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lost in shanghai
But times have changed. Back then, the economic disparity between a
Shanghai local and a Western foreigner was huge. In 1997, my husband
earned nearly fifty times the salary of what a typical white-collar
Chinese “local” manager earned. Not only that, he was supplied
with a chauffeured Mercedes, and a travel allowance that constituted
more than five times a typical worker’s annual salary. I could
see the appeal he would have had for a pretty, local girl earning less
than 800 RMB a month: the fastest way up the economic scale was to land
a white, foreign guy like him. And because I looked "local"
to the locals, I too was grouped in this category of ambitious ladies
who had no national or cultural allegiances to their own kind, but were
practical money-grubbers who believed that a foreign salary and a foreign
passport was the speediest way to get themselves out of an unpromising
economic situation.
Now the economic disparity is no longer so visually obvious, the resentment
in Shanghai has waned somewhat. And there are many more mixed marriages
going in both directions. I am beginning to see many more Chinese men
with foreign wives. Furthermore, it is no longer obvious who is the
richer of the two—is it the foreigner or the Chinese? Eleven years
ago, my husband used to joke with his colleagues and tell them that
he only married me for the U.S. Greencard. It used to irritate me, but
I eventually understood why he went around saying this: he wanted to
inform them that I wasn’t one of those economically opportunistic
girls.
But the real challenge of mixed marriages is not about marrying up or
marrying outside the culture. It is about reconciling the differences.
Whether it is a mixed-culture marriage or a mixed-language marriage
or a mixed-nationality marriage, all mixed marriages have the additional
problem of two parties who have to bridge a gap that people who marry
within the "blood" may not necessarily have to face: misunderstanding
what that other person really is.
In the old days, especially in traditional Asian cultures, most young people married the man or the woman that family members would introduce them to. The logic behind this tradition was that marriage was an institution, and an institution integrating two families and one had to be very circumspect in integrating a bride or a groom into one’s family. The assumption was that one’s own family best understood the young person’s needs and personality and would pick the best marital candidate for that person. After all, if you are going to spend the rest of your life with someone, it had better be someone who was similar to you in culture and background. In addition, love didn’t matter; what did matter was the suitability of the groom or the bride to the family’s social and economic needs. The idea was that love was ephemeral, but social suitability and similar values would sustain the marriage for the rest of the couple’s lives. But times have changed, and love is now one of the most compelling reason for marrying, for both the young and the old. Still, there is something to be said about the old tradition: falling in love is one thing, but spending possibly the rest of one’s life with another person is a different matter. Eventually, as the boredom and the tedium of daily life settles in, life is beset by more unexciting questions such as: Does he come home for dinner? Is he making enough money? Does he want babies? Is he a good father? Or what I would conclude as simply: does his value system concur with mine?
The reason mixed marriages are difficult is that the ‘mixing’ adds an unknown and unpredictable wild card; it is difficult enough for men and women to communicate clearly in the first place, but then add in the language differences, cultural differences, and maybe ethnic or religious differences, the capacity for misunderstanding becomes infinite. When people ask me, “Are your children ‘hunxue’?” I think what they’re really asking me is: “What is it like? What is it like to marry someone outside your race/culture/language/etc.?” Of course, they don’t quite realize that although I look “local” and my husband looks “foreign,” we are actually more similar than we seem.
Many mixed-marriages have a built-in cultural blind spots that take
a long time to unravel: just because a person seem acceptable in China
doesn’t mean that he or she is acceptable in the U.K. or the U.S.
There is always a huge cultural margin of error in evaluating a marital
candidate from another culture because there isn’t a group of
people—either colleagues or family members--vetting him: how do
you really know that he is who he says he is?
Just because my husband made 50 times a local salary 11 years ago didn’t
mean that he was rich. In the U.K. or in Hong Kong, he was merely a
gainfully-employed corporate executive, and his salary respectably middle-class;
but for the local Shanghai girls working in the same office building,
he was one of the richest people they had ever met.
I’ve seen dynamic and ambitious Shanghai women marry American guys, immigrate to the U.S., only to discover that they are losers in their home country, and had never had a girlfriend before. Not only that, the wealthy, glamorous U.S. life that these women had dreamed about turned out to be a dull, suburban existence in the Midwestern cornbelt, decidedly a step down from the cosmopolitan Shanghai lifestyle. I know a Spanish woman who married an American man, and didn’t even realize that he was gay, because she mistook his aloofness and frigidity as something that must be “American.” And one Greek man told me, “Greek men have many girlfriends even after they are married because they are weak; Greek women understand this and they make up for it by being the boss at home.” But what happens when that Greek guy marries an English girl, who doesn’t understand that particular Greek marital contract?
Well, for the English girl who believes in marrying only one guy for the rest of her life, and believes faithfulness is part of that package, she will find herself unequipped to deal with that Greek husband who thinks it is normal to flaunt his girlfriends publicly. And who will tell her? Surely, not her English girlfriends.
But in truth, all marriages, mixed or not-mixed, are an exploration of the unknown. What happens when certain things that you assumed were fixed attributes about the other person turn out to be no longer true? What happens when that investment banker with a good future turns out to have a 7-year run of unemployment and decides to be an artist for the rest of his life? What happens when the person you married cannot bear children? What happens when his or her idea of a stable life and marriage does not correspond to yours? As the years tick by, and marriages meet their fair share of conflicts, the person you married will slowly transform, and whether they will transform for better or worse, only time will tell.
There is something to be said about marrying the man or the woman that your parents, relatives and colleagues set you up with: they know the history of the person that you are being introduced to; they know his or her family and educational background; and they may also know his medical history and personality quirks.
The real truth is that any marriage is a gamble, and any
act of linking oneself permanently and sometimes, irrevocably, with
someone else and locking in that deal by producing children, is a bold
act. So when you do find someone and decide to get married, remember
that you may end up spending the rest of your life wondering: just what
did I get myself into?