This is a continuation of the story to be found here.

In the first years of marriage, Steven and Ning found that their jobs had them working different schedules. This upset Ning, because her father-a doctor-had worked long hours, and she did not want that pattern to repeat itself in her marriage. So one morning she lit into Steven about his work hours. Later that day he showed up at her office with flowers and a big apology. He really thought they were on the brink of separation. She laughed. To her, it was just a fight. She was letting off steam.

This is a continuation of the story to be found here.

In the first years of marriage, Steven and Ning found that their jobs had them working different schedules. This upset Ning, because her father-a doctor-had worked long hours, and she did not want that pattern to repeat itself in her marriage. So one morning she lit into Steven about his work hours. Later that day he showed up at her office with flowers and a big apology. He really thought they were on the brink of separation. She laughed. To her, it was just a fight. She was letting off steam.

“You mean, you’re not leaving me?” he said.

“You believed me?”

In fact, one of the notions Steven needed to learn was how invulnerable their marriage was. In his family divorce was common. His mother was divorced twice, his stepsister once; even his brother had managed to get divorced before dying. So he considered marriage to be enormously fragile. lf you consider it fragile, you’re wary of rocking the boat by expressing your needs, so those needs go unmet, which is far more dangerous in the long term. In Ning’s family divorce was unheard of. Among her fifty-two cousins, for instance, there had not been one divorce. And while her parents fought through many hard spells-fought loudly dramatically-they never considered splitting up. So Ning had no qualms about speaking up or expressing herself because according to the notion in the back of her mind, nothing could really threaten her marriage to Steven.

The best aspect of having a huge extended family emerged when Ning gave birth to Candy. Steven had those memories of sitting through Mary Poppins all day and he sure didn’t want his daughter to experience anything like it. He needn’t have worried. The way Ning had grown up, she barely learned to walk because there was never a pair of hands to hold her. And so it would be with Candy. Ning kept working until Candy was three, so Candy practically lived with her grandparents, who were only seven miles away. Just as Ning had an intense bond with her maternal grandmother, Candy had a bond with Ning’s father, who doted on Candy in a way he never had with his own children. This made raising a baby much less overwhelming to Steven. The new responsibility was never daunting. Steven never had to worry who would care for his child if something happened to him.

Over time, Steven made several attempts to spread this new spirit into his mother’s family For the most part, his efforts failed to change anything. Right after the wedding, he began calling his mom weekly (rather than quarterly), but he admits his true motive was more to impress Ning than to get closer to his mother. The regular calls had their restorative effect, though, and his mother began visiting Chicago four times a year. This culminated in a big trip to Disney World with Ning’s parents and Steven’s mom and stepsister. The week was an absolute disaster. The contrast in styles made everyone uncomfortable. The Scotts and Canlas’ were like oil and water. It was in Orlando that Ning learned the Scotts do know how to fight after all-at least with one another. As the story of that week was told and retold for years, it took on a nickname: the Great Experiment.

More experiments were conducted over the years, but the gains were temporary Steven has remained close to his mom, but to him the remnants and shards of his past-primarily his stepsister’s family-are not worth lighting for. One family can often heal its in-laws by osmosis, but in Steven’s case the gap was too great between what he expected, now that he’s a Canlas’, and what the Scott’s side delivered. When he flew to Reno, where his mother and stepsister lived, the room never lit up. He predicts that when his mother dies he is likely to let that connection to her side go.

Though Steven had a lot to learn about family from Ning, he also had something to teach her: She had never learned how to say no to her family. She had never insisted they respect her borders. They had not let her become an independent adult. By this measure, she and Steven really had opposite pasts. Consider how Steven was allowed to drive throughout the Southwest by himself at sixteen. Ning’s father did not even allow her to get a driver’s license at that age “You’re too young, it’s too dangerous!”

Then consider the way Steven was allowed to find his own way academically. He was never pressured, and as a result he’s always enjoyed his work. It’s his; his motives are in the right place. Ning was ordered to follow her father and become a doctor. She was sent to Stanford as the family’s Great Hope.” Not only did that not work out, but Ning credits this overbearing pressure with her failure to ever find her own soulful connection to work. Today she has a loveless job behind the register at a drugstore.

Her real love is music. She plays the harp and teaches cello. She, like all her siblings, was raised to the sound of “harana” on their father’s guitar, and they spent their childhood in front of a piano. As teens, they “rebelled” by switching to the violin. Music had been their father’s first career; he only took up medicine because his parents told him his jazz combo was no way to provide for his new family, even though he was fairly successful as a musician. (Medical school is what brought him to Chicago.) And so he passed this same warning on to his children. They were encouraged to play but never told to be great. Music was to be a hobby not a profession. He meant it. When one of Ning’s brothers moved to Los Angeles to make it as a musician-and inevitably struggled (who doesn’t at first?)-this caused a great rift. He was treated as an outcast and did not speak to his father for five years.

That never would have happened in Steven’s family. Perhaps it was inevitable that at some point Steven was going to buttheads with Ning’s parents. It was only a question of when, and of whose side Ning would take.

Their pastor had been dead-on during marital counseling when he predicted Ning’s family would “be in your life, in your business.” This intrusiveness, let’s call it, is characteristic of Filipino families in general, but by no means limited to Filipinos- I have heard this trait described hundreds of times, by families of every size and from every country. I interviewed a sprawling Sicilian family that was on the verge of exploding like a grenade under the constant pressure of being loyal to its patriarch, but I also interviewed a mom-and-pop duo in coastal Virginia who had driven their two adult children away by never respecting their independence. The size of a family does not correlate with whether or lot it respects autonomy; not to do so is a damaging trait. It destroys core families than it preserves.

Were does it come from? From tradition and imitation, partly But it’s exacerbated by fear, usually the fear that the family will fall apart or fail if the rule by an iron fist is not maintained. So families that migrate internationally often bring with them a tradition of patriarchal control, but it can get much worse in the new surroundings. The Canlas’ intrusions were minor compared with other stories I heard.

‘When Ning’s daughter was born, her parents stepped in. At first this was great. When Candy was three, Ning decided to work part-time. By the time Candy was four, Ning realized her daughter had been allowed to become a spoiled brat. She had assumed her parents were teaching her daughter obedience and respect, as they had Ning, but apparently they’d thrown all that out the window. They were raising a princess. Ning recognized she had to take control and chose to stay at home fulltime. She needed to discipline her daughter, but did not want to spank her child as she had been spanked, so she and Steven began taking parenting classes. The classes were so great that Ning went from being a student to a teacher-facilitator. She had learned to say no to her daughter, but still hadn’t learned how to say no to her parents. Was there a class for that?

Missing their granddaughter, Ning’s parents began showing up uninvited at Steven and Ning’s house. Not once in a while, which would have been charming, but every single evening. Once there, they routinely criticized the way Ning treated her daughter-and not in private, after Candy had gone to bed. At the time, Ning and Steven were trying to wean Candy off a bottle. “If she wants the bottle, give it to her. What’s the harm?”

“Mom I’m trying to establish some rules here.”

Dad piped in. “A hard spanking’s the only way to get her to listen.”

“You’re not touching her!”

As a child will do, Candy sensed the lack of a united front, and she turned into an expert negotiator, twisting every no into a lengthy debate. The grandparents remained Candy’s primary babysitters-they were quick to volunteer-but Ning eventually figured out that her parents were not respecting the new rules. They gave her milk in a bottle, and then let her stay up late. One step forward, two steps back. Ning screamed at them, but they thought they knew better.

It got to the point that when Ning’s parents knocked on the door in the evening, occasionally Steven and Ning hid upstairs and pretended they were not home. The third time this happened, Steven looked at Ning and said, “When Candy grows up, do you want her to hide from us?” It came to a head on the verge of Ning and Steven’s tenth wedding anniversary, Steven was taking Ning to Boston for a romantic weekend, so they dropped off Candy (then seven) with her grandparents the night before they flew east. A few hours later, Candy called in tears, terrified, begging to come home. She had seen her grandparents argue quite often, but she had never seen them fight physically. Steven and Ning were incensed. In their minds, that was it. They picked Candy up and took her to an aunt’s. They were up most of the night, stewing with guilt over letting it get this bad. “This has got to stop”, Steven insisted. Run the morning, you’re going to call theme’s they don’t listen to me”.

So for the first time, Steven called them. He had no trouble putting it in a way Ning never could: “This is my family; that is yours. Please don’t taint mine. Do not call here, and do not come here. We’ll let you know when we are ready to let you back into our lives.”

Oh, the scandal! Immediately the phones were buzzing.

“Can you believe what that husband of Ning’s said to his elders!”

Steven was suddenly the outsider, the White Guy again. Ning stood beside him (or maybe a little behind him). She might not have been able to stand up for her own needs, but she would protect her daughter. For three months the grudge did not budge. Both sides waited for an apology. Finally Ning’s father got sick, and Steven immediately took his family to visit. They were at the hospital every day. No apologies were offered, either way and the issue was buried. “My family is great at pretending things never happened,” Ning explained.

After that, Steven made a rule: The grandparents could come over, but they had to call first. It was a small demand, and one they obeyed forever after, but not without a lot of collateral griping total’s siblings. “lf it were not for Steven,” Ning Said, “I never would have learned how to have my own life. He taught me we don’t have to always give our bedroom to visitors, and we don’t have to show up at every family event. Never knew I didn’t have to put up with it. I tried, but they always wore me down. Steven protects me. He offers the perspective of an outsider, one who isn’t Filipino and chained by the expectations that come with that heritage.”

Ning summed the story up this way. “Far from being a problem, I think the fact Steven and I came from such opposite backgrounds has been the secret to our success. We’ve never been able to fall into a pattern, never had a chance to fall asleep at the wheel. Our contrasts have made us conscious, made us stay attentive.”

“I think that’s true,” Steven echoed, with a glint in his eye. “But I don’t know if I’ll ever get comfortable with how your family likes to have their picture taken with the dead person at a funeral.”

This tickled Ning, who added, “Or how we carry a pig’s head on the plane when we visit cousins?”

”Yeah, I’m happy in this family but I’m never going to win the ‘White Guy Game.”

The ‘White Guy Game was Ning’s sister’s idea. They were down in Dallas for a reunion, and she decided to put on a contest, a mock version of the game show Jeopardy! Testing all the white guys” in the family on Filipino culture. In addition to Steven, the contestants included a Mexican spouse, a longtime boyfriend, a niece’s fiance, and Ning’s younger brother, who was born in Chicago. They were instructed to count to ten in Tagalog. They were then given a couple of ingredients and asked to name a traditional Filipino dish that included them. Obscure relatives were pointed out, and anyone who could identify them scored a point. Questions were thrown out to the contestants:

“Can you use opallo and wag in a sentence?”

“What plant is a Barong Tagalog made from?”

“How do you hail somebody across a crowd?”

The family roared with laughter as the contestants guessed.

“Seventeen years we had been married” Ning teased, remembering the contest.”You seemed to have absorbed so little.”

“Sometimes it does feel like we-just got married yesterday,” Steven remarked.

Ning replied, “That’s a good thing.”