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By Andrew Crosthwaite
People often ask me what it’s like to be a foreigner married to a Taiwanese girl. They’re curious, I guess, about a close relationship between people from such different backgrounds and cultures. But if I give a simple answer like: “It’s great,” more often than not I’ll be met with a disbelieving: “Really?” People expect that, coming from two very different cultures, our marriage must have lots of problems. The look of eager expectation that’s usually on their faces shows how ready they are to revel, not altogether privately, in whatever difficulties we might have.
Their assumption, that a marriage like ours must have more problems than one between two people from the same country, appears to make sense. All couples deal with a variety of troubles, but we also face the added burdens of different cultures, educations and first languages. Thinking about it like that, it’s probably a wonder to some people that we ever get through the day.
This idea, though, is based on a blinkered outlook. It fails to take into account that our marriage doesn’t have all the same problems as other married couples precisely because it’s cross-cultural. Take, for example, our relations with each other’s families. I’ve heard many stories from Taiwanese women complaining about their in-laws. Often they live with their husbands’ parents and, due to pressure (coming largely from their mother-in-laws), are unable to live their own lives, or raise their children, as they choose.
My wife doesn’t have that problem—not in the least because we live several thousand miles from my parents. And even if we didn’t, English men who always do what their mothers want are derided as “mummy’s boys”. As for me, I get in-laws who are extremely helpful and supportive, but who also accept that their daughter has left their family and don’t try to interfere too much with how we run our lives.
There’s also another very positive side of being married to a woman from a different country. It doesn’t suit everyone, but I enjoy being with a person whose upbringing and experiences give her a very different take on life from my own. Provided you keep an open mind a different opinion will help you to understand the world more fully. To put it simply, a cross-cultural marriage, just like any other marriage, has both good and bad points. However, this doesn’t always answer a question that casts me in the role of Englishman or foreigner, and my wife simply as a Taiwanese girl.
Aren’t we more than that? What do those labels mean anyway? A normal Englishman could be stoic, polite, and reserved, or he could be a drunken lout. A typical Taiwanese girl could be one who grows up as a dutiful daughter before marrying and becoming a dutiful wife. She could be a girl who thinks only of shopping and cosmetics, or she could be an educated career woman. Even when dealing in stereotypes, labels that are based purely on nationality have very little meaning.
There’s also the fact that none of these stereotypes or generalizations accurately describes either myself, or my wife. Indeed I doubt they could ever fully describe any real person. Real people (even shallow people), are not one-sided. Rather, their personalities are made up of a range of characteristics and influences. And, more and more in this shrinking world of ours, the influences that help to build our characters come from cultures other than the culture we were born into. In reality there is no such thing as “a foreigner” or “a Taiwanese girl”. These words have little genuine meaning when applied to individuals.
The question “What’s it like to be a foreigner married to a Taiwanese girl?” is one that I just can’t answer. Underneath our nationalities, beyond our nationalities, above, beside, and around our nationalities, we are just two people with deep and complex personalities. We are not “a foreigner and a Taiwanese girl”.
The question irritates and saddens me because the people who ask (some of whom have known me for a long time), are people who still haven’t gotten past the generalizations. They are people who still can’t see my wife and me for who we are—a pair of ordinary, but unique, people.
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