Category: Family

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Family Reflections

Baby steps for the new year

So far with my parents, I have decided to not bring up the topic of our wedding, which I will refer to in this blog as The Elephant In The Room (TEITR). It’s a shame really, as the planning stages for TEITR are almost as exciting and fun as the eventual day will be, and I have a strong desire to share our discoveries with them. But I have made a firm decision to not bring things up with them, since Dont Ask, Don’t Tell seems to be their policy. I know this will deepen the rift between us, but I need them to show some interest, and by not bringing it up, it may force them to show interest (if there is any on their part).

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is what they told me years ago when I first came out to them. They don’t deny the fact that I am gay and that I will not be changing my orientation (no matter how hard they have pleaded in the past for me to at least “experiment”). But they were so fearful of the potential shame within their small community of extended relatives and friends, that they pleaded for me to not tell anyone. They rationalized that since Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was good enough for President Clinton’s policy for the U.S. military, it was good enough for our family.

I of course disagreed. Yet I was torn between honoring my parents’ wishes, which is what a good Asian kid is trained to do from day one, and to being honest and true to myself and others, which is what being an independent adult and member of human society is all about. So eventually we reached a detente. I would live my life as I see fit as long as no one they knew found out about my “delicate situation”. This was easy when I lived 2,700 miles away from them in Boston. And even easier still when I moved to London, which is 5,400 miles away from San Francisco. And whenever I was back in San Francisco, or with any relatives, I would just be their “batchelor” son who was too busy with school or work to settle down. So I lied to others on their behalf, despite the values they taught me about honesty.

This arrangement worked, but not when my ex traveled to SF with me, which he did with every other visit. There was one time when, after we arrived at the airport, we were whisked into the house. I didn’t even notice it at first, until it dawned on me later that it was to prevent my grandfather or aunt’s family (who lived only 3 blocks away) from seeing my ex. My revelation happened the day after, when we were invited to have dinner with my aunt’s family. But it was of course the “royal” we, which did not include my ex. He was instead asked to stay home. My mom at least bought some takeout for him and brought him back a doggy bag. And the irony is not lost–he was treated the way that I am being treated now…on the one hand like a dog, and on the other hand like a dirty little family secret.

But the odd thing is that it was not the first time my ex was out in SF with me, and not the first time the he would have met my extended family. In fact he had met them just a year before, when he was “a friend” visiting with me from Boston. But my folks didn’t want my extended family meeting my ex twice in a row, which would have “raised suspicions”.

This type of arrangement of course also creates a rift between me and my extended family. They will never get to see the full extension of who I am, only whatever facade I have created for them on my parents’ behalf. And I will always be left torn with having to leave significant parts of my life out of conversation, and to have to pretend to be something I’m not to many people who are otherwise close to me. And then there are the wider number of extended relatives to whom I have not allowed myself to get too close because of this arrangement. In many ways, it has become my parents’ version of Star Trek’s prime directive.

But in this day and age of Facebook, the distances between me and my family mean nothing when everything is just a click away. And that’s why I was so surprised to receive this message from my dad on Facebook on New Year’s Day:

“Happy New Year ! Donny and Chris, We hope you’ve had a good year , and We wish you the best 2012.”
 
This is the first time they have acknowledged us as a couple…and in a forum as public as Facebook. I don’t know what security settings he has in place on his account, but most of his Facebook friends are relatives, who would be able to see his post. Are they now scratching their heads wondering who this “Chris” is? Are those Singaporean relatives who had met Chris now finally putting two-and-two together? Is my dad unsure about how public Facebook can be, or was this an active decision to start being more public about the real me and to stop hiding behind facades? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions yet.
 
But what I will do is to acknowledge this event as an important baby step towards fully accepting me and Chris into their lives. These were only a few words, perhaps written in haste on New Year’s Day, but they are meaningful and have deeply touched both me and Chris.
Categories
Family

Family phone call, part II

Hero and Shadow. Rest in peace to you both! You've helped change many lives.
Hello Kitty
Hi Grandma and Grandpa!

So I feel like I should post a follow-up to my earlier post about my family, since many of you have been asking. Since that last conversation with my mom, there were a couple of weeks where we weren’t able to get in touch, so I just left a message on the answering machine saying that all was well.

We finally connected this past Sunday, and again, the elephant in the room was not brought up. It reminded me of the period of time shortly after coming out to my parents, where every phone call was strained, and my then partner’s name (also Chris) would never be mentioned. If she had to, she would refer instead to “him” or “that person”–to which I would naively respond: “Oh, are you referring to the cat? Or do you mean Chris?”  And I had to emphasize the “we” rather than the “I” and “me” every chance I got. But I also had to reinforce that they accept “us”, which includes “me” and “him”, or else they would lose me.

You see, to assign a name to a person humanizes them, and it also makes the situation–the fact that their son is gay and in a long-term relationship–real. Without re-inforcing the reality of the situation, they just could not come to grips with things, and would just continue to live in their own altered reality, with their heads in the sand.

And I still remember when they were in Boston for the first time for my college graduation, my mom’s refusal to even look at the house I shared with (my now ex) Chris, while my family waited in the car for me to join them. She of course didn’t want to meet Chris, which would put not only a name to the “him”, but a face as well. And to see the house would make everything too real, and she wasn’t prepared to do that.

So I again had to force their hand. To do this, I used my trump card. Deperate times called for desperate measures. So, I brought out a cat. The first to come out was Hero, a fat orange tabby who was deathly afraid of the great outdoors. As I pressed his face towards the car window, he let out a plaintive mew, which caused my mom to at last take a look towards the house that I just came out of. And as I waved his paw in their direction, telling Hero to say hello to his grandma and grandpa, a crack of a smile appeared on my mom’s face as she realized the ludicrousness of the situation, with a cat being presented to them like a human baby. And by the time I brought out my favorite cat, a grey-black tabby named Shadow, they were already looking in anticipation to see what mischief I was up to next. And from that point after, in future phone conversations, she would always ask about the cats.

Fast forward nearly a decade–the situation was repeated again when they were visiting Boston for my PhD graduation ceremony. But this time, not only were they inside of that same house they refused to acknowledge so many years ago, but they were playing with the grand-cats and having champagne and a snack with Chris, and Chris’s parents. What a difference a day can make. (In this case, it was literally about 3,000 days). And what a journey of acceptance they have gone through during those 3,000 days.

And this is why that recent conversation came as such a shock to me. By my reckoning, it has now been about 6,000 days since that first incident with the cats, and almost exactly 19 years since I first came out to my mom just before Christmas in 1992. It felt like after one huge step forward and they’ve taken three steps back.

So this last weekend’s call started as usual, with banter about weather and work. I was expecting at least some questioning of how the wedding planning was going, but again she wasn’t about to mention the elephant in the room. Instead, she gave me an alert about London from her Chinese newspaper, regarding massive food shortages in London and people hoarding stockpiles of canned food and “special spaghetti sauce” that is going for over 20 pounds a jar, because of rioting that was going to happen as soon as the Euro destabilized.

This left me scratching my head. There weren’t any food riots that I was aware of in London. In fact, things seemed quite normal. I had my computer on, and scoured Google news looking for anything about the food shortages, or the riots, which my mom insisted were happening, because “she saw it with her own eyes” in the Chinese newspaper that she had in her very hands.

I could even hear the rustling of her newspaper, so I asked what the brand of special spaghetti sauce was, that was going for over 20 pounds per jar. My parents still don’t really speak much English (despite having lived in America for over 35 years), and being in San Francisco, which has a huge Chinese population, they can get by using Chinese for most day-to-day things like banking, shopping, and even transportation. So I pressed my mom for information, and she spelled out the brand for me:

E-M-E-R-G-E-N-C-Y F-O-O-D S-T-O-R-A-G-E.

I was on Google in a flash, and made a horrifying discovery. My mom’s source of news was a translated version of this Daily Mail article!

So this last conversation was a let-down, in more ways than one. But at least my mom recommended that “we”–both Chris and I–think about creating our own stockpile of spaghetti sauce. And that is at least some progress.

Hero and Shadow. Rest in peace to you both! You've helped change many lives.
Categories
Announcements Family Key Events

Facebook, privacy, and pressure

Plastic Smiles?

Wow, two posts in one day! I haven’t been this inspired in…days.

So now it definitely feels like the pressure is being turned on. Earlier today, Chris and I decided to make our engagement public. We had already told family and close friends. My folks were not exactly excited (but that’s another story). Now it was time for everyone else to learn about the news, and of course the easiest and quickest way to do it was via Facebook. So with one quick push of a button, our friends, the rest of the world, and of course, the databases that Facebook maintains in order to direct advertising towards us, were notified of our upcoming nuptials.

And literally, within seconds, the “likes” and congratulatory comments started filtering in. They came from people from all the different phases of my life–childhood and high school friends from San Francisco, college and grad school classmates from Boston and Williamstown, Massachusetts, and colleagues and friends from both coasts of the Atlantic that we have met along the way. I’m off to bed soon (it is just past midnight), but I am sure there will be dozens more by morning. I was (and still am) feeling a bit overwhelmed. So to those of you who took the time to click “like” or leave a comment–here’s a heartfelt thank you! 

Those of you who know me know that I value my privacy and do not take this type of public exposure lightly. Even this blog is a bit of a departure for me. But I feel very strongly that it is important to be visible, and to serve as a role model for others. And to not hide behind a cloak of anonymity. One of the things that drew me to Chris, was the fact that he does work hard to support causes that he believes in; he and his friends have worked to try to bridge the gap between the Christian world and the GLBT community and to create safe environments for kids trying to navigate between these two sometimes seemingly diametrically opposed worlds. I’m not at all religious, but I can recognize the strong ethic within Chris and the values that they represent. And it is shared values, at the end of the day, that form the foundation of a healthy relationship.

But now that this public announcement via Facebook has been made, I can feel the pressure go up a notch. A wedding ceremony, like any other ritual, essentially has an element of theatre, and the pressure is now upon us to put on a good piece show, albeit only for one day. Good thing for us, Chris is also a published playwright. 🙂

We won’t have Wills and Kate’s resources or army of wedding planners (although I do have William’s hairline), but we’ll do our best.

Plastic Smiles?

 

Categories
Family Uncategorized

Gay penguins lead the way in China

http://www.globalanimal.org/2011/12/08/gay-penguins-in-china-given-chick-to-raise/60310/

They’re penguins and they are gay. What’s not to love?

 

Categories
Names Practicalities

To hyphenate or not to hyphenate? That is the question.

 

I’ll post my thoughts about family issues as they happen, but I don’t want to make this into a blog of woe. I’ve already done that in the past when I documented the end stages of my 14-year relationship with my ex (with whom I am still friends, in case you were wondering). But in this blog I want to be able to share all the interesting things that happen and fun thoughts that go through my head as Chris and I embark on this journey.

So one thought that I had recently, is whether or not we should hyphenate our surnames.

It has become a running joke with some of our friends regarding how awful some double-barrelled names can sound. It’s quite a common thing for posh people in the UK to hyphenate their surnames and the practice came about as a means to preserve the family name when their daughters were married off. But because it is something posh people do, it ends up looking and sounding like people are trying too hard to sound posh when they hyphenate their names, which in turn makes it into something slightly cheap and tawdry, or as they would say out here, “naff”.

That’s not to say that all double-barrelled last names are bad. I personally think they only sound good when you have some level of alliteration. In fact, we are are friends with such notable couples as the Hagger-Holts and Plummer-Powells. But you see, their names work because of the alliteration.

So I was greatly amused when our friends Alex and Dave gave us a card addressed to the “Wong-Dickens”. I tried that name out in my mind, like you would try out a wedding dress or a ring the first time you get it home from a shop. It didn’t exactly roll off the tip of my tongue.

wong-dickens

To be fair, it wasn’t bad, despite the lack of alliteration. And it was certainly more genteel than the reverse configuration (“Dicken-Wong”), which just sounds like a punchline to a rude joke. However, it also wasn’t quite “me”, if that makes any sense.

Although I am fully aware that a marriage is like a corporate merger of sorts, I am leery of losing my individual identity. Whereas I am fullly committed to becoming one half of a new unit, I think it is equally important to maintain my own identity as an individual, in part to make sure that I do not forget my past or my roots.

However, the jury is still out; I am leaning one way but can possibly be swayed in another. Maybe some of you can share your thoughts on the pros and cons of double-barrelling?

Categories
Family

Family choices and crossing chasms

I am writing this now after having one of the more difficult conversations with my mom that I have ever had. For the past week, the air has been filled with congratulatory overtones from all the friends and acquaintances with whom we have shared the good news of our engagement. Even my brother and sister-in-law, who are fairly religious, were happy to hear the good news that I shared with them today. All has been good in the Wong-Dicken world.

Yet the one black cloud has been with my parents. I first broke the news of our engagement to my mom last week. She had been on my side throughout most of my previous relationship. All 14 years of it. And she was one of the first people I told when that relationship came to an end. Likewise, she was one of the first people I told when I had the offer to move to London with my company. Over the years, our relationship had morphed away from the mother-son model and more towards a strong adult friendship. I was her confidant. And in many ways, she was mine. This is quite unusual in Asian families, but for us it kind of works.

So I received quite a surprise when I shared the news of our engagement with her last week. Instead of happiness or excitement from my mom, what I got instead was a rather cold pragmatic set of comments and questions: “Getting married will make everything more complicated when you split up.” “And what about when one of you gets a horrible disease and dies?” Optimist, she is not. Offensive? Yes, but of course in the most well-meaning and motherly of ways.

Today’s conversation with my mom started off like most of my conversations have ever started off. Ever since the age of 17, when I first left San Francisco to go to college in Boston, I have been in the habit of calling my mom every Sunday evening. It is never a chore, and I usually look forward to hearing her voice. The conversations always start with a little chatter about the weather. And then segues to a discussion about how busy work is. Oftentimes, I’m told some gossip or news about things happening with some of her friends or relatives. And on some rare occasions, there is a little bit of drama too. Last week, the big drama was that there was a mouse in her house. (And I learned this week that a strategically placed gluetrap had done the mouse in one night).

However, this week, I found it odd that the big elephant in the room wasn’t being brought up. So after the usual banter, I asked if she had shared the news with my father. And the response was yes. But barely before she finished the “yes” came the stock response, that while they congratulated me on the nuptials, that they would not be able to come to the wedding because…and here is the kicker…because then the extended relatives might find out that I am gay. I was simultaneously flabbergasted and crestfallen.

Instantly I was brought back to a similar episode over a decade ago, when my brother was getting married. While they recognized my relationship with my (now ex) partner, they were not able to extend an invitation to him for the wedding because…and this was the kicker back then…because then the extended relatives might find out that I am gay. When that comment was first made over a decade ago, I was instantly reminded of where I and my big fat gay relationship stood in the hierarchy of their world. And with the comment from this week’s phone call, again I was instantaneously reminded of where I stood.

The date of the big event hasn’t even yet been decided, but they have already chosen to not attend. Not out of fear of flying (which my mom does have), or even out of homophobia. But because “the relatives might find out.” My first reaction was to give them a big F-U. But of course I couldn’t say that to my mom. So I ended up saying something worse. Something far worse:

“So is this your decision or Dad’s decision?”

My comment of course started a round of the blame game. But I was having none of that. So we ended the conversation with some choice words from me. I told her I didn’t really care whose decision it was. As far as I am concerned, it is their joint decision. And the ramification of their choice is not only that they would miss their younger son’s wedding, but that they have chosen to not respect me, and to not treat my brother and me as equals.

“You have a son who is married, and who has produced two grandsons that you can parade around. And you have chosen to treat your other son like a set of rags that you wear only around the house. You say you love and support me, and only want me to be happy. Those words are so nice and sweet. But when one of the few major milestones in my life comes up, your true feelings become exposed. I am no better than a set of dirty rags to you.”

And with that came a terse “goodbye.” Who knows what kind of drama will come next week?