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?

Chinese and Homosexuality

A week after the Chinese New Year's parade, I was sitting in front of the TV late Sunday night and happened to come across another parade in Sydney, this time the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

This is an annual event in Sydney which attracts tens if not hundreds of thousands of people from Australia and abroad, to either participate in the parade or to simply be a spectator.

Now in terms of comparison, the Margi Gras is all about pride, and interestingly I noticed the same sense of pride amongst the marchers in the Mardi Gras as in the week prior with the Chinese.

Apart from that, I also noticed that the Mardi Gras seemed to have an over-representation of Asian and Chinese marchers, presumably because they were gay.

Now I have often heard amongst Chinese women their belief that many Chinese men are "too feminine", but I have rarely experienced this myself. What I did notice at the Margi Gras however was that almost all the gay asians marching were feminine, as opposed to all other marchers. At least this is how it seemed to me.

I was also surprised at the number of asian lesbians, and how they were also almost all feminine in appearance as well. In contrast amongst other races, there was a visible proportian of butch lesbians as well.

At the end of the day however this was just an interesting little distraction for me that I came across while channel surfing on a Sunday night at home.

However as I was watching, my wife walked into the room.

She first seemed excited thinking it was a reply of the Chinese parade. When I explained what this march was about, her mood changed, and she then began a tirade of commentary, using many profanities that I cannot type on this blog, as an expression of her complete distaste and hatred for this lifestyle.

Knowing my wife as I do I did not enter into a debate with her, but it is a given that she and I have many diametrically opposed social views, and discussion or debate will not change this.

My wife did however make a comment which caught me by surprise, and lead me to ponder how we would both react in the event that our child turned out to be gay one day.

What I found so surprising was my wife's insistenance that if I son was ever gay, that she would never associate with him again, and that she would likely commit suicide.

I responded by saying that given that its her only child, whom she loves more than life itself, that she will probably learn to live with it, as most parents do, for the sake of her child.

Well, I should know better than to engage in these kind of discussions with my wife, and as expected my wife began directing her spitefullness towards me, suggesting that I could be sending sub-concious signals to our son that it is okay to be gay.

She ended the conversation by saying that if our son turned out to be gay, she would be blaming me because she thinks my views are a bad influence on him.

Hmm?!

Chinese Relations

I read a very interesting article in the newspaper today claiming that there is a growing number of Chinese men who believe that they have contracted HIV while visiting a prostitute.

According to the medical authorities, this is a psychological issue rather than a medical one, as none of the men tested had HIV or any other related illness.

An interesting reference was made that the symptoms experienced may be the result of the guilt associated with visiting a prostitute.

Its an interesting hypothesis which I don't necesserily buy, but the news article did trigger off memories for me of an association between Chinese women and Prostitution that I had been subjected to, unfortunately on too many ocassions, when I first started dating my wife.

Many years ago when I first started dating my wife, I have been on the wrong end of sarcastic and sometimes jokular wisecracks about the nature of my relationship.

These comments, which were at first a nuisance but later became a real irritation, included things like:

• Did you pick her up from the brothel?
• How much does it cost you for a happy ending? (aparently a term for paid sex)
• How much does she cost per hour?

.............well, you get the picture.

These comments came exclusively from male colleagues, including doctors, nurses and other medical professionals.

What I was not aware of at the time, but I learned the hard way, was that the Chinese had earned a reputation for monopolising prostitution, at least in Sydney.

After I became quite annoyned by one comment, my colleague, by way of explanation, showed me the personal ads section of the local community newspaper, and it seemed that up to 90% of all the ads for prostitutes were for "Asians" or "Chinese".

Not quite the reputation one would be proud of.

Now given my line of work, I have come into contact with prostitutes from time to time, due to their addictions. I have never however knowingly come into contact with a Chinese prostitute, and certainly not in my line of work.

So I suspect that unlike Australian-born prostitutes who live that life primarily because of their drug addiction, Chinese born prostitutes see it merely as a business, just another way of making money.

Now given my conservative Protestant upbringing, I don't know which is worse, but my heart tells me that at least a drug addict has no real control over their life.