1. “Your marriage must be so much harder, having to communicate across language and culture.”
Marriage is hard because you have to forgive. Forgiving in any language is equally difficult and equally rewarding. International marriages do have unique challenges because of our different backgrounds, but those challenges are just different than non-international marriages, not more difficult.
2. “So, do you think Taiwanese guys are good looking?”
Well, I think my Taiwanese guy is handsome. Some Taiwanese people will ask me what’s wrong with white guys. Nothing is wrong with them. It’s just that I happened to meet and fall in love with a pretty amazing Taiwanese guy.
3. “You’re not really Taiwanese because your husband is American.”
I am not any less Taiwanese because I married an American. Marriage and culture are not a zero-sum game. I do not reduce myself to half a person in order to join with my husband. We are two whole selves committing to one another. Both of us bring the entire vibrant culture from which we come from into our marriage. Yes, we do have to make compromises and difficult decisions in areas where our cultures conflict but those choices do not reduce our Taiwanese-ness, or American-ness, they help us mature.
4. “Do you hang out with other international couples?”
It is fun to hang out with other culturally-mixed couples. If we ever double date with another couple, it’s confusing who goes with whom because we instinctively pair off the similar looking ones. However, I don’t think I’ve ever hung out with another couple because they were also internationally married — we’ve hung out because we like them. And we certainly like all kinds of other couples, international or not. Also, we like hanging out with singles, divorcees, unmarried partners, other human beings in general. The ones we like.
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Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s