BITTER HERBS

This weekend, Savage Kitten and her boyfriend are going to have lunch with her siblings and their families. At a dim sum restaurant.
She's known him for less than a year.

I have met just one of her brothers. And that was only because she wanted to be fair, and wished her favourite brother to at least meet someone else who was (still) important to her.


I've known her since 1989.
We were lovers for over twenty years.
I've met ONE of her relatives. Just one, once.
It happened when our relationship was over, when I was just the good friend whom she had known for a long time.
I have not met the people whom her current beau - who has been with her for far less time - will see in a few hours.
Some of them have broken bread with Wheelie Boy four or five times already.
He's the 'boyfriend'. He has an important role in her life, and it is right and proper that her kin acknowledge all that.
I'm not, and I don't rank.
Never did.

Now that her dad is dead, and her mom is a vegetable, she finally has the courage to introduce her "boy friend" to her siblings.
But it ain't me. By the time she worked up the courage to tell everyone to f*(% off, she also decided that I wasn't it. Not any more. Not any longer.

I'm as much part of the discarded past as her dad's disapproval and her mom's sentience.

If things had been different, I might have had kids by now.
I wonder what they would have been like.


While the two of us were a couple, I was the filthy secret that her mom's Toishanese relatives, friends, and neighbors should never find out about.
We hid our relationship from them, and from any Chinese person who might know them. We never were together in Chinatown, we never kissed in public, we never held hands while walking - because nice Chinese girls do NOT have relationships with white guys.
Really, they don't. She knew that from growing up Chinese, I knew it from constant exposure to Chinatown and everyone I knew who spoke Cantonese.
Obviously, that rather destroyed any hopes of a normal family life.
But it's over now, and no one need ever find out about me.


I hope I discover which dim sum place they went to. So that I can boycott it for the rest of my life.
She and I went out for dim sum just ONCE.
In twenty years.

I expect that her family will make Wheelie boy welcome, and treat him well. He's kind of likable, and from what I hear they're decent people.
Besides, everybody has a kwailo in the family.
At least one. It's become "normal".

I'm feeling a little foul at present.
But I'll get over it.


You can't always get what you want.
What's gone is gone.


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