you in a roundabout manner, by way of stories.
As I said before, I’ve always been a hopeless romantic. I suppose it was a reaction to the complete absence of romance in my childhood (except, of course, for what I saw on the screen and read in the romance novels devoured in secret, the ones my father forbade me from reading). Pragmatism was the guiding principle of love and marriage in my immigrant household. Have you ever seen my parents kiss, even on the cheek? Exactly. Neither have I. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen them even touch one another with any kind of affection. I never saw that between my grandparents, my father’s parents, the ones I grew up around. Romantic love was simply not a part of my family tradition.
My grandparents’ marriage was arranged when they were still children, despite the fact that they lived in different countries. My grandmother was from a little village in Hainan, a lush island off the coast of southern China. My grandfather’s parents had also been born in Hainan, but he himself had been born in Vietnam after his parents immigrated there to start what would become a successful business in trading spices and other valuable commodities, like elephant tusks and rhino horns. The families knew and liked each other. My grandfather’s family was well off; my grandmother was young, strong, and healthy. At fourteen, she was plucked from everything and everyone she had ever known and taken to Vietnam on a multiweek boat journey by a stranger, her future husband’s maternal grandfather. There, she had to learn a new language and a new way of life that revolved around commerce, and not farming or the land. There, she resentfully did as her domineering mother-in-law commanded while my great-grandmother spent most days gambling. There, she cared for her boy-husband and his seven younger brothers and sisters, even breast-feeding his youngest brother as she breast-fed her own firstborn son. My grandmother cooked, cleaned, sewed, and even massaged the stubs that were my great-grandmother’s feet; Great-Grandmother grew up in an era when bound feet no bigger than three inches were a mark of erotic beauty, and so she must have deplored my grandmother’s grotesquely large feet. My grandmother was effectively a servant in her own home, and her boy-husband did nothing to improve her situation. He did as his mother wished, and no doubt saw his wife’s travails as part of a cultural rite of passage in the centuries-old power play between mother and daughter-in-law. There was no romantic love between my grandparents, at least not the kind of love I would have wanted. Theirs was a love born of familiarity, habit, obligation. My grandfather kept at least one mistress and had at least one child with her, a girl. I’m sure my grandmother knew about them because my grandmother knew everything, but she never spoke of them. When my grandmother died, after nearly sixty years of marriage, my grandfather grieved for her for a brief period of time, and then he went to China to retrieve and marry my grandmother’s sister, a widow, who would take care of him in his later years. An excellent example of a man who couldn’t cope.
My parents’ story was marginally better. My mother was beautiful, truly. In the small town in which I would later be born, my mother’s beauty caught my grandmother’s eye. Her firstborn son was twenty-four; it was time for him to get married. She asked around about this pretty girl who walked past the house four times a day, back and forth from the school where she taught first grade. Her parents were from Hainan, too, although she had been born in Vietnam. The eldest of six children. Not a rich family but a perfectly respectable family, and her beauty could not be ignored. So my grandmother dispatched a matchmaker to my mother’s house in Hoi An to broach the possibility of a union. My maternal grandparents were ecstatic. My mother was not. She had seen my father—a pale-skinned man, handsome enough—from a distance. But my mother felt she, at twenty-two, was too young to get married. She longed for adventure. She wanted to work at a different job, something other than teaching, like for the Americans at the army store. But her father wouldn’t allow her to mix with the Americans, for doing so was an invitation to corruption, scandal, and ruin.
Her parents pressured her