Top blogger illustrates Chinese wife's struggles

With his winning of the prestigious Alpha Blogger Awards 2010, Tokyo-based cartoonist Junichi Inoue is now recognized as one of the most influential Japanese bloggers.


His blog carries comic strips of amusing episodes about a new life with his young, Chinese wife, Yue, who is in her mid-20s and struggling with cultural and language difficulties in Tokyo.


Hits on the website have risen sharply, especially after last September, when Sino-Japanese ties became strained by a territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea — a group of uninhabited islands claimed by both Tokyo and Beijing.


Inoue, a 40-year-old anime and manga otaku (geek), became convinced that a real-life cartoon depicting a Chinese woman living in Japan would be a hit because Japanese people's interest in their giant neighbor has grown bigger and bigger.


"Everyone wanted a (real-life) Chinese character through which they could understand what the Chinese people are like. It was very strange that there was no manga featuring real-life Chinese characters," he said.


"The number of Chinese-Japanese couples is the largest among international marriages in Japan, but there had been no manga about a couple like that," Inoue added.

The first volume of the printed edition of "Chugoku Yome Nikki" (Daily Records of a Chinese Wife), whose English title is "A Chinese Wife and an Otaku Husband," will go on sale Friday.

Junichi hails from Miyazaki Prefecture and Yue (which is not her real name) is from the Inner Mongolia region of northern China.


The two of you met each other for the first time at an omiai (match-making) party arranged by friends and relatives in China in 2008. How was the meeting arranged in the first place?

Junichi: I had been making (manga) figures at factories in China. I had worked for some time in Guangzhou (in southern China), so I'd become acquainted with a factory manager there who was associated with the family of Yue's sister, who had married a Japanese man.

Yue: My sister in Guangzhou proposed an omiai party and I agreed because I just wanted to see what an omiai was like.

What were your first impressions of each other?

Junichi: At first glance, I thought I would never get married with her because she was too young and too beautiful for me. I had done omiai four times in Japan and was turned down each time before that. I thought this meeting would never work (laugh).

Yue: I thought he might be a good person because I like a man of few words. Jin-san (Junichi's nickname) didn't speak at all. He neither smokes nor drinks, and he was very quiet during the meeting.

Junichi: I didn't say much because I felt very awkward. (Yue and her sister) didn't understand Japanese well, so I had no choice but to speak very slowly. (Yue had learned some Japanese in 2003 when she stayed in Japan for a few months.)

What was your impression of Japan in general?

Yue: The images of Japan in historical dramas on Chinese TV are not very good (because they focus mainly on Japan's war with China.) But when I actually met people, I found they were all very nice.

Junichi: When her sister got married to a Japanese man, her parents were strongly opposed to it. But he behaved in such a kind manner that the parents have come to trust Japanese people.

When you first came to Japan did anything surprise you?

Yue: I liked fashion in Japan (even) before coming to Japan. After I arrived, I was surprised to find even some Japanese men were using makeup. And the towns in Japan are very clean. You don't see any trash on the street.

Which language do you usually use at home?

Junichi: All Japanese. I knew some Chinese, but I'm getting worse and worse. She can now communicate too well in Japanese. Otherwise, it would have been much more interesting.

Do you have any plans for the future? Do you want to live in Japan or China?

Yue: We often talk about this. If we have a baby, (I) want to raise the child in Japan until kindergarten age. I want to move to China when the child reaches elementary school age.

Junichi: That would be OK with me if that is what Yue wants.

Why kindergarten age?

Yue: Because the medical system in Japan is much better. In China, there are too many hospital patients and doctors give children too much medicine and too many shots. That does not happen in Japan.

Junichi: Hospitals in China are terrible. You need to wait for about a day (to be seen by a doctor).

Then why do you want to have your child attend elementary school in China?

Yue: It's better for kids to learn both Chinese and Japanese.

Junichi: And Yue says the level of Japanese schools is lower than that in China.

Yue: They don't teach much to kids. Kindergartens and elementary schools in Japan just let children play.

Do children in China need to compete much harder at school than in Japan?

Yue: Yes.

Junichi: I saw the textbooks used by her sister's children. They are much more difficult than those in Japanese schools. They are given much more homework, too. I don't think Japanese schools are good at all.

Do you often have arguments at home?

Yue: He is just so nice.

Junichi: I was thinking of creating a manga (on their life), so I have kept records of everything that has happened. If you think of manga in that way, you find almost everything is just so interesting (laugh).

So you don't argue about any cultural differences?

Junichi: It's no use saying anything (about something different). Differences are the things that make someone else interesting. Yue is Chinese, and you can't do anything about that.

Yue: If I find anything different, I want to try to do it the Japanese way as much as possible. For example, our wedding ceremony was totally different. I wanted to do that in the Japanese way. I want to make the same meals that his mom made for him.

Junichi: You don't need to do things like that.

What do you like and dislike about Japan and China?

Yue: In China, it's quite difficult to get important documents from a city office. You need a friend there, otherwise it's very difficult. (I like) it that prices in China are very cheap. I like fashion in Japan.

Junichi: I don't dislike any particular thing about Japan. I like the manga (culture) in Japan. China doesn't have it. In China, the content industry is so hollow because pirated copies are immediately created. I will publish this comic in China, too, but definitely pirated editions will soon appear and I will not be able to make much money there.

What about the political system in China?

Junichi: It's also a problem for me. If you run a factory in China, bureaucrats come and openly demand bribes. If you don't pay, they will just start harassing you. Everybody knows that. They won't do anything good.

Has this work changed the way you approach your job as a cartoonist?

Junichi: I have realized that a big change has taken place in the manga industry. In the past, you needed to have your manga works published in a major magazine and it's very difficult. But now you just can create a blog to let everybody know about your works. This is a paradigm shift. A really big change.

Source

Chinese Dragon Woman who seeks the Impossible Man

It has been a while since I last updated this blog.

This article about a modern age gold-digger grabbed my attention, for obvious reasons, as it fits in well with a stereotype that I have now developed as a result of my experience being married to a Chinese born wife.

This stereotype is neither politically correct nor fair, but unfortunately it is what it is, and stories like the one below only add fuel to my admittedly irrational conviction.

My saga has unfortunately gone from bad to worse, and I will elaborate on this when I have enough strength to, but for now what I can say is that I have not seen my son in almost a month.

In any case, I consider the woman in this article to be an extreme version of a typical Chinese-born woman, and not something of an exception.

This woman, unattractive as she is, with very little English and not much else to distinguish her, is seeking the IMPOSSIBLY PERFECT husband, and she has left China to the USA to find him.

Her name is Luo Yufeng, or Fengjie, and she is a Chinese internet celebrity who left Shanghai in 2010 for America on a quest for a husband who meets her exacting standards.

He must have graduated from Yale or Harvard, or similar, have ambitions of world domination, cannot be Asian and preferably stands at 2m tall.

yes, you read correct. he cannot be Asian. Why? I don't know but this is not the first Chinese woman I have heard who has made that kind of statement.

Fengjie, 27, stands at just 1.3m but points out that she wears heels.Hmmmm?!

She came to national attention in China in 2009 when she started handing out flyers for an ideal husband.

She says she became the “hottest” star in China, known to 80 per cent of the population.

She claims she’s a political refugee but more likely had to do a runner when she made it known that none of the 300,000 Chinese men who she claims proposed marriage were good enough, or tall enough, for her.

Despite misgivings that she is a self-invented internet figment, she is real enough. As she stood near Wall St in New York for her photo opportunity, Chinese tourists stopped, pointed and began taking photos of her.

Chinese bloggers, who hate her, believe that she represents the worst of China to the world, and I suspect that they are spot on.

Fengjie and a group of her friends started handing out husband flyers at Manhattan subway stations last year.

She says she gets about three calls, texts or emails a day with offers of marriage.

No American man has so far made the cut. She says she works in a humble Brooklyn manicure salon, living in a tiny room, waiting for Mr Impossible.

“I am a very clever person,” she said through a translator.

Asked in what ways she was clever, she said: “I cannot give you the details.”

Asked what she offered her husband in return, she said: “I do not care. I do not consider that.”

This point alone underscores the attitude of this woman, and perhaps to a lesser extent the attitude of many Chinese born women, towards marriage. It seems to be a unilateral, one-sided exercise designed to raise her standing in the world, but she herself feels no responsibility to offer anything to her husband to be. It seems to be little more than emotional exploitation, at a grander scale.

She said she did not believe in sex before marriage but when asked whether she’d ever had sex before marriage, she blushed.

“My husband must be very clever and intelligent. He must have a willingness to be president of a nation, or own a very big business. I require my prospective husband to have graduated from a famous university.

“I myself am very good at politics.”

Asked to name the Australian prime minister, she could not.

Asked if she would consider an Australian husband, she said she would. But he would have to move to the US because she was in process of applying for refugee status.

But what if she just fell in love with a guy who had nothing? “I will not fall in love with a person like that,” she said.

“I will wait until I find that man.”

FENGJIE’S HUSBAND MUST BE:

Aged between 25 and 31
About two metres tall (a bit shorter is acceptable)
Must have a master’s degree from Harvard, Yale, Stanford or West Point
Must NOT be Asian
Must have a house and car
Can never have been married, and no kids
Intends to rule the world

The Inevitable Consequence

My wife is currently in China on holidays. She is with my son. She has gone with my blessing and my support.

It is a positive thing, given what we have just gone through recently. The fact that I agreed for my child to go oversease to a country like China without my presence, indicates something positive in an otherwise gloomy recent past.

What I mean by this should become very clear soon.

I guess it is at this point where I declare that we are in fact separated.

Anyway, it has been a very difficult last few months.

I guess you never really know someone unless you actually separate from them, and witness their reaction.

Our separation has for the most part been amicable, given the complex financial circumstances we were in.

I had come to the conclusion that our relationship simply would not work, and I realised that the longer I waited, the more vulnerable I would be to exploitation.

The fact that we just made a huge investment in a large house, although at first I thought to be a stabilising influence, made determining the genuine status of our relationship all the more urgent.

So it was I who separated from her.

Although I had planned to do this for a few weeks, when I finally did do it it was the result of a misundertanding on my part regarding a phone call she received.

I did not say anything but I assumed the worst, only to find out days later that it was an error on my part. It seemed I had grown weary and paranoid.

In any case, it didn't really matter. I did what I had to do, being the inevitable consequence of unresolved issues from our past.

The good thing is that during this period of separation, I have cleanly untangled my finances from hers, and managed to get a full account of her own net worth.

Wow!! I can't believe how much money she saved during our marriage, while I was paying for all her expenses.

Anyway, being separated, especially being the initiator of separation, gave me a strange sense of control. This is something that I had very little of for the bulk of our marriage.

I was able to request that she provide her true financial circumstances to me, as I did to her, in order to try and arrange an equitable financial agreement between us.

I was also able to make requests of my son's time, that were previously never afforded to me, regardless of how reasonable and just my requests may have been.

I asked for my son to stay with me for 2 days per week, and during this time my son has been actually able to visit his paternal family without interferance, for the first time ever.

One request that I have yet to have her agree to has been for my son to stay overnight with me.

It is hard to fathom that she objects to my 8 year old son staying overnight with me, yet she had allowed my son to go interstate on his own to visit his aunty for a whole week, without even blinking.

However, this is something that I have been working on.

I think I will just have to force the issue when they return from China, as it is not a genuine concern, of this I am sure. I believe that she is on some level at least gaming the child support system, which determines level of support on the number of overnight stays with each parent.

In any case, I must be patient and try and to slowly persuade her to the wisdom of sharing the load, and hopefully common sense will prevail.

I should also mention that since our separation she has written on 7 occassions asking that we reconcile. These have been quite detailed letters. She clearly has gone to a lot of effort.

However I am not seriously considering such a move, but on an emotional level it does make the separation easier to bare at least.

Hymn of the Tiger Mother

I post an article about the Parenting styles of Chinese mothers, a topic that has received a lot of press recently.

I have thought about this topic extensively, given that I have a young son.

I wish to elaborate on my views and experiences on the topic of parenting, in particular the cultural influences and values that tend to have an overwhelming impact on our parenting styles.

But first an article on the topic that has been in the news of late.

======

By Amy Chua

In “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Amy Chua describes her relentless determination to make her two daughters successful by raising them in a strict fashion, contrary to what she sees as modern American standards of permissiveness and mediocrity. In this excerpt, she starts to explain her parenting philosophy.

Part One

The Tiger, the living symbol of strength and power, generally inspires fear and respect.

The Chinese mother

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

I’m also using the term “Western parents” loosely. Western parents come in all varieties. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Westerners are far more diverse in their parenting styles than the Chinese. Some Western parents are strict; others are lax. There are same-sex parents, Orthodox Jewish parents, single parents, ex-hippie parents, investment banker parents, and military parents. None of these “Western” parents necessarily see eye to eye, so when I use the term “Western parents,” of course I’m not referring to all Western parents—just as “Chinese mother” doesn’t refer to all Chinese mothers.

All the same, even when Western parents think they’re being strict, they usually don’t come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments thirty minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough.

Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that “stressing academic success is not good for children” or that “parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.” By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be “the best” students, that “academic achievement reflects successful parenting,” and that if children did not excel at school then there was “a problem” and parents “were not doing their job.” Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

This brings me to my final point. Some might think that the American sports parent is an analog to the Chinese mother. This is so wrong. Unlike your typical Western over-scheduling soccer mom, the Chinese mother believes that (1) schoolwork always comes first; (2) an A-minus is a bad grade; (3) your children must be two years ahead of their classmates in math; (4) you must never compliment your children in public; (5) if your child ever disagrees with a teacher or coach, you must always take the side of the teacher or coach; (6) the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal; and (7) that medal must be gold.

Song of the Sirens

Well, I finally have my wife's banking details. She has saved a lot of money over the course of our marriage, and before.

I did not expect her to so casually provide her bank account details to me, especially given her refusal to do so in the past, but she probably thought she had no choice.

This surprisingly does not make me feel relieved or satisfied. In fact I feel more frustrated than ever, especially when I consider why it has taken so long, and why there was so much resistance.

I sometimes think back to when we first met, and I wonder why I never picked up on her "Me not Us" view of marriage. Or if I did, why or how I let it get to this point.

I remember in fact the day that we met, and all the circumstances behind it. I had been about a year out of a long-term relationship, and my colleague and his wife invited me for dinner at a restaurant.

Once dinner was over, they surprised me by providing me a ticket, and dropping me off in the city for what I was to find out was a speed-dating evening.

Now I am not the most charming of men, and I often get tongue tied in these situations, so I felt quite uneasy about going ahead with this, but I thought it may be a good laugh if nothing else, so I gave it a shot.

I waited for an anxious half an hour in a bar with another 30 or so men and women, all strangers to me.

Most of the men and women congregated in small groups. It was obvious to me that women came prepared in groups, while men came alone but grouped up out of necessity.

Despite feeling anxious at being all alone, I felt quite out of my element, and stood there like a statue until the event formally began.

It was at that point that I caught my wife's attention. She too was alone, and as far as I could tell, very shy.

Once formalities began, we got to sit down with each person of the opposite sex for 5 minutes each, and then move on. We were told to make small-talk, but not talk about our work, and not to provide private contact information.

I actually did not like the majority of the women I spoke to, because I felt that they were too self-involved, too demanding, too assertive. But when I got to sit with my wife, it was obvious that we hit it off straight away.

We did not talk about work, money, success, or anything of the sought. It was merely small talk, just a little banter and fun.

So I thought she liked me for me.

In any case I didn't really pursue her, except for the fact that she managed to get my mobile phone number by nights end.

Come next day, I really cooled off on her, and decided that if she called, I would simply make up some excuse, and hopefully she would get the idea.

And so it happened, problem is, she didn't get the message.

So she kept calling, and calling, and calling, and finally I guess I simply caved in to her ongoing request to go out one night.

So try as I may, I can't see how I missed those vital calling signs of things to come....or am I missing something here?

We bought a new house, but…

Well, we just bought a new house.

Its actually quite big, even majestic really. It cost an absolute fortune.

I was happy where we lived, but my wife wanted opulence.

We will move in the next few months.

However my wife and I have come to an impasse.

My wife’s salary goes into a separate bank account, and despite my best efforts, its always been kept out of my reach. In fact I don’t even know how much she has saved.

We have, I say embarrassingly, been living on my income alone since we got married.

Now with the new house purchase, I have demanded that she contribute to the purchase with all her saved funds.

She has refused.

Surprisingly she has been referring to this purchase as “her new house”, and yet she expects not to contribute to it at all.

Given our troubles in the past, this is simply not on.

So I have laid down my terms to her. Either she contributes to the house with her funds, to the extent that she has saved, or I will simply borrow against the house that we have, so that the burden is shared.

I have accepted that our first house will be split equally or thereabouts should we ever separate, despite she never contributing, but I will not make that mistake again.

She has been acting very upset over this, but her expectations are remarkably unreasonable.

This is not an issue that I am prepared to compromise on. If I am to be fair to her, I also have to be just as fair to myself.

Mr Cat, meet Mr Pidgeon

"Mr Cat, meet Mr Pidgeon...the rest I leave to you."

So goes the old saying, which indicates the strong order of things that seem to drive so much of the human condition.

Much like the laws of nature, so with humans, our likes, our reactions, our affiliations and our nemeses.

Or so I thought.

A few months ago I started seeing a new patient, an elderly Chinese man who was suffering from moderately advanced Parkinson's Disease. In the consultation was his daughter, a feisty, assertive but genuinely caring woman, doing all she could for her father, as well as the gentleman's wife, a woman in her eighties who could not speak any English, but seemed to be the decision maker in the unit.

This man was luckily very responsive to first line treatment, and at least for now many of his symptoms have come under control, resulting in a better quality of life for this man, and as is almost always the case, for his long suffering wife.

At our last appointment the wife expressed her delight that she could now go for long walks without worrying about her husband, who she previously believed needed 24 hr monitoring. In response, I jokingly mentioned that since they live close to me, that she could come and visit my mother-in-law.

Given all that they had in common, their age, their heritage, their language, the vicinity to each other's households, I thought this was a no brainer, and this would provide my mother-in-law an opportunity to mix with other people, and have broader interests and independent friends.

So naively, I arranged for us to meet one day over yum cha.

From where I was sitting, everything seemed to go smoothly. There was a lot of chatter, a lot of smiles. My mother-in-law and the elderly women seemed to talk the most, and why not after-all, they were so remarkably similar.

Well in the days and weeks after that lunch, I slowly noticed that there was no reference, no discussion about the new friend.

At first I barely noticed it, but I kept on asking my wife whether her mother saw her new friend today, in a way feeling chuffed that through my handy work, my mother-in-law had benefitted.

My wife would respond without asking her mother, with a bland "no".

After a few weeks of this, it occurred to me that this simply didn't sound right, so one night, while lying in bed with my wife, I asked her why her mother had not seen her new friend since the yum cha.

My wife said that the woman called 3 times, but her mother didn't want to see her.

I found this so strange. My mother-in-law has so few friends, so few peers of the same age, and she had such a burning desire for conversation, how could she not want to see her new friend?

After more prodding, my wife finally spilled the beans.

She said:

"My mother doesn't like her. She feels that she is below her."

My wife continued:

"My mother was a teacher back in China. This woman was just a commoner."

"My mother now has a son-in-law who is a doctor. This woman's daughter works in a factory. How could you think they would have anything in common. All you have done is embarrassed my mother."

Ditto! Maybe there are some things about the laws of nature that I have yet to fully understand!

The Lingering Dream

Things have pretty much settled down in my relationship, at least that's what I have been telling myself.

However I have recently had a very vivid dream which has kinda thrown things upside down for me, at least emotionally.

I am still baffled as to what it means, and why it has appeared now.

My dream has me separated from my wife, contemplating my future.

In reality I am 7 years younger than my wife, but in my dream I was 20 years younger than my wife, as irrational as that may sound, but it felt like an unquestionable truth.

In this dream I also felt a sense of comfort in knowing that my wife was probably too old to have another child.

This I felt freed me to consider my future, where I had decided that it was time for me to meet another woman.

Here's the crunch though, I got into a conflicting mind-set, trying to work out whether I should allow myself to enter a relationship with another Chinese woman, or a woman of any other race.

I kept going back and forth, convincing myself of one approach only to realise the problems it would evoke.

The conflict I was experiencing was quite palpable. At one point I felt that for my own well-being, I should try and avoid any woman who has the same cultural emphasis as my wife does.

But I kept getting pulled back to the very real needs of my child.

I kept fearing, maybe irrationally, that were I to have another child who looked 'caucasian', that my son would not see this chiild as his sibling, and in a way my son would see me as emotionally abandoning him for my other similar-looking child.

I felt the only chance of ensuring my son still felt part of my life was to have another euro-asian child, to look essentially like my son.

I know that this makes little sense and quite possibly my son, given these circumstances, would care less whether his half-sibling had blonde hair or black hair, but obviously this dream means something to me, but exactly what I don't know.

It is one of those dreams however that lingers on, troubling me evening when in the back of my mind.

Struggles of a bi-lingual child

One of the advantages of having a euro-asian child, as I see it, is the opportunity for the child to learn two languages from a  very young age, and possibly optimising the child’s intellectual capacity at a time when the child has capacity to spare.

Because of my mother-in-law, my child learned to speak Mandarin in parallel with his English from the start.

This may or may not explain why my son experienced speech delay problems when he reached about 12 months old, but I suspect not.

These delay problems eventually required about 4 years of speech pathology treatment. I suspect however that maybe my son had an inherent weakness with language to begin with, rather than any complications arising out of his bi-lingual environment.

Despite my son making remarkable progress with his English speech once he entered speech pathology, he still struggles with learning Mandarin.

At this stage my son has a genuine appreciation of the English language. He is an excellent speller and he has developed a very broad and impressive vocabulary.

But his Mandarin, despite being given every opportunity to learn, is quite woeful.

He attends Chinese lessons once a week, and I am wondering whether more lessons will help him gain some traction in this language.

It would be a terrible shame if my son does not master this language, given the importance of this language to my son’s heritage, and the ever growing role this language will play on the world scene.

Talking & hearing Chinese

I was always quite good at school.

I excelled in maths and physics, biology and chemistry, but always did exceptionally well in English.

When I went to University I also studied French as an aside, foolishly believing at the stage that French was still an important language to learn.

To my credit I picked it up rather quickly, and can still speak it well today.

So you may think that I have an aptitude for languages, given that history, and I would have agreed with you before I was confronted with a language that I can hardly “hear”, and one that simply does not follow any of the language structures that I am familiar with.

I realised that my ability to learn French, as well as some self-taught conversational German, was less to do with my exceptional prowess at absorbing language, and more to do with paralleling similar language structures.

German for instance is effectively the mother tongue of English, and is very similar to English in its structures. French, although less so, is still a related language with similar sounds and language rules.

Chinese Mandarin however is a completely different beast. Although I have become very familiar with so many words, given that I hear them every single day, I am still at a loss when I try and repeat these words.

Even my son laughs at me when he hears my Chinese.

“No daddy” he laughs. “It doesn’t sound like that at all.”

The problem is not simply in the pronunciation of course. It starts off in the hearing, and there are so many nuances in the Chinese language, that once you get to a particular age, you will forever struggle to hear.

So I struggle, although I wish it wasn’t so.

If only I could learn Chinese, I sometimes think, it would open up an incredible new world for me, one where I would directly engage with so many people that I am surrounded by, people that otherwise are off limits to me because of the language barrier.

Taking off my shoes in the house

Like most Australians I have always worn my footwear in the house.

As a young boy the only time there was an issue with footwear in the house was when there was mud on my shoes.

When I initially met my future wife, as a matter of courtesy and respect I would always take my shoes off before entering her unit.

I did this as a show of respect for her property, her unit, her home. It did not occur to me at the time that if I was to marry this woman at some point, that I would be forgoing my home life sensibilities for hers.

But so it was.

No compromise, no meeting in the middle, no delicate mix between of east and west.

Basically I live my home life as if I was raised in a Chinese family.

This expectation laso extends to the TV set. In fact watching TV for anything other than the new is  big no-no. The house is almost always quiet, with some activity going on that requires silence, or so I am told.

Anytime I watch sport on TV, I am quickly reminded that I am being lazy. No ifs or buts.

What is not appreciated by my wife is that many Australians keep the TV on at all times, simply as background noise that will take our attention from time to time, but we still get all our work done.

Completely different approach to home life, and one that I simply didn’t expect when I entered into a cross-cultural relationship.

Racism or just Parental Anxiety

We recently went away for a long weekend.

It was me, my wife and our son. My mother-in-law went to stay with her son for a week.

We travelled up north and had a really great time. We drove up the coast casually, taking our time and seeing the sights.

We finally got to the Gold Coast in Queensland, and this part of the trip was our son's favourite.

He got to go to Movie World, Sea World and Wet and Wild Water World.

All was going remarkably well. My wife and I were in a great mood, and really attentive to each other. Our focus however was on our child, and we both marveled at the joy of simply being parents, and spending quality time with our one and only child.

Well, all was great but for one incident, that for some reason made a huge impact on me emotionally, but did not register at all with my wife.

Whilst we were at Wet and Wild Water World, there was a section where most of the young kids and parents would congregate, which involved a huge water feature with a large pirate bucket that would fill up with water, and periodically dump the water on all the young kids below.

It was quite contagious hearing the laughter and enjoyment of all the young kids running around and screaming everytime they would get wet.

It was especially wonderful watching my young boy, who is typically quite shy, run around with free abandon, completely enjoying himself and engaging with other children of his age.

Well at this point a large blow-up ball entered the scene, and along with the water features, the children started kicking this ball around.

At one point the ball landed near my son, and he prepared to kick it, jokingly going back and forth as if he were about to kick the ball, but pulling back at the last minute.

Everyone present found this quite amusing, especially my wife and I. We were also really proud of our son for showing the confidence to play-act as he was, in front of what was effectively a group of strangers.

Well, everyone was laughing at our boy's antics but for one other child, another boy roughly the same age as our boy, about 8 years old.

He impatiently began calling out to my son to kick the ball.

What stunned me was the language he used.

The boy, as if to taunt my son, began calling out:

"Hey China, kick the ball! Kick the ball Chopsticks!"

He repeated this taunt one more time, before my son finally kicked the ball.

My son completely ignored the comment. It simply didn't register with my son. I am not sure if this was because my son didn't hear what was said or how it was said, or if my boy simply selected to ignore it.

My wife on the other hand heard what was said, but did not even look at me to signal concern.

It left me wondering whether my reaction was an over-reaction.

But what I felt was remarkably strong and overwhelming. I even felt completely, as embarrassed as I am to say this now, to approach the boy, a young 8 year old boy, and abuse him for talking that way to my son.

Luckily I held my composure, but expressed my feelings to my wife soon after.

She said she did not consider it racism, it was just a silly comment from a young child.

maybe she was right. Maybe the fact that I am a fair-skinned European has somehow mis-calibrated my sense of what constitutes racism, and what may simply be a simple reckless comment.

I guess as parent I am programmed to be over-protective of my son, but incidents like this leave me feeling anxious about the next time that this happens, and if it is a more serious incident.

I want to be there to always protect my son, but of course that is unrealistic.

It is one of the burdens of having a racially mixed child I guess.

Re-writing history

I have been very confused lately.

I don't know if somehow things have settled down and life goes on as normal, or whether I am simply fooling myself.

My state of mind is earily similar to a friend of mine who a few years ago separated from his wife.

His wife was Russian, and they did not go through the typical courtship process.

My friend had previously got an Australian woman pregnant, and only because of his persistance and use of very expensive lawyers did he finally manage to get a shared parenting arrangement, whereby his daughter lived with him for 5 days a fortnight.

So after a very distressing ordeal, which involved the full complement of anti-father agencies in this country, he managed against the odds to get a very positive arrangement for him and his young daughter.

So perhaps you could imagine the absolute shock of all his friends when we found out that without much thought as to the eventual consequences, he popped over the Russia and somehow managed to commit himself to a woman that he hardly knew.

Given what he had already gone through with an Australian woman, we all wondered what in heavens he was thinking doing it all over again, but this time with a foreigner from an ex-communist state.

Well, true to form, within three years of arriving to Australia, she kicked him out of his own house, she wouldn't let him see his two kids, and she launched legal proceedings against him.

He was shattered, but more than that he was very very angry.

For about 6 months I heard a man completely committed to getting full custody of his kids, kicking his wife (and her new boyfriend) out of his house, and then moving on with his life.

In his eyes she had betrayed him in the most malicious manner, and nothing could undo the damage that was done to this relationship. Absolutely nothing!

She had kicked him out of his own home.

She had made false allegations of domestic violence against him.

She had removed $240,000 from his bank account (not sure how she managed that one).

She had refused to let him see his kids;

and "a new man" moved into the house.

Pretty serious stuff, and quite unequivocal.

Well, 6 months later he called me up one day to tell me that he and his wife had reconciled.

There was a very long and strained pause on the phone at that moment, as this was the last thing I expected from him.

He then proceeded to rationalise, and in a way to re-write history.

He told me that his wife really didn't have a boyfriend, he was just a Russian friend that moved in for companionship.

He told me that his wife really didn't want to make allegations of domestic violence against him, but she was strong-armed into it by the women's legal service she was using.

He went on and on, revising everything that had occured, somehow making it all out to be a simple misunderstanding.

"And what happenned to the $240,000?" I asked.

He said that in anger his wife sent it to her family in Russia, and they spend it.

"It's only money" he then added, in a defeated tone.

At the end of the conversation, he realised that I simply wasn't buying it, and I guess at one level neither was he.

So he ended by saying:

"You know, I just don't have the balls for this. Separation is a lot harder than I thought. If it means that I simply will have to give her what she wants to avoid more problems, then I am preparaed to do this."

I was shocked and disappointed. I had previously looked up to this guy. He was a ball-beaking business man, he was ultra-competitive at everything he did, and he drew a line in the sand with his child custody matter, and stuck to it no matter how difficult it may have been.

Here he was now however, a broken man, essentially trying to deceive me, but more importantly himself, on the most crucial matter of his married life.

So here I am reflecting back on this friend of mine, who is incidently still married, but never calls me anymore.

I am wondering whether I too am somehow revising circumstances.

Paranoid delusions and fear of Abduction

In the past I have tolerated my wife's quirk's, and I viewed them as managable little issues that would resolve themselves with a dose of common sense.

Maybe I have been too tolerant however, and just maybe, these little quirk's were something more than that, maybe even something pathalogic like a paranoid disorder.

One example for instance hapenned not that long ago, but this is just one of many.

My wife had formed the belief that our electrician was trying to assasinate her. This was the word she used "assasinate".

She came to this conclusion when he hapenned to leave a cutting tool behind on our kitchen table after he was called to fix a faulty fuse.

My wife saw this as a symbolic gensture that he was jealous of her, and wanted her life to suffer.

The electrician was a small, timid Chinese man, who spoke in broken English, but who was called by my wife because he was cheap.

This little benign incident took a life of its on, when my wife started "seeing" the electrician following us when we were out.

My wife kept on demanding that I confront him about his assasination attemps (apparently my wife heard the sound of gunshots close to our home).

She kept on fretting that he will drive past our house and shoot her.

Anyway, that bizarre period died a slow death, and only so when I demanded that she not speak of it again lest I take her to a psychiatrist.

Now there are many more incidents like this, and I have always taken the approach that she is my wife, and I have an obligation to stick with her and manage whatever she has going on in her head together.

I also believed that my son would be infinitely better off with my constant watchful eye on his mother, rather than a likely outcome of my son being in his mother's sole custody.

I mention my son because a number of times my wife's delusion revolved completely around my son, and had it not been for my resistance she would have involved the child, I believe, in a harmful way.

Well I raise all this because I have been recently following story in the press about a father who had similar experiences with his wife, to the point where she finally accused him of sexually abusing their child.

The story (The father who never gave up)involved a mother who imagined one bizarre incident after another, and finally abducted the child internationally to protect the child from the father.

The psychiatric analysis of the mother showed a history of paranoid delusions that climaxed into her fixation on the father.

Now this story has really worried me. My wife has not yet made such comments to lead me to believe that she has developed such beliefs, but she does want to send the child to China for 4 years, and so I am left wondering.

Outsourcing children to be raised in China

Well, even though we have technically reconciled, it seems that every second day I have to put out a new spot fire.

I do not seem to be able to get any respite within this relationship.

My wife has now come to the conclusion that our son needs to be taken to China and left there for four years, so that he can learn Mandarin proper.

When my son was just born, we went through a similar episode where my wife insisted that we send the newborn to China with her mother, to be raised in China for the first eight years of his life. She argued that this would free us to make more money and not be tied down by having to raise a child.

I said "No" back then, despite it causing a lot of arguments, and I am saying "No" again.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

My wife and I have come to an uncomfortable truce, one borne out of necessity rather than preference.

I guess it kind of operates like the Bill Clinton Military policy on gays, where it was a case of "Don't ask, don't tell".

For my part I have come to this point purely as a case of exhaustion, and my strong belief that if I push this issue any further I will simply be labelled a jealous and paranoid husband.

I have also reached the conclusion that I know as much as I will ever know about what has happened.

What I do know however with complete certainty is that there has definitely been no sex or physical contact involved, if that really make a difference.

There are a number of reasons why I know this.

(1) Firstly, my wife simply would not have had the opportunity to make the time for the required rendezvous'. Like many Chinese mothers, she is completely immersed in her career, in her out-of-work-hours book-keeping work, and taking our son to his almost daily extra-curricular activities.

An 'affair' would consume too much time, and would take her away from what she loves doing most.

(2) Secondly, as one of the readers suggested, I did in fact lodge a helpdesk request to recover the emails that were sent from my wifes email address.

What I got back was 6 emails only, and they only provided me the date, sender, subject title and receiver deatils. Apparently there are some kind of privacy provisions to prevent snooping and the like, and thus the body of the email is not stored in the firewall, or something like that anyway.

I got the feeling that Helpdesk were a little suspicious of my request, and I was told that if I cared to get the complete emails, I could simply ask the recipient (being of course James, the lawyer).

Well, at least I got something I thought, but unfortunately 4 of the emails had one non-descript subject title of "re: Hi"

However, two of the email subject titles were more descriptive.

They had the title of "Do you remember what I look like?", and "re: Do you remember what I look like?".

This subject title is in keeping with what my wife told me about James, that they met once, and more importantly she said to me that she doesn't "remember what he even looks like!"

It adds up that is she asked him if he remembered what she looked like, she would likely have also had problems remembering what he looked like.

(3) The third point is the most convincing for me personally.

You see, prior to my wife I had one other Chinese girlfriend, but she was from Hong Kong.

This girl, lets call her Elizabeth, was sexually liberal in bed, and contributed to the love making on an equal footing. She was also affectionate and physically intimate when circumstances called for it.

My wife however has been anything but, from when we first met.

When we first started dating, my wife would not hold hands. I can honestly not recall her ever holding my hand willingly.

What further surprised me was her complete distate for kissing. She in fact regularly rejected my efforts to kiss on the mouth by calling it an "unhigenic practice."

We actually had sex before we had ever kissed or even hugged, which I find remarkable to this day.

And our sex flows along these same lines. My wife lies back and her arms are strethed down along her legs. She doesn't move her arms, and she never touches during love making.

When I face her face, or when another part of my body is in the vicinity of her face, she turns her head to one side, and there it remains.

I remember on one ocassion without any prompting from me, my wife told me that she was to perform a sexual act on me, in order to show me how much she loved me.

Given her frigidity, this was a remarkable offer from my wife, one I still cherish with great fondness to this day. However it lasted barely 2 seconds, with her making strange throat noises and running to the bathroom to spit.

So, my point is, even though I have been content to accept these quirkes because I care for my wife, I simply can't see her having sex with another man as anything but a serious inconvenience for her, and as such, very unliklely.

...but of course, all those emails and all those phone point to something don't they?

Response to some questions

I am grateful to the feedback I have been getting, both from males and females.

It gives me an opportunity to reconsider my own thinking, being fully aware how humans can get things so wrong sometimes.

I am also a very insular kind of guy, so I have no one to talk to about these things. In my world, men unfortunately just don't talk about these things.

(1) Regarding one suggestion to talk to NaiNai, well in some regards there is a lot of merit in this, as she yields enormous influence over her daughter. NaiNai is also very strict with her daughter and I believe would not approve of her daughter risking their current "status" over something as short lived as a fling, for instance.

Of course one problem is that they are mother and daughter, and NaiNai comes from a completely different world to me, so I really don't know how to approach it, were I to try and speak to her.

Secondly, I fear that she will also be dismissive of what I may say, which will mean that I will lose "face" in front of NaiNai, further diminishing any respect she may have for me.

Finally and most importantly, NaiNai only knows two words in English, "Sankiou", for Thank you, and Bye-Bye.

So any talk with NaiNai would need to involve a third party to interpret, and this just makes it too complicated and too risky.

(2) Regarding the suggestion of requesting relationship counselling, well this is of course a great idea, because bouncing your concerns through a neutral intermediary makes communication of sensitive issues all the more effective.

Now I actually suggested this to my wife when we spoke, and although she originally indicated an open mind on this, for some reason she quickly decided that it was "just silly!". I got no further explanation as to why it was silly, despite my repeated efforts.

(3) And finally, I am not sure if I mentioned this, but my wife spoke to James, the lawyer, because she claims she became afraid when she read an article in the newspaper about Australia's Shared Parenting laws.

These laws place an emphasis on separated parents having joint custody of a child, rather than the typical situation where the mother gets sole custody.

I asked my wife how these laws affect us given that we are not separated, but she did not explain herself well. She just kept on saying that as a mother she was concerned because of many newspaper articles claimed that mothers were forced to shared their children with the father, and she wanted to know more.

This was a digression from the issue, but I asked whether this meant that she believes we will be separating soon, and her response again was that I was just being silly.

So anyway, some truth from her but it just doesn't gel together.

It is actually quite draining when someone simply can't give a straight answer, and I have decided that rather than get into an argument, that if she resists answering then I should just leave it be for now, as I am sure more details will reveal themselves soon enough.

So I will try and answer some more questions soon, and I will try and explain why I don't think she was involved in a physical relationship with anyone. But this doesn't really lessen the issue for me, but it is a process of paling away the layers and seeing what's left.

Marriage in Distress

Well, a lot has happened since my last post.

For the longest time it seemed that I simply would not muster up the courage to raise these lingering issues with my wife.

However an opportunity arose by chance, when mother-in-law decided at the last minute to visit Brisbane for a week, in order see family. We decided that it would a great holiday for our son as well, who was on school holidays.

So as a result, we were alone for one week, without any disruptions or distractions.

So I finally spoke up when we were alone at home.

This was the beginning of a conversation that lasted a few hours. It was not frenetic nor was it aggressive in any sense. It was a calm discussion, mostly driven by me. I calmly addressed the issues, one by one, that I thought needed to be cleared up.

The responses from my wife were the most honest she has ever been to me, but not entirely honest.

I know for a fact that certain claims she has made were simply untrue.

I know this for two reasons.

Firstly and as they say in the poker industry, she has a "tell".

When she lies to me she tilts her head in a submissive type of display, she also touches my hand affectionately, but in all such cases she can never bring herself to look in my eyes. This has been a very consistent "tell" from her for many years.

But secondly and more importantly, I know that certain claims are untrue because I checked up on the details before-hand.

For instance, she claims to have only spoken to this lawyer two or three times on the phone. This is untrue. She has called (and/or texted) his number in the hundreds of times, on some days up to six times a day.

Secondly, she claims to have only emailed him two or three times.

Again, this is simply untrue.

Firstly, I witnessed her deleting emails in bulk from her sent folder recently, and this was from her private hotmail account. I knew that this was the email address that she would have used to correspond with him.

But more damning is the following.

A few months ago, she asked me a very strange question.

I did not think much of it back then, but I realised not that long ago that there was a connection between this lawyer, and that question.

She had previously asked me whether anyone at the university I teach at could intercept or recover any emails sent to the university.

I was perplexed by this question and simply answered by saying "I don't know"

But she asked again, with an element of tension in her voice, and to boot, she would not look me in the eyes while asking.

I thought little of it, until I realised that this new friend of hers teaches at the same university as I do.

So I followed this up with the IT section at the university.

Now my wife has never sent me an email from her hotmail account to my university email address.

However I mentioned to the IT person that I wished to recover an email my wife sent me with some important details, but was not sure if she had sent it to my university email address.

Now, although this was not strictly legal, I was told that 98 emails were sent from that email address, but not to me.

So, progress, and a little bit of relief because I was no longer completely in the dark, but also distress because this deception was growing bigger by the day.

Having said that, my wife told me certain things that I do in fact believe.

First is that she only met the lawyer once in person.

Second, she explained to me why she met the lawyer. I will go into this in a later post.

Thirdly, she implied that nothing went on sexually. We did not discuss this explicitly, but it was there between the lines. I also believe this, for good reason. I will explain this as well in a later post.

For now my thinking is all over the place and quite chaotic.

So, in an effort to help my thoughts settle and fall in place, I would ask for those reading this blog to ask me some specific questions, if you wish to, which will force me to think clearly about aspects of my circumstances that I have not given due consideration to yet.

This will help me be more rational in my thinking, as I am a complete emotional wreck right now and wish to ensure that I do nothing stupid while in this state of mind.

Last night while she was in the shower...

I have been struggling with this emotional distress now for quite some time, and what seems to be bothering me the most is the "not knowing" bit.

Its a terrible way to live ones life.

For the most part I just pretend everything is normal, but this uncertainty is just eating away at me.

Part of me oddly prefers the anguish of not-knowing, for fear of what I may find out if I look further. By living in the dark there is still hope that it is all in my head, right?

But last night my wife went into the shower and unually for her, she left her mobile phone on the bedside table.

And well, after so much effort to simply ignore this issue or somehow convince myself that it is just my imagination, it just got too much for me, so I picked up her mobile phone and decided to look at some of her records.

I went straight to the SMS section, and found an unfamiliar number from someone who SMS'd her about a week earlier.

I jotted the number down, and then read the text message.

This is what it said:

"Called U back later in day. Sorry to miss UR call. Will not be at work tomorrow."

...and then I read the previous text message from my wife, prompting this response. The text read:

"Tried to call you 5 times. Are you avoiding me? Have a lot to tell you"

This is all I was willing to read. I put the phone right down. My heart was racing and I was in a cold sweat. It may or may not mean anything, but it is not the all-clear I was hoping for. In fact I imediately took it for something worse than it really is, at least so far. I think I imagined some words that I had to keep checking on the paper to ensure they won't there. It seems my mind is playing tricks on me.

Anyway, I in fact don't know whose number this is, and for all I know it could be one of her girlfriends.

I guess I will have to read more next chance I get.

The new friend

My apologies for keeping everyone waiting.

It has been a very strange period for me lately. I am a neurologist and see patients daily who are suffering from terrible afflictions caused by injuries or illnesses like catastrophic head injuries, strokes, Parkinsons disease and Alzheimers.

I need to have constant attention to detail, as I am dealing with quality of life, and in some cases life itself.

Although it has not affected my work yet, I am doing my best to guarantee that IT NEVER does, so I write on this blog late at night in my desperate attempt to cleanse myself of the immense distress I have been going through.

Anyway, back to that strange weekend, and here we are at Sunday.

For most of the morning my wife was exceptionally nice to me. She would call me "honey" repeatedly, and on a few ocassions she called me by my baby name (the name my mother calls me to this day).

My wife would only act like this when she was extremely happy, or when she was preparing to persuade me about something.

Anyway, about mid-morning, although I didn't realise at the time, my wife started on what was probably a well thought out plan to introduce me to a new person she had apparently just met.

She started making references to a "James", a man she met through her work, but according to her had never met in person once.

She however did mention to me that she had spoken to James 4 or 5 times on the phone (although she mentioned nothing about emails).

Now I counted 7 separate references to James on that Sunday, all I believe designed to sound innocuous, but I could feel that there was more to this than that.

Now James is a lawyer. She met him through work, and because he also has a Chinese wife, she became friends with him. he is anglo by the way.

Sounds plausible right? Well its not. There's more to this than my wife has been letting on.

By the 7th mention of James, my wife said:

"Would you like to meet James? I told him about you."

I replied by saying:

"Why would I want to meet a stranger?"

My response was terse, but I had grown frustrated with this charade by my wife, and it was a desperate display as far as I was concerned, but she still persisted in trying to put an innocent spin on events.

Well, she stopped talking about James after that.

But later on that night, I remembered something that she asked me about 4 months ago. I didn't think anything of it back then, but it was a strange comment none the less.

The more I think about it, the more it all fits.

It seems that James and I are not actually strangers after all. In fact I think we teach at the same university.

Just lying in bed that night I knew a lot of things didn't make sense. The email episode, her claim of only 4 or 5 phone calls, and her strange comment about 4 months ago.

..its starting to make a bit more sense now...but maybe I need to check on a few facts first...but more on that later.