Because here’s the thing no one tells you about being Asian and falling in love with another Asian from a different Asian country: you spend half the time bonding over the similarities (rice, filial piety, saving plastic bags) and the other half quietly decoding each other’s wounds. Your family’s brand of strict wasn’t my family’s brand of strict. Your “I’m fine” meant something else in Cantonese than it did in my mom’s Tagalog.
Now I do: because some heartbreaks are too precise for translation. asians ex diary
We broke up not because of love. We broke up because I couldn’t explain to my lola why your father’s ghost stories about the Japanese occupation made you so angry. And you couldn’t explain to your aunt why my family’s colonial Catholicism still made me cross myself before lying. Because here’s the thing no one tells you