I came across this short story in my reading one day and thought of sharing it here since it’s relevant to the subject of the site, filipino-western relationships. The book is a collection of true stories of people from all walks of life. So here it is:

I came across this short story in my reading one day and thought of sharing it here since it’s relevant to the subject of the site, filipino-western relationships. The book is a collection of true stories of people from all walks of life. So here it is:

Steven Scott barely knew his father, and knew almost nothing of his forebears. Steven’s mom had grown up during the Great Depression. Her father had worked for Northern Pacific Railroad, and she had gotten from him the idea that they were better off if they kept moving. So as a child, Steven got used to constant change; in the fifth grade alone, they moved three times. His mom also clung to her Depression-era frugality and relentless work ethic. During the summer, rather than pay a babysitter while she worked, his mom would drop Steven off at the movie theater in the morning. Steven would sit through Mary Poppins four times in a row; then his mom would pick him up. By his high school years they had landed in Spokane, terrain familiar to his mom from her childhood. When his older brother got into drugs, Steve kept his distance. Later, his brother died in a motorcycle accident. The Scotts were down to two.

When Steven obtained his driver’s license at 16, he took a long solo trip through the American Southwest. The way he chose a college was simple: Eastern Washington University was local, and it was cheap. After college he went to work at Kmart in management, and the company moved him to Arizona. He described himself then as bathe least Irish Scott there ever wasn’t He had been to church only twice in his life. His sense of culture had been extinguished, and so had any sense of family He spent most holidays alone, and it did not bother him. He thought nothing of this. He sent a card; that was enough. He called his mother four times a year. He enjoyed his privacy and independence. At his house in Arizona, he had everything to himself He had the pool to himself the bathrooms to himself the kitchen to himself If you had visited him then, dinner would have been awkward, because there was only one wood chair seated at the dining room table, and only one placemat in front of it. The others were in storage. One set was all that was necessary.

That year, he made a decision: He was never getting married. “Who needs a wife?” he asked, and his empty house did not argue with him. He was good-spirited. He did not feel he had lost anything, because the way he was raised, family was never emphasized. He held no grudge about this. You don’t miss what you never knew.

That October, he flew to San Francisco for the wedding of his one friend from Spokane. And at this wedding he met a woman, a college roommate of the bride. Ning Canlas was Filipino. Her family moved to Chicago when she was four. He didn’t ask any more about her family, and she didn’t ask about this.

But something opened in him the moment he met Ning. He doesn’t know where it came from. Around her, he felt instantly at ease. They wrote and talked by telephone for a month, and then Ning flew to Arizona for a 3-day weekend. Both felt what they had found was acutely special, and neither wanted to part. On their last night together Ning asked him the dreaded question: “So when’s the next time I get to see you?”

Steven’s answer shocked him: “Well we could do that, we could plan the next time we’ll meet. Or-or, I suppose, we could also just get married.”

In this way, Steven sorts proposed, and Ning sorta accepted, and they were happy Ning did offer one caveat, though. “You know, before we get married, you’re going to have to come to Chicago and meet my family”

“Sure, sure,” Steven replied, carelessly “Of course.”

Her dad actually telephoned about two hours later, just to check in on his daughter. Perhaps Steven might have thought this odd-a dad calling a boyfriend’s house, on his daughter’s second date, a grown daughter, with her own apartment and job? But this oddity was lost in the excitement over Ning’s big announcement, which she immediately shared with her father. Quickly Ning handed the phone to Steven.

This man was talking with such a thick accent that Steven couldn’t really make out what he was saying. But his tone was welcoming and enthusiastic, so Steven was giddy To this day he is not sure what Ning’s dad’s speech was about, but he thinks it concerned what makes a good marriage. Steven just kept saying ‘Yes, yes, yes” at every pause, and they seemed to get along great.

In early January, Steven flew to Chicago to meet the Canlas’ family. Right before he left his house, Ning called. When you change planes in Dallas, some of the Dallas contingent will be there to meet you.”

The Dallas contingent?

Sure enough, when Steven got off the plane at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, two of Ning’s cousins were at the gate to greet him and escort him to his connection. It turned out there were at least a hundred Canlas’ in Dallas. They were curious about this man their cousin intended to marry. At this point Steven thought the greeting committee was cute and endearing. It made Ning exotic. The cousins were talkative and friendly. Though they were there to judge him, oddly he did not feel judged. There was something about how Ning’s family assessed a person that was very different from the way Steven’s family did. All families are judgmental, but not all families are judgmental to the same degree. Many families judge people like they are vetting a candidate for the Supreme Court. Every fault is magnified and scrutinized. There’s another way to do it-more like the way people are patted down on the way in to a rock concert. As long as you’re not bringing in any handguns, knives, or alcohol, you’re welcome to join the party.

Steven’s undersized family looked for often petty reasons to exclude someone. Ning’s sprawling family found reasons to include anyone. From their point of view, this newcomer Steven had a job, an education, and he made Ning happy That was good enough for them. When Steven got on his next plane, they called ahead to Chicago.

“Thumbs-up,” they declared.

In Chicago, Steven walked into a party that had been gathered on short notice. Not many could make it. So there were only six cousins, two parents, a grandparent, a handful of aunts and uncles, and a dozen or so friends from their church. They embraced Steven like a long-lost brother, which was awkward for him, because in his family there were no outward displays of affection. Dozens of new names were thrown at him, in one ear and out the other, but luckily Ning had briefed him on the usage of “lola” and “lolo” for grandparents, “manang” and “manong” for cousins. Aunts and uncles were just ‘Auntie” and “Uncle.” These are titles of respect, and they are always used when addressing an elder, so it was not odd to use them as shorthand.

And then the good-byes! It was not sufficient to yawn and point to the coats and simply wave the guests away wholesale. It had taken Steven the whole night to meet everyone, and now he had to say good-bye to every single person there-and each of them also had to say good-bye to every person there. Filipino good-bye rituals can last an hour easily. Steven was overwhelmed, but still game. Ning’s aunts sent him home with an ice chest packed with lumpia, a type of egg roll. He had passed the Family Test.

Were they genuinely judging him? Or was it a formality just to make her family feel included? Ning said, I joke about it as the Family Test, but it was not so much about their approval as their opinion. I really wanted to know what they thought of him. I had made a few mistakes with boyfriends in the past, guys whose faults I didn’t see coming but they spotted from the start. So I trusted their judgment, whether they liked him as much as I did.”

“And they liked him even though he was not Filipino?”

“I had been coached for years to marry a Filipino, but the moment they met Steven that expectation vanished and never returned.”

“So on what basis did they judge him?

“His character. He is open and forthright and has a sense of humor and is easygoing. My aunt said the moment she met him, she took pity on him, but that’s really a botched translation from Ilocano, our dialect, where the word means something more akin to ‘compassion.’ Her heart went out to him. ‘Simpatico’ is what a cousin said she felt. He was a man they were going to enjoy sharing life with.”

“If they had not liked him, what would you have done?

“I don’t know. It would have made it very hard. At that time, my parents were going through a rocky patch in their marriage, and so I was hyper-aware of not wanting to make a mistake in my choice. If my family did not love him as I did, I would have been very careful.”

In March, Steven moved in with Ning, into her studio apartment. Kmart allowed a transfer. The wedding was planned for late May. However, there was a glitch. All of Ning’s siblings moved in with them, too. They did not want to live with their parents while the parents were fighting. So there were six people living in one studio apartment. Can you imagine what this must have been like for Steven? From a ranch house all to himself to a studio with six adults sleeping on every inch of floor? From a family he rarely saw to a gaggle of strangers putting rock salt on their fruit and charring fish on the stove and stuffing the refrigerator full of food he could not and green mangoes and something called “baboong”? He joked that they were “the Boat People” and the others took up the joke in good spirit.

They liked “the White Guy.”

Still, though, Steven did not really understand what he was getting into. In the haze of romance, he did not put it all together. He figured her siblings would move back to their parents’ soon enough and he and Ning would have their own life. It really only sank in when they started recognize–greasy sausages premarital counseling through Ning’s church. Steven attended this counseling with the attitude Sure, whatever can’t hurt. But Ning took it very seriously-again, because she trusted her pastor’s input. This pastor had known the Canlas’ for decades. In their first session he looked straight at Steven and drilled him.

“Do you realize what you’re getting into with her family? By this he meant, rhetorically Son, I don’t think you do.

What do you mean ?” Steven asked.

“Do you even know the size of her family?”

“Ive met them”.

“No, you have met just a small part. There are several hundred Canlas’ in the United States alone. Do you know what this will mean for your marriage?”

“I guess not,” he admitted.

“You are not just marrying Ning, son. You are marrying this family. They will become your family. They will be in your life, in your business, help raise your children, and expect you to care for them when they’re in need.”

Steven sat back and really thought about it for the first time. Until then, he had assumed that he and Ning would have their own life-her extended family would be in the periphery, and he and Ning and any children they had would be his family But he had fallen in love with an oldest daughter who has certain obligations in a Filipino family Ning took these obligations seriously: She is one of two in the family who knows everybody’s birthday by heart, and always sends a card. Several hundred birthdays are magically stored in her brain.

The pastor’s speech daunted Steven. “But I loved Ning and wanted to be with her. There was some trepidation on my part, but never did I once consider not going ahead with it.”

If there are two camps in our society-one that includes extended family, another that shuts them out; one that puts family above everything, another that declares family is important but rarely acts like it-then there has never been a wedding that has better represented what can happen when these two camps are thrown together. There were 125 guests crammed into the small wedding chapel. If that church had been a car, the passenger side would have scraped the street. If that church had been a boat, it would have capsized. Only two guests were from Steven’s family-his mother and her husband. They represented two-thirds of his entire family (his stepsister was grounded by an airline strike). The other guests were from Ning’s family, they represented only a third of the American Canlas’. Ning has fifty-two first cousins. Steven has none. Steven’s family was prompt and on time and staring at their watches within minutes. Ning’s family was on island time, give or take an hour. In Steven’s family they can barely make eye contact. In Ning’s family they squeeze and hug and wave grandly and kiss easily.

It was only a semi-traditional here.