Chinese husband | Speaking of China

The Sanshi’erli Scare: Over Thirty and Still A Student?

A desk with a textbook open with a pen and ruler on it. — "Won't you graduate already?" That's the pressure my Chinese husband felt from family and friends, wondering why he was over thirty, with no career or children. (photo by shno)

My Chinese husband John shot me his weary, it’s-way-too-late-on-Sunday look. I expected him to vent about his PhD studies the way he always did when he appeared tired — the homework, the papers, the feeling that you’re always, despite your best efforts, just a little behind. Behind it all, though, I always felt his passion, his love for the path he’d chosen — to become a clinical psychologist.

But not tonight. “I’m tired of being a student,” he sighed.

I dashed into the living room, as if his words signaled some emergency, that his lifelong passion needed life support. “What do you mean?” I asked, staring into his eyes for signs of something, anything, that could tell me what was wrong.

He hid himself behind a generic smile, the kind that doesn’t really mean he’s happy. “My cousin is my age. He is settled down and has a family.”

“So? Your cousin also will never be able to do what you can do after graduating.”

He grinned, and with just one glance I had a feeling this problem went far beyond his cousin. “I’m too old,” he said. Continue reading “The Sanshi’erli Scare: Over Thirty and Still A Student?”

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Finding Friends With Married Chinese Women

A Chinese girl sitting next to a Western girl — A birthday dinner in August reminded me of the value of friendships with Chinese women. (photo by ophelia cherry)

In early August, my Chinese husband and I invited five of our closest Chinese friends to celebrate my birthday a week late. We met at a Thai restaurant in Hangzhou. And while I longed for the piquant curries, I never realized I longed for something else even more until that evening.We happened to discuss the wedding between Min and Lao Da, who just married at the end of May. I really wanted to know about what they did to plan their ceremony. I had asked Lao Da about this almost two months earlier, but he dismissed the subject by saying his wife handled most of this.

When I approached Min about the process, she started dressing down Lao Da before she even got to the topic of dresses.“He did almost nothing to help!” she moaned, her eyebrows furrowed behind her geek-chic black frames. “I kept on trying to get him involved, but he didn’t. He always told me not to worry, that it wasn’t a problem. But we had all of these details to take care of and it was hard not to worry!” Continue reading “Finding Friends With Married Chinese Women”

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Ask the Yangxifu: Six Western Women of the Past who Married Chinese Men

Louise Van Arnam Huie, with husband Huie Kin (photo from http://www.huiekin.org)

mali asks:

I just came across this book Grace an American in China with a foreign woman marrying a Chinese man in the 1930s and going to China. I thought it was pretty cool that they had their relationship then…wow that must have been so hard!! So I wondered if you knew about other actual women like her that married Chinese in the past?

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I sure do. You might call them our “yangxifu grandmothers,” the Western women who paved the way for the rest of us to love and marry Chinese men (and often at great cost to their own lives). Here’s a list of six prominent women I know of — including Grace: Continue reading “Ask the Yangxifu: Six Western Women of the Past who Married Chinese Men”

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Does Marrying a Chinese Man Prove I’m an Outcast?

A girl sitting all alone in the corner of a playground, with two girls in the background gossiping about her. — Does my marriage to a Chinese man prove I'm an outcast and more? (photo by sanja gjenero)

Yesterday afternoon, while waiting for my car to get checked at the auto shop, I started reading a book called Intercultural Marriage: Promises and Pitfalls. When I got to the discussion about the kind of people who married someone from another culture, I discovered this list:

1. Outcasts
2. Rebels
3. Mavericks
4. Compensators
5. Adventurers
6. Escapists
7. Unstables

The author described it as the “seven types of people who enter intercultural marriages — people who share certain personality tendencies or matrimonial motives,” and even mentioned that most people fall into more than one category. Yet, I had this uncomfortable feeling as I read the names of these “types of people” — maybe because the labels reminded me of men who hit on me on the few times I went to bars (often the creepy, unshaven types with sour, alcoholic breath that make you swear off bars for the rest of your life).

Then I read the description for the Outcasts, which started out like this: Continue reading “Does Marrying a Chinese Man Prove I’m an Outcast?”

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My Chinese In-laws’ No-Drama Goodbye

A rubber yellow hand on a stick, as if waving goodbye — The way my Chinese in-laws said goodbye to John and I, it could have been any other morning. But it wasn't -- we were leaving for the US, for another two years. (photo by Alexandre Caliman)

It looked like every other morning when I’d left my Chinese in-laws’ home this summer. My Chinese mother-in-law grumbled about how large our bags were, but then proceeded to push more honey pears and mooncakes into our backpacks. As usual, my Chinese father-in-law paced around the first floor like an expectant father – and only stopped when we climbed into my oldest brother-in-law’s car. Through the window, they appeared with the same calm and content face I remembered every morning, pushing heaping plates of breakfast my way (on this day, I had vegetarian dumplings stuffed with tofu and pickled vegetables and sweet fried rice pancakes) while asking why I’d risen so late from bed.

But this was not just any morning. John and I left his home for the US – which meant we wouldn’t see his family for another two years. When I waved at my Chinese mother-in-law and father-in-law through the window, that was the closest to a “goodbye” that we had.

As I thought about that moment over and over at Shanghai Pudong Airport, I couldn’t help but wonder – is that all there is? Continue reading “My Chinese In-laws’ No-Drama Goodbye”

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Featured in Global Times Article: On the Fast Track to Love

Champagne glasses, toasting at the beach — The Global Times featured me in a recent article titled "On the Fast Track to Love." (photo by Roger Kirby)

I’m on the fast track back to the US (I’ll be hopping a plane back there on Tuesday, August 16). That’s why I’m late to tell you about my latest appearance in the news — a Global Times article titled On the Fast Track to Love, a story about cross-cultural speed dating. Here are a few quotes from me in the article:

For some, the attraction comes from an interest in their partner’s culture. “I’ve always felt more comfortable in the company of Chinese men, since their culture is more in tune with who I am,” US born Jocelyn Eikenburg, an English/Chinese translator who married a Chinese man and blogs about intercultural relationships, said, adding that she’s actually “incredibly shy and not so direct with people.”

…

For many Westerners, saying “I love you” is a big step in a relationship, a sign that you are really serious and invested; while love is usually implied among Chinese couples through actions such as sending you all the way to the door of your apartment, Eikenburg said.

“When Chinese do verbalize their feelings, they tend to use softer terms than what we are used to, such as ‘I like you’ because the word for love packs quite a punch in Chinese,” she added. “Not surprisingly, many Chinese with foreigners actually feel more comfortable saying ‘I love you’ in a foreign language.”

Check out the full article online. And if you love it, share it. Thanks!

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Ask the Yangxifu: My Chinese Husband Cares About Money Too Much

A pile of US 100 and 50 dollar bills — An American woman with a penny-pinching Chinese husband wonders, is it normal for Chinese men to be very thrifty? (photo by Tracy Olson)

Pinched asks:

I don’t know if this will sound weird to you, but are Chinese men in general *very* thrifty with money? It’s interesting to me that before my husband and I were married, he really doted on me and practically bought me anything and everything if I even just said “oh look at this, how nice.” (Of course, I was always saying, “No, I don’t want you to *buy* it, I was just thinking out loud!”) But now that we’re in the US and married, he’s turned into a real penny-pincher. I get the idea that money in the bank is worth more than even happy memories sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I totally think saving money is wise and the right thing to do, it’s just that he seems overly concerned about money all the time. I even overheard him telling his older sister (who is also very “thrift”) on the phone one day how much money we have and how much [I] spend… that really upset me and I told him so, and he acted clueless as to what he had done wrong. I tried to explain that in American culture, one family’s money matters are not to be discussed with another’s. I know that Chinese are a lot more “saving” than Americans are, and I think money is very important to them… like my husband once said to me, “You know, Chinese think wasting is like a sin.” And I admire a lot of that aspect of their culture, and have learned a lot from it. But I guess I place more value on enjoying life than counting my pocketbook. 😛

It just bothers me how whenever we go shopping or buy something or want to do something, my husband complains about how much this or that costs, almost as if it was the most important thing in life. My friends and family think he’s so weird because of it. And it’s almost impossible for me to explain cultural differences to people who have never experienced the culture in China. When they want us to go do things with them on a whim, like go watch a movie, my husband will say he’d rather stay home and watch one and save the money and gas. Which is totally okay with me, really, it’s just that when we were dating he would do anything with me without hesitation.

I was just really surprised how he changed a lot when we came to the States… I am SO proud of him for getting jobs and working hard and I really do not mean to complain. I just wanted to get your take on this, and see if there’s something you can suggest to me in responding to my husband in a way that he knows I both care about him and saving money. When he’s worried about finances, and I try to smooth things over by saying, “Honey we’re fine, everything will be alright,” he gets upset and says that because I just don’t care, or something to that effect.

I think it’s the US economy and how expensive everything is here that burdens him. I’m just not sure how to help. We are NOT struggling financially, in fact, we’re doing surprisingly well. But according to Chinese standards for some reason it’s not good enough. I have a feeling some of my husband’s frustration stems from his family and friends “back home” constantly asking how much money he makes here and stuff like that. Maybe he’s trying to live up to their expectations? My husband is the youngest child and only boy in a family with 4 sisters. I understand there is some pressure on him. Continue reading “Ask the Yangxifu: My Chinese Husband Cares About Money Too Much”

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My Chinese Husband’s Cousin, Looking For a Western Wife to Brag About

Wang, my Chinese husband’s cousin, seemed to have it all. A lucrative job as a real estate developer. Two new BMWs. Expensive suits. Nothing about him suggested his countryside roots — the same mountain village as my husband, where people still planted their own rice paddies, used wood-burning stoves, and had free-range chickens scurrying in and out of their houses.

But when he volunteered his silver BMW sedan as our wedding car in 2007 (of course, he couldn’t help but boast “oh, if you had mentioned this sooner, I could have prepared my bigger and better BMW.”), he discovered he was missing the ultimate accessory of all — a Western wife.

“He told me he wanted to find a yangxifu,” my husband recalled. “He asked if we could introduce him to some Western women.”

But we didn’t. Sure, we didn’t know any single Western women in China, since by then we lived in the US for nearly two years. But even if we did, introducing them to Wang had the kind of cheap, mail-order-bride feel to it that no friend would get their friend into. After all, he didn’t really care who she was, so long as she was foreign.

It’s just like I read over a year ago in a study about What Western Women Think of Chinese Men:

Those [Chinese] men with Western girlfriends or wives will brag about them, as if these women were a BMW.

Wang already had two BMWs to show off, but no such Western wife — never thinking, of course, that a wife, any wife, should never become a man’s bling.

“People who think this way have no suzhi,” my husband said as he frowned, using the word that Chinese often use to refer to the quality of people — which, in this case, was not much at all. “They turn their wives into objects, and try to show they are better than others in such a low way.”

Still, Wang could have gone much lower, as we learned two years ago while visiting the Kaifeng Night Market. After we bought almond tea from a stall run by lanky twentysomething wearing a white kufi — the hat worn by the Muslim Hui minority in China — he nudged my husband. “Hey, do you think you could get me a foreign wife? I could buy her a house and a car.”

John grinned as he shook his head. “It’s not that simple. Western women have different expectations.”

Then the lanky guy leaned over and whispered something in my husband’s ear — which John told me about later. “He said his penis is very strong.”

What do you think about this?

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Ask the Yangxifu: Why Does My Chinese Family Refuse My Gifts?

Gift box wrapped in silver paper with purple, blue and green stripes and a magenta bow — An American woman wonders why her Chinese in-laws seem upset every time she gives them a gift. Why do they always refuse what she buys for them? (photo by Irum Shahid)

Sam asks:

Recently, while I was at the grocery store, I saw a lovely bouquet of lilies. I thought they would look lovely in the kitchen, and decided to by them for my Chinese mother-in-law. I brought them home and put them in a vase. But when she came home and I told her they were for her, it seemed to stress her. She first tried to get me to say that they were just for myself, and then insisted that they were for the men in the house since Father’s Day had been the week before. We finally agreed that they were for everyone.

I can’t help but wonder if I did something wrong. My husband didn’t think so, but he’s been in the states for over 20 years now and isn’t always in the loop.

I had a similar experience when I came back from a trip. I had bought her a purse that I found on super-sale and thought she would like it. She kept on insisting that I would need it more than she would and that I should keep it for myself. It wasn’t until I told her I had bought myself something similar that she settled down and accepted it.

It is not uncommon for me to see something that I think a friend will like and buy it for them. Several times I’ve seen clothes that I know would fit my mother in law that would look good on her, but I am afraid I’ll terrify her or something. Do you have any insight? Continue reading “Ask the Yangxifu: Why Does My Chinese Family Refuse My Gifts?”

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The Relationship Between Language and Falling in Love

Over dinner two weeks ago in Beijing, Melanie Gao — a fellow yangxifu and blogger — asked an interesting question. “What language do you have a better relationship in with your Chinese husband?”

I didn’t know what to say because John and I had always floated between English and Mandarin, as if the two languages together somehow became our hybrid “husband-wife” language. “Hmmmmm, I don’t know. It’s hard to decide between English and Chinese. Maybe our relationship is slightly better in English these days.”

But I never would have guessed Melanie’s answer. “My husband and I have a better relationship in Japanese.” Japanese? If John had been here, he (and the remnants of his anti-Japanese ideas) would have fallen over. “I think it’s because it’s another language for us. We both have to try hard to understand one another.”

Still, I remembered reading how Melanie met her husband in Chiba, Japan when they were foreign students there — and came to know him in Japanese. Which made me wonder about another explanation. “Maybe that’s because Japanese is the language you fell in love in.”

Does it matter in what language you fall in love with someone? The question followed me long after that dinner, as I recalled my different loves in China. Continue reading “The Relationship Between Language and Falling in Love”

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