There are many ways you can make this a very Chinese Christmas, such as putting your name in Chinese (and English) on your Christmas stocking (like mine).
When you straddle two different cultures, sometimes, you wish your holidays did too. Holidays like Christmas.
I still love and embrace the traditions of my childhood, growing up in a Catholic home with a fresh-cut spruce trimmed with tinsel, and lights and an Angel. We hung our stockings, exchanged presents by the tree, hung wreaths, shared Christmas carols, baked Christmas cookies, and decorated our doors with pictures of Santa and the Reindeer and Elves.
But now, with my Chinese husband John, I’ve enjoyed creating a few new traditions and twists on the old, to make the holiday reflect the international, cross-cultural couple we are.
Under the indigo unknown of night, my Chinese husband and I had a surprising conversation, about just who we are.
There’s something about the indigo unknown of a dark winter night. Because, for John and I, it turned a compliment into a conversation bordering on metaphysics.
We were driving home on Thursday evening, when the veil of clouds had turned the sky above into a huge, nebulous tunnel dyed in india ink. And I just happened to turn to John, over a broadcast of Hanukkah songs, to say what I often say to him. “You’re outstanding.”
“But why am I outstanding?” he asked. Which is not unusual. He’s asked me many times before, to elucidate every aspect of what makes him so outstanding. And I always oblige with a parade of compliments, that range from the physical (“Handsome”) to the more abstract (“Talented”). But I’d just told him why the other day, marching out the very same compliments. So I didn’t understand why he needed to hear all over again.
John looked down at the floor. “Sorry, I have trouble remembering.” And then as we both looked into the earthly cosmos stretched out before us, a more nebulous admission arose. “I really don’t have a clear idea of who I am.” Continue reading “Who Is My Chinese Husband?”
Weeks after John and I became a legally recognized couple in China in late July, the pink pastel envelopes of misunderstanding — with return addresses from my parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts — started pouring in:
Congratulations On Your Marriage!
To the Bride and Groom…
On Your Wedding Day…
“It’s not really a wedding,” I had told my father. “They call it dengji, or registering. It’s more symbolic, like an engagement.” I didn’t wear a bridal gown that day. There were no friends present to witness, and no gifts to receive. We didn’t even tell John’s family about it, until afterwards.
But I’d sent photos home to my dad, and they told another story. China’s national seal, flag, and an official podium with the words “Shanghai Marriage Registry Office” adorned the stage where John and I stood side by side. Across from us, a bureaucrat read our wedding vows, asking us to pledge to care for one another, and our parents. The whole thing screamed “wedding at the courthouse or justice of peace.”
So years later, after John and I came to the US, my American friends and relatives just didn’t understand our need to have a wedding. “Didn’t you already get married?” they might ask, as if I was trying to erase how I’d chosen shotgun eloping over a ceremony. Every year, around late July, we’d find the same well-intentioned pastel envelopes in our mailbox, feeling like another round of votes against our wedding hopes. Sometimes even I wondered if I’d wasted all that time and money getting three wedding dresses, now languishing in the back of our dusty wooden closet.
“My family doesn’t consider us married until we have the wedding ceremony,” John would reassure me. So, by the time we did have our ceremony, it didn’t matter that it was nearly three years after we had “registered.” John’s family welcomed us back home to China, to do the ceremony that I wanted, and they wanted. There was no confusion about it — this was our true wedding.
But I can’t say the same for my family in the US. After all, they still ask me what’s the date of our anniversary. 😉
Have your family or friends ever gotten confused over the “dengji question” — or other wedding/marriage customs in China?
There are three inches of separation between me and my Chinese husband — because I’m five-foot-seven and he’s five-foot-four.
There are three inches of separation between me and my Chinese husband. That is, three inches of separation between us being exactly the same height — because I’m five-foot-seven and he’s five-foot-four.
Five-four is not what I expected when I measured him a couple of weeks ago. I happened to ask for the measuring tape, just so I could size up our oven for the Thanksgiving turkey we planned to bake this past Thursday. But then he asked for it. “Could you measure me?”
He stood with his head high and chest out, just like the People’s Liberation Army had taught him years ago during those military exercises in the few precious weeks before he started his freshman year of college in China. But as I unraveled the metal strip all the way to his head, I suddenly realized that the five-foot-five I’d told him to put on his driver’s license was, well, one inch too tall.
Years ago, I couldn’t imagine the separation of one inch — let alone three inches — between me and my love.
As John and I flirted for weeks like teenagers, the fact that we always met each other sitting down made me believe in my own version of a tall tale — that he was as tall as I was. But then I invited him to lunch one Saturday, and the moment John stood up from his chair, I traded in one cliche for another — a tall tale for a short Chinese guy.
I’d already vanquished many stereotypes to fall in love with Chinese men before: not sexy enough, not handsome, too effeminate. With every soul-stirring kiss and embrace with one of the sons of Han, I discovered that the stereotypes were no match for the beauty, strength and passion of Chinese men. But now I faced the final dragon, and I didn’t know how to cross this river without faltering. After all, I’d never given my dream man a race or ethnicity, but somehow I’d always promised myself he’d be as tall, if not taller, than me.
To my friend Caroline, who schemed to match John and me up, the answer was obvious. “He may be short, but he is handsome.” Which was true, from his large, oolong-brown eyes to a striking straight nose. And then, she cocked her eyebrow and grinned, imagining another reason to look beyond appearances. “I think he’d make a good husband.”
At first, I didn’t know what to think. So, over time, I just listened to John and his stories. How he wanted to become a psychologist and open a “humanistic care center” to help heal others. The way he had confronted the growing menace of stone-processing factories in his hometown, and their noisome, 24/7 din that had disturbed the peace. His deep passion for philosophy, from Carl Jung to Erich Fromm, and the natural environment. The fact that he was madly in love with me, imperfections and all. And, with each new passage, with each new revelation, he stood taller — in ideals, in character — than any man I had ever known in my life.
So I stopped noticing the height of his stature, and instead embraced the height of his character. And, in 2004, I married him.
Which is probably why John doesn’t even see five-four the way the rest of the world might. “I’m a wusi qingnian!” a five-four youth, he declared, a joking reference to the May Fourth Movement when the youth of China rose up against the Chinese government’s weakness — a movement they call “five-four” in Chinese. While John never was one of those angry youths of the past, in a way, his very presence is like a demonstration — that the greatness of a Chinese man isn’t measured in inches.
Have you loved someone who didn’t “measure up” to your expectations? How did you overcome it?
Beneath my Chinese husband's compassionate exterior lived a "military fan" -- and a story of nostalgia surrounding the anti-Japanese films of his childhood.
For my husband, Boston’s historical ground zero was nowhere to be found on the Freedom Trail. In early June, 2010, we’d spent the entire day tracing the footsteps of the revolutionaries, shaking the city of Boston, and the fabric of America forever — but John wasn’t moved. Not until we caught a glimpse of that weathered old gray hull across from the USS Constitution. Then, like the greedy seagulls hovering around us, he dove straight towards this morsel of forgotten history, one without swarms of tourists or a song to forever memorialize its great accomplishments. His hungry eyes devoured all of it, from the industrial strength metal panels bolted together to the rather auspicious “793” painted on the side.
“It was hit by kamikaze fighters in the Pacific,” I pointed out. Nothing could have been sweeter to my husband — to see a retired US Navy Ship that fought against the Japanese during World War II. Because, after all, he is a “military fan.”
The closer I got to China, the more I began to see just how fuzzy those "permanent" borders really were
“They’ve seized land the size of Zhejiang Province, you know?”
Of course I know. I know exactly what my Chinese husband has been looking at — the border dispute between China and India, one of many John obsesses over in the hours between his studies and dissertation proposals.
Years ago, I didn’t know much of anything about modern border disputes. Even as I had seen the borders of empires and countries wax and wane throughout history, and in my youth, I still imagined those boundary lines as permanent and fixed as the black ink used to print them in the atlas.
Then I went to China and, as I leafed through my first copy of the Lonely Planet China guide, found this disclaimer in tiny italicized print:
The external boundaries of India on this map have not been authenticated and may not be correct.
This post exploring stereotypes is a collaboration with Gerald Schmidt. We wondered about the idea of stereotypes in Chinese-Western couples — how are they different, and who has it harder? Read Gerald’s take on the Chinese man-Western woman pairing.
For those of you dying to know about my path to fluency, this piece tracks how I left illiteracy in Chinese behind. Curious? Here’s a snippet:
When I came to Hangzhou, China in August 2001 as a writer – and to work on Mandarin fluency – I faced a great, embarrassing wall: I was illiterate.
Sure, I could speak and understand basic conversational Chinese, because I’d studied while teaching English in China from 1999 to 2000. Then, as a beginner, speaking and listening in a tonal language was so challenging that I didn’t want to deal with the characters.
But in Hangzhou, my ignorance was a big deal. Even though I could chat with locals, order food and ask directions, I was baffled by business cards, menus, and even store signs. I needed to read so I could build vocabulary and truly be fluent. But how?
I wanted to let you know that your article was featured in this week’s Traverse newsletter, which means it was picked out by senior editor David Miller as one of the strongest pieces published during the week.
When you live in China, you cannot escape the Chinese zodiac, and the light it shines on everyday life.
My Chinese husband used to be what his mother called nanyang (难养, difficult to raise). But she didn’t turn to any Chinese equivalent of Dr. Spock to solve the problem. She saw a fortune teller.
“The fortune teller said I had a conflict with my father,” John told me. He’s a horse in the Chinese zodiac, and apparently rats — the sign of his father — just don’t get along well with their equine brethren. “So the fortune teller suggested she find a godfather who is a tiger.” That’s a tiger in the Chinese zodiac.
And that explains why a man John refers to as “godfather” shows up at John’s family home for Chinese New Year and other major holidays in China. He may not be blood family, but he’s important to the family harmony.
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Weeks after John and I became a legally recognized couple in China in late July, the pink pastel envelopes of misunderstanding — with return addresses from my parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts — started pouring in:
