Part 1 of My Experience Dating a Chinese Family
As I mentioned, family played a major role in how we navigated the course of our relationship, basically it felt like we were using the old folded up map that my dad kept in the glovebox. For the first two years of our relationship, I didn’t get to know her family, mainly her parents, very well for a variety of reasons. To touch on this, stereotypes and traditional values were the driving factor for me not having a chance to meet and interact with my now soon to be in-laws. If you have friends of different races and cultures, especially ones that are very traditional in those cultures you may have seen or heard of a relationship racial hierarchy for whom a parent deems are acceptable for their children to date. Until I experienced this for myself, I believed the hierarchy was just something that my friends, even of different races, were making up. The hierarchy takes in factors of ethnicity, race, culture, and skin tone. Generally what was describe among my Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese friends is that their parents want them to date, someone of the same ethnicity, if that doesn’t pan out then someone of the same race, and so on down the line. The further down the line and the darker the skin tone would equate to more disrespect for the child and more dislike for the significant other. Take into my account of being multiracial (Caribbean and Caucasian) and having light brown skin, I was closer to the bottom of the hierarchy.
As I mentioned, family played a major role in how we navigated the course of our relationship, basically it felt like we were using the old folded up map that my dad kept in the glovebox. For the first two years of our relationship, I didn’t get to know her family, mainly her parents, very well for a variety of reasons. To touch on this, stereotypes and traditional values were the driving factor for me not having a chance to meet and interact with my now soon to be in-laws. If you have friends of different races and cultures, especially ones that are very traditional in those cultures you may have seen or heard of a relationship racial hierarchy for whom a parent deems are acceptable for their children to date. Until I experienced this for myself, I believed the hierarchy was just something that my friends, even of different races, were making up. The hierarchy takes in factors of ethnicity, race, culture, and skin tone. Generally what was describe among my Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese friends is that their parents want them to date, someone of the same ethnicity, if that doesn’t pan out then someone of the same race, and so on down the line. The further down the line and the darker the skin tone would equate to more disrespect for the child and more dislike for the significant other. Take into my account of being multiracial (Caribbean and Caucasian) and having light brown skin, I was closer to the bottom of the hierarchy.
Having mentioned that Lissa is very close to her family brings in the struggle of introducing me without upsetting the delicate balance of her family life. Lissa did not want to upset her parents or deal with the grief that would come along with introducing her new boyfriend to them. On the other side, she did not want to alienate me or put me in a difficult situation with her parents. The first year seemed to go by without incident but it was year two and three that I could sense the wear and tear. There were many nights when I could overhear arguments on the phone between Lissa and her mom; I could only assume they were arguing about me. Many of these arguments would lead to tears and solemnness. To say “the struggle is real”, would be an understatement. How do you console someone when you are directly and indirectly the cause of the issue? Not to take away anything from the struggle that Lissa was going through but my own internal struggle and plight were surmounting at the same time. I constantly sat there wondering if I wanted to stay in this situation and if I was really ready to have this be a part of my life forever. How do you find the inner resolve to say “I have to fight on because the relationship is worth it, yet I feel I’m in a bad situation, I’m disliked by my girlfriend’s parents because of a stereotype, and I don’t feel like I’m getting enough reassurances”?
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