"You can hurt your long-term partner more deeply than you ever imagined is possible," writes Anne Anlin Cheng. "The enveloping aura that cushioned you has thinned out, become concentrated, now more like an invisible thread that runs between the two of you." Image via Getty
Meeting my husband was an event: a singular happening with reverberating waves. He arrived like a stranger whom I should never have known but who somehow fit into a space that I didn’t know was there. It seems like a miracle that we met at all. We moved in different circles—me in academia, he in tech—and I was at a very low point in my life at the time. I was waiting for a divorce to finalize and hardly thought I was in the mental or emotional place to meet someone. Yet somehow, despite my guardedness, in spite of his unlikeliness, I knew early on that I could put my whole life in his hands. My very critical mother likes to say of my meeting my husband: “You fell flat on your face and found gold.”
Being married means you have seen each other at your most unglorious. My husband has held me through a miscarriage, a scary amnesiac episode, chemo-induced neuropathy. Yet somehow, in spite of being my miracle ally, sometimes in public we go flat and become the White Man and his Asian Wife. This might happen at a dinner party, for example. My husband is being his easy, talkative self, regaling everyone with a description of some invention he concocted in our garage, while I quietly bask in the haven his sociability affords me, and suddenly, by some real or imagined glance, I will be jolted into alertness: we must look like the typical loud white man and his silent Asian wife. And I will prod myself to say something, anything, to not be that.
It’s more devastating when this happens when we are alone. One day he noticed the term “racial capital” in the title of the book I was reading. Not being an academic, he hadn’t encountered the phrase before. He asked whether the author meant someone who plays the race card, using their racial identity as a form of currency. I cringed. What a white thing to say. Centuries of white people and institutions had profited from, made capital out of, nonwhite persons and bodies, and yet he assumes the “capital” here belongs to the person of color?
For all our closeness there’s an irreducible kernel of difference, of otherness, between us.
To be fair, the phrase is academic jargon and not self-explanatory. My husband was simply trying to understand an unfamiliar expression in terms of more familiar ones, and he grew up around people for whom “the race card” was just another phrase. But to me, it was upsetting. In what peculiar sort of game can racial difference constitute a winning hand? Reappearing with the mean caprice of a Joker, the race card brings with it a host of revealing questions about the perverse value and perception of race and race matters in America. How else could the terrible wounds of race in this country come to be euphemized as a playing card, a metaphor that materializes race as an object that can be dealt out, withheld, or trumped? The fact is, one can only play the race card when one has already been excluded from playing any of the games that matter. Holding a full deck means being rich with disadvantages.
But how do I say all of this in the moment, without becoming the Lecturing Professor? So at the time I was impatient and angry but mute, trying to avoid a nonproductive fight, where I felt injured and he felt unfairly attacked for inquiring into a book I’m reading.
Sometimes I look at my husband and wonder whether he knows to whom he is married.
Yet how could it be otherwise? He grew up a white man in a middle-class family in the middle of white America. His family valued individuality, self-reliance, and their rights to this land. I came from halfway across the world. I’d learned English as a second language, and my parents thought they could keep their children safe by impressing upon us our unbelonging. Different forms of love: his parents pushed him out of the nest, for his own good and expansion, while mine wanted to keep my brother and me small, tucked in the shadow of their wingspan, even at the price of our maturity, because they had moved us all to an unpredictable place without a safety net. They never did acquire the American ambitions of what would come to be known as “Tiger parenting.” They just wanted us to survive.
I sometimes dread having conversations with my husband about race. What starts out innocently enough—a chat about a coworker, hiring practices, a movie plot—can suddenly turn sour. During the 2016 election, I read about long-married couples filing for divorce because one spouse was a Democrat and the other a Republican. I found such news both shocking and believable. My husband and I are on the same side of the political aisle, and still, the acrimony of American racial reckoning stings us.
For all our closeness there’s an irreducible kernel of difference, of otherness, between us. It erupts like bad weather. The tangible and intangible patterns of training and assumption sneak in, shape an utterance or a gesture, and take on a life of their own. Over the accretion of dailiness and years, these little atmospheric beasts pluck at the surface of our marriage with indifferent appetite.
When I was young I thought that with concerted effort and hard work I could transcend labels that didn’t define me. I didn’t think of myself as a “woman of color.” That belonged to victims, not me. Now I wish my husband could see that my not-at-homeness is part of who I am and not a matter of choice.
Sometimes I can’t believe how politics, a mirage wielded by mostly invidious, power-grabbing individuals, could contaminate my most real, weighted, and cherished relationship with the person with whom I’ve built the only life that matters to me. I suspect that my husband is often hurt that I “allow” external things—world events, intellectual ideas, things that don’t have anything to do with us—to impact my mood and inflect our private interactions. Yet I also know that, in our world, I live as an unavoidably racialized person. Questions of racial difference, of how people of Asian descent are seen and treated in this country, past and present, follow me and will most likely follow our children.
In a conversation after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, I fretted about Taiwan, which is Mainland China’s Ukraine. My husband, to comfort me, said the wrong thing: “Stop tying yourself up in knots. Does it matter what happens to Taiwan? You don’t have any family there anymore.”
I don’t know how the man who buttons my winter coat on days when the joints of my fingers are inflamed or who, to this day, always reaches out to take what I am carrying, could also be the man who thinks I wouldn’t care about the country from which I came. I was dumbfounded, appalled, by his crisp, unmelancholic ability to let things like the past go. (Should he ever stop loving me, would he let go of me with equal ruthlessness?) I also realized that there is a huge part of my life about which he knows next to nothing and has little curiosity about. He doesn’t care much about my past. (Isn’t that part of his charm, part of what I fell for?) From his point of view, I’ve lived three quarters of my life as an American citizen. I’m a professor of American literature and culture, for goodness’ sake. I haven’t gone back to Taiwan since he and I met. Why would he think I have attachments there?
Nothing in the world feels worse than thinking you have to protect your child from your spouse.
Yet those ten-plus years of my life as a child in Taiwan, chunks of which are blurry even to me, nonetheless form the invisible textures of my being. In talking about the costs of upward mobility—and, I would add, assimilation—writer Jennifer Morton uses the term “ethical goods” to name the ineffable, at-risk values of affective bonds with family, community, and a sense of the past that make up our sense of who we are. Taiwan is that invisible stock for me: a remembrance of rootedness, of never questioning where I was, of a single me supported by a firm net of grandparents, aunts, great-aunts, and cousins.
My husband is a presentist, living only in the moment. He is always moving forward and doesn’t allow the past to impede him. It’s part of his strength, his recovery system. But increasingly I experience myself as a haunted person, pulled backwards toward what I can no longer see.
The ceaseless sounds of the city below our balcony, the tinny feel of the handle on the pail my brother and I used to carry dumpling soup from the street vendor, my grandparents’ stone house in Tainan, the little red balls bouncing on top of water jets in front of the new amusement park outside of Taipei, the queer feelings I got walking among the strange rock formations at Yehliu Geopark, my mother’s hand around mine as we strolled down the street, the sight of my father waiting for me at the school gate: when I die, that world, the Taiwan that is only mine to remember, will disappear too.
Twenty years into our marriage and on the cusp of becoming empty nesters, it hit me that almost all of my worst fights with my husband have circled around issues relating to our children.
How is it I never noticed this before? This realization is shocking because we have in fact raised two extraordinarily wonderful people. Our children are kind, empathetic, smart, creative, affectionate—even as teenagers. If there is one thing we as a couple are good at, it is parenting. Yet this joint project that has preoccupied us for most of our marriage has taken a tremendous toll.
An early, traumatic moment: when he insisted on Ferberizing our two-month-old colicky baby and my hair grew white from her inconsolable, frenetic cries. I think I hated my husband then.
The fissure grew over the years: a conversation about “coddling” turns into a vortex; a debate about whether we could allow a child to walk the 2.6 miles between the middle school and our home becomes a contest of will and, for me, an anxiety pit; a decision about summer school versus summer jobs becomes a referendum on our core values. What’s at stake in these skirmishes? Nothing less than our children’s moral character and their future ability to survive in the world.
Nothing in the world feels worse than thinking you have to protect your child from your spouse, to choose between betraying your partner or your responsibility toward your children.
He almost never pampers the kids. He is eager for them to grow up, to be self-sufficient and resourceful. I want to cherish and safeguard their already-too-short childhood. He thinks risks breed courage; I think security enables confidence. Maybe this is simply a gender gap, typical father-is-from-Mars and mother-is-from-Venus stuff. But I can’t help but think there’s a cultural schism here, too, which is to say a racial difference. His family feels very white to me, with their afternoon cocktails and DIY attitude, while my family feels very Asian, with our ever-present family obligations and extended social duties.
His childhood was filled with house-painting, oil changes, deck building, summer jobs; my childhood circled around my sole responsibility, schoolwork. He grew up knowing that, after college, he was on his own, sink or swim. I grew up with parents who, even after I was a full-grown, gainfully employed adult, would leave money on my dresser—“for parking”—after their visits. Trying to pay for a meal for my parents is like battling two indignant generals. His parents sit back and let him, the independent adult, pay.
Having my parenting instincts questioned by my husband feels so horrible because it feels like my parents have been found wanting. When my husband wanted to train our babies to “self-soothe” (which I think is just delusional, because if babies could self-soothe, there wouldn’t be lullabies in every language—or Dutailier gliders) or when he feared that our kids might become “spoiled” or “quitters,” I heard an implicit criticism of how I was raised.
I heard, too, my father-in-law, not the charming man he is to me but the brutal parent he was to my husband. He was the kind of father who, on a dead-cold January day in Maryland, sent his young teenage son out in a small skiff in the middle of a lake to see whether he could handle himself. Over the years my husband and his siblings have developed excellent ducking mechanisms. As children they fought not to sit where their father’s arm could reach, be it in the car or at the dining table. My husband would tell you himself that the coldest and most miserable times of his life were all spent in the company of his father. Yet I also hear in his voice a note of pride, for having survived, and having had a father who instilled in him hard-earned but valuable lessons about strength and fortitude.
Is what I call my husband’s “presentism” a reflection of the American can-do, never-look-back spirit or a willful erasure of a grueling childhood? Can I separate the two?
What does it mean, anyway, for me to say that race interferes in our marriage? To recognize this is to say everything and nothing. I’m a scholar of race, but it’s still challenging to parse how race lives in the pockets of everyday intimacies. I sometimes mentally call his family “WASPy,” but that’s an inaccurate shorthand for the peculiar blend of public and private histories, their manifestations and disguises. My husband grew up hardly ever seeing blacks, Asians, or foreigners. Unless, of course, you’re talking about his own mother, a Latvian refugee who came to the United States at age eleven, right around the same age I was when my family emigrated. Unlike my family, who came to the States relatively comfortably, my mother-in-law’s family had wandered rootlessly across Europe for several years in the wake of World War II, fleeing German and then Russian armies before making their way to the United States under a refugee sponsorship program. Her family, children included, worked for three years on a Virginia farm to repay their passage. Now, at eighty-two, my mother-in-law is independent, fiercely loyal, and capable of making everything by hand, from curtains to car seat upholstery. She thinks of America as a land of salvation and is susceptible to conservative fearmongering about “immigrant hordes” at the border. She doesn’t see the dissonance.
My family, too, practiced its own versions of forgetfulness. My father came to America and didn’t look back. He did not own a single photo of himself as a child. I learned from my mother that his own father had died, from something penicillin might have prevented, right around the time of his birth and that his mother, a young, indigent widow, swayed by some fortune teller, believed that her infant son was the jinx, the cause of her husband’s death. I think that was why my dad became a doctor against his mother’s wishes (she didn’t want to have to find the means to pay for it). My dad pretty much raised himself and then put himself through med school, subsisting on a diet of rice balls with dried vegetables. In America, my father dutifully sent money home to his mother every month for over two decades, in envelopes into which his wife would insert letters on his behalf. He never set foot in Taiwan again.
After my last grandparent died, I never went back to Taiwan either. My Mandarin and Taiwanese have deteriorated to an embarrassing degree. Neither of my children speak Chinese, and neither visited Taiwan growing up. (My fault.) My success as an assimilated person depended a great deal on forms of forgetting that I’ve only now come to see. I said I was haunted by history, which is not the same as living with it. History has been a kind of silent creek running in the background of my daily life; only recently has that past risen to meet me like a tidal wave.
Just when I think I’ve done the hard work of acknowledging that we as a couple, for all our shiny specialness and individuality, are not immune to the vagaries of politics or ideology, just when I’ve come to accept that large, impersonal social forces like race can color our most intimate and mundane interactions, the view fractures yet again like a kaleidoscope. The details, blown up and held close to the eye, become pixelated, at once larger and harder to discern, for “race” encompasses so much: histories (ours and not our own) that touch us, gender disparities, that vague and potent thing called culture, immigration and nationhood, family romance and family idiosyncrasies, familiar plots and unpredictable outcomes.
You can hurt your long-term partner more deeply than you ever imagined is possible.
It is common to hear that we all end up marrying our parents, or at least that we’re doomed to turn our loved ones into avatars of our parental units. My husband is as different from my dad as you can imagine. One is a relatively traditional Taiwanese man who reserved his hands only for surgery, while the other is an American DIY guy who loves nothing better than getting oil and dirt under his nails. One is reticent, the other brash; one broods, the other explodes . . . there are countless ways in which they differ. Yet both my dad and my husband are survivors of paternal losses. My dad hardly knew his father, and my husband knew too well his father’s oppressiveness. Both sons grew up and went on to become good family men who put their families first and bore their private pains and discomforts silently and impassively: Chinese and American masculinities with different faces miming each other.
My husband tells me he has long since forgiven his father. I’m glad, but I don’t trust that he has fully come to terms with the aftershocks. The child in him—the child he believes he’s left behind—peeks out from time to time. When his retired father picked up remote-controlled airplanes as a hobby, my husband built his own planes in order to help his father understand the mechanics. When his father put up a bluebird house, my husband did the same in our yard, and built snake baffles for them both.
When I see his desire to please his father, I ache for the boy who disappeared. When I hear him telling our son not to cry, especially in front of others, every cell in my body seizes up with anxious protest. No, no, we’re not going to teach our son to hide or repress his feelings; we’re not going to teach him shame and toxic masculinity!
When I overhear my husband talking to our daughter about the damage currently being done to Roe v. Wade and its profound implications for our society and her future, I wonder why I ever doubted his parenting instinct. But when I see him pressing our son to go on the roller coaster at the county fair, I’m filled with impotent rage and wonder how such a smart person could be so blind.
Our views about childhood itself are so vastly different. When people praise our well-behaved children, my husband likes to say that we discipline our kids to make our own lives easier. I usually let the statement lie because it frankly sounds like he’s speaking a foreign language to me. Since when is our convenience even a consideration when it comes to kids? My father, the OB-GYN, believed that children’s needs must take precedence over all adult priorities: in his company, every adult activity must come to a halt should any child in the vicinity need to sleep or eat.
Yet my sentimentality about my golden childhood—about myself as a child—breeds its own selective memories too. I had two fathers. The one who pulled me behind a closed door to wink at me while my mom expected him to punish me and who allowed me to scamper up and down in his office as he talked to patients even as my mom gestured frantically by the door for me to get out. Then there was the father of my teenage years in America: quiet, somber, not prone to silliness, impatient, short-tempered. My father wasn’t someone who yelled or raged, but the dark cloud would descend on him, sucking all the air out of the house. That was when my job would begin: I would top the tightness in my chest with cheerfulness, cajole him with jokes and silly antics, perform cuteness even when I was already too old, because sometimes that worked, sometimes I could tease him out of that darkness. That was my version of ducking.
Nothing makes my husband more uncomfortable than when I’m being cutesy and childlike, which, unfortunately, is how I take cover. You see the problem.
We come to our children hoping to correct the mistakes of our parents and our own shortcomings, but marriage and parenthood throw us against the rocks of our worst flaws. Our children, I’d like to think, benefited from our differences and our compromises, and certainly neither of us would have sacrificed our chance at parenthood even if we had known that part of our precious relationship with one another would be the price. I only wish this shared project, this joint and dear investment that we wouldn’t have taken on if it weren’t for the other, hadn’t cost us so much, at times making us strangers to one another.
You can hurt your long-term partner more deeply than you ever imagined is possible. You are prey to the tiniest tremor in each other’s moods. You get insanely angry at your partner for not throwing you a lifeline without realizing the other is also drowning. The stakes of all petty things are crazy high because these small, ordinary things are the very fiber of a life you have labored to build together, strand by strand. The enveloping aura that cushioned you has thinned out, become concentrated, now more like an invisible thread that runs between the two of you.
Marriage is an exercise in the faith of narrative progress.
Whether out of a sense of belonging or unbelonging, my husband and I have both bought into the myth of American progress. Doing so has enabled us to accomplish much, but it has also made us ungenerous when one of us stumbles. Our intense, seemingly one-off arguments unlock larger systems of meaning: family, systems of race and culture, a wide field of interconnected structures that we can barely perceive but are always sounding. If we’re lucky, we love and fight one another, a small huddle that absorbs the rumbling fields all around us.
Marriage is an exercise in the faith of narrative progress. Its benchmarks—buy a house, have children, see those children through their own life stages, work hard to excel, work hard to retire—train your gaze forward, orienting you toward the next goal as if there were a trophy to be had at the finish line. The popular imagination likes to represent marriage as a long game with a deferred reward program, from the mere paper earned by the first anniversary to the aspirational gold of the mostly impossible fiftieth. But there is no trophy at the end. I read somewhere that there is no happy ending to a marriage: you either split up or one of you dies. I don’t, however, take this insight in a maudlin way. There is no forever. We delve into each moment full on, in joy or in angst, because that is our moment. Forever is now.
Last week we took our teenage son to an ice cream shop after dinner to celebrate the beginning of summer. The adults were not planning to partake. My husband has been on a carb-free diet for almost a year. Yes, my crazily strong-willed husband has not had a trace of sugar or a sliver of pasta in months. Me, I was just trying to be good for the night. My son, knowing my weakness, asked me, are you sure you don’t want anything? I told him that I would have a scoop if they had Tax Crunch, coffee ice cream with almonds and a rich chocolate ribbon that runs through it. It’s my favorite from this shop, and they only offer it once a year for a brief period in the middle of April. This was June, so I knew I would be spared this indulgence. As we waited in line for the lone, harried server, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my husband cross the store to peer into the mini fridge where they sold pre-packaged pints. Anyone would think he was checking out the offering out of vicarious desire, letting his eyes feast on what he was denying himself, but I knew that he was looking to see if there might possibly be a tub of Tax Crunch left in there.
I think of all the hundreds of silent, invisible things he does for me and vice versa. When he comes back to the line, I put my hand in his, like I always do. And, just like that, the thread glimmers.
New perspectives, enduring writing. Join a conversation 200 years in the making. Subscribe to our print journal and receive four beautiful issues per year.
New perspectives, enduring writing. Join a conversation 200 years in the making. Subscribe to our print journal and receive four beautiful issues per year.
