started getting really upset because twice now they have tried to get an uncle of mine to come to this breakfast, even though I made it very clear it was just for the parents so that they could meet each other and so that Mr. Warrior’s parents would not feel overwhelmed by the tidal wave of Chinese people they were going to encounter later that night. Plus, I suspected something else was going on because all the explanations about why one or the other of my uncles had to be there was a bit ludicrous. And from the way they were acting, I knew I was not going to get the real reason out of them. I felt that they were placed in the middle of something, but I couldn’t figure out if it was cultural traditions that were blocking them in (i.e. we need a male elder to be present at the meeting of the parents) or family pressure (i.e. my father’s sister insisting on her husband being looked after at my wedding) or their own discomfort at meeting Mr. Warrior’s parents. And the way my parents were dealing with this whole situation was a little too reminiscent of all the weirdness that resulted when they first found out about Mr. Warrior. I felt like all the progress we made as a family was for naught and we had regressed to the relationship we had a decade ago. We were back to the old way of dealing with things and I didn’t like it. I felt they should have trusted me and Mr. Warrior. That we would have made the meeting with his parents as un-awkward as possible for everyone even if the situation was less than ideal. I was frustrated at their need to hide behind tradition or excuses in an attempt to alleviate their own anxieties. I decided to play their game and told them I wasn’t sure we could have my uncle there because we already made the reservations and I didn’t know if the room we had could handle more people. Two hours later, my brother calls. My dad had called him asking for either him or my sister-in-law to back out of the breakfast to make a space for my uncle! At this point, I dug my heels in. I explained to my brother why I wanted both of them there and not my uncle (of course my brother understood) and told him that I would handle my parents. I called my parents back the next morning and asked them, straight up, why they were so insistent on my uncle being there. Was it tradition? Family pressure? What? They kept to their story about him needing to be looked after and how he did not want to see his own family. This made me even more furious. Because, if true, I was being asked to endure a breakfast with someone who is almost always belligerent and difficult to deal with on a day when the focus is supposed to be on me and Mr. Warrior, not on an uncle I never see. Why I was expected to deal with my uncle’s issues with his family when he chose to come to a wedding knowing his family members were also going to be there, I’ll never know. When I hung up the phone, I wanted to throw it across the room and yell and scream. Then I wanted to cry. And I did. I cried and yelled and screamed and told Mr. Warrior I wanted to cancel the breakfast. He agreed. He was as pissed off as I was and at this point wanted to have nothing to do with my family. I called my mom back, told her we had way too many things to do and we were canceling the breakfast. She responded with relief, saying it was probably the best solution.
I still don’t understand why and what happened. On the morning of the wedding, Mr. Warrior received a call from my cousin, the daughter of the uncle who was so insistent on not seeing his family. She called to say that she would be late in coming over to help us out (which was ok with us since she spent the whole day before helping out and we had a phalanx of people already at the house). The reason? She was going to have brunch with my parents, her sister-in-law, her nephew and HER FATHER.
As far as I can tell, they had a perfectly pleasant brunch and both my cousin and her sister-in-law had a good time seeing my uncle whom they hadn’t seen in quite awhile. As for me and Mr. Warrior? Well, we decided the traditional ways are not so bad after all. We plan to never talk about this incident again with my parents.
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