CANTONESE OBSCENITIES

For twenty one years I've been the outcaste, the dark secret; now she wants to introduce HIM to her kinfolk.
For twenty one years, I didn't cheat on her, I held her above all others, I always came home to HER.

But HIM she'll include in the family.

Can you tell that I'm a bit bitter now? Do you perceive that for some strange white dude reason I feel a sense of betrayal?

I did everything right for twenty one years. I was a gentleman, and I'm still a gentleman.
I did not allow myself to take risks, I didn't tell my employers to go hump their camels, I didn't quit jobs and move to South America.
I turned down luscious young things in bars, I didn't stay out all night dancing with Babylonian whores.
I was, in every way I could conceive of, as decent a fellow as I knew how to be.


It counts for nothing. Because I somehow managed to not read the signs. She must've spent months thinking about it. And it no longer worked for her. Probably from early 2010 on, she reinterpreted, and obsessed about, our relationship. By spring she started to give up. And because of Aspergers syndrome, she vexed and worried, and could not even realize how much she meant to me, that our oneness kept me afloat - she couldn't see it, she couldn't understand what I should have communicated better - and she let it slide.

A normal woman would, after so much shared history, perhaps have talked about it.

Dammit.

She, instead, fixated on the aspects that didn't work for her.
It festered.

All through those last months it fermented, it rotted in her estimation. Her own secret tunnel vision hell. She should have shared.
She broke off a relationship of twenty one years in the summer. I didn't see it coming, she hadn't said anything. We're both on the Aspy spectrum - it excuses her entirely, she's worse than I am. But maybe a fully normal man might have noticed a few clues.

My obliviousness prevented me from recognizing portents, her major Aspergers kept her from seeing how it would, how it did, affect me.


Would I have done anything different?

Yes. And no.

She has been probably the best thing that happened to me. She kept me sane. She kept me from pursuing a weird and flaming finality.
She still does.

And oddly, I am now the stronger person in what's left of our "relationship".
She tells me about him. She weeps on my shoulder when her situation with THAT man is not evenkeeled. She reveals her frustrations.
She listens to me - I am the person she has known best for twenty one years, her entire adult life. I can finish her sentences, as she does mine. Who knows her better? And I comfort her when things get rough.

So yes, the fact that she has finally decided to do the right thing - no longer hide her life from her family, admit that she is not the perfect Chinatown daughter - hurts.
Dammit all, it hurts. Because I was there for twenty one years - I held her when she wept over the deaths of people she loved. I was the person who stood by her when she was frustrated with her brothers or angry at her sisters-in-law. I was there when her mom came down on her and made her suicidal. I explained her weird Chinese family dynamics to her - things that she experienced and should've understood, yet had not the exposure or reading to figure out.
And I never even met the people who always made her miserable - I know them vicariously, but they never heard about me.


Yet, when all is said and done, after twenty one years, I am the "roommate", the best friend, the wise elder - but HE is the son-of-a-bitch whom she wishes her family to accept.

It is as if I do not exist.

Frankly, this whole situation stinks for me.

I am happy that she is 'going straight' with her life.

But dammit, I deserved better.


Oh, and by the way - all of you Chinatown folks who kept saying that I should find a nice Cantonese girl, why heavens, a kwailo who speaks our language really should hook up with someone Chinese - except heaven forefend it would be one of YOUR daughters - go f*ck yourselves.
It is your g-ddamned subculture and biases that made this happen, your venomous attitudes that dominated our lives for over two decades and kept everything in the shadows.
It was your horrid preconceptions and miserably patronizing opinions of whitey, your sneering disapproval of Chinese-American women dating outside the tribe, that informed the secrecy that we kept.
Even if, ESPECIALLY if, the person she was attracted to was a clever white boy, "yat goh ho lek-ge sei-fan-gwai".
And every time you found out that I spoke Cantonese better than her, you treated her like garbage, and acted like I was some kind of misguided well-trained pale monkey - oooh, smart kwailo, why ARE you seeing this stupid girl?
Yeah, screw you, and screw your inability to value your daughters, screw your racism, and screw your sexist dominating bitch-ass insistence that whitey is just not suitable for a decent Chinese woman to associate with; and above all screw your idea that a Cantonese-American girl with TWO college degrees, a good person with sound values, intelligence, kindness, common sense, and a deep and abiding ability to grasp what is right and good in this world, has done something irredeemably wrong by hanging out with a lofan.


Do I blame Savage Kitten? No.

I blame her mom. I blame her brothers. I blame her classmates, her neighbors, her pissy sisters-in-law, her Chinatown relatives, her entire friggin' verkrampte golden ghetto background plus the Chinese-American teachers who thoroughly support and enable the rottenness, AND that miserable misogynist writer Frank Chin with his racist 'screw whitey' mentality, all the Chinese-American female authors pimping their 'we're so unique' ideology, priggish Chinese-American boys who look down their pudgy noses at chicks with Caucasian boyfriends, Hong Kong immigrants sneering that they (and only they) are maintaining the proper values, all the old-timers who refer to the American-born generation as jook-sing, and the entire Confucian paternalist value system itself - both the high-fallutin' antique inheritance and the folk-culture toxic virus that is its modern-day continuation - which insists that girls are inferior and not entitled to make their own life-decisions.

I blame the immigrant Toishanese peasants who enforce a rigidly narrow-minded social orthodoxy, I blame the ethnocentricism and boastful cultural superiority that permeates the Chinatown family associations and guilds, and most especially do I blame the humongously inflated sense of self-worth so characteristic of every single frikkin’ Chinese-American intellectual blustering that his or her own family’s personal history is miraculously unique and how the hair-shirt and barbed wire straightjacket of Chinese-American cultural tradition is beautiful, meaningful, and infinitely precious.
They're ALL maladjusted pissants.

Screw orthodoxy. Screw ethno-centrism. Screw poisonous tradition.

Screw those male-chauvinists and their spiteful brainwashed bitches.


Oh yeah..... screw her new boy friend too. Stupid dumb-ass white guy.



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