By Lili Hun

My father trained me to be good helpmate. Ultimately, he wanted me to be very different than your American women. Now, I'm sure that he was doing his best to give me training that my mother lacked, though my mother also taught me the new things which she had learned and enjoyed doing. I'm certain she wasn't the kind of mate he would have wanted because there was constantly bloody hell between the two of them, and right back at him from her view.

I was always having to hold or push or bring or hand him whatever he needed or simply watch something that he was doing and learn. I wasn't allowed a long American leash for sure. I had a not-short-enough-for-my-father's-comfort Hungarian one, but no TV to counteract his value system.

I would be allowed to go around the corner and play with neighboring kids for a much shorter period of time than they were allowed. They seemed pretty free to me. Sometimes, he would call me home after an hour because he needed some help. Once it was to retrieve a hammer inside our house where he was working. And then I wasn't allowed back out. I knew it was a pretext, and I resented it like hell, though I'm laughing as I write this now. Another time, I had to come home to hand him nails, one by one, from a box which he could have set on that little ladder shelf made expressly for such things. At the time, I was wickedly angry. I probably wouldn't have been so resentful if I didn't have bigger things setting me off already, like their marriage. These little happenings just piled into a bucket that was largely full of the rubble of domestic unbliss with a big heap of paternal control thrown on top. I still buck authority and break rules.

Nevertheless, I can, if it's not coming from a screeching hen or a stupid, unpleasant rooster, work with it. I can even enjoy it, because it's comfy and familiar. This has come in handy more than once. Now, I have a new little job with a southeast Asian boss. By the end of my second day, he's already comfortable enough with me to be himself, because he can tell it will fly... "Give this, put that, tell so-and-so, get, do, come here, go watch..." I can only imagine a Dindu queen in my place... Conflagration—job over/fired/curses, etc.

Southeast Asian men are still men and not ashamed of it.

I don't speak his language, obviously, but I'm used to listening and picking out mispronounced English words, absorbing patterns of sound, etc. I keep hearing "Uber." Two of his cronies are there discussing the business. They share a lot of practical detail with each other. I've picked out banks, credit, and now Uber, from their conversations. He's standing to the side. I go over to him and whisper, "Do they know there was an Uber driver stomped and hospitalized downtown by two cab drivers?" He nods and smiles, no worries. Somehow, I feel sorry for anyone who picks on these guys. Not so with some paleface men, whom I instantly recognize as unable to protect themselves...unless they wear sleeveless t-shirts and a cap, and show some muscle, that is.

When there's been a free moment, my boss and I have shared family photos, stories and our thoughts about this society.

He said, "American women bad. They want everything their way. In marriage, one person can't have everything their way.” When they married, neither of them had had a boyfriend or girlfriend. “So we were both clean,” he tells me. Then I asked him, "Who makes the decisions in your family?" He points to himself definitively, "I do." I ask him, "All of them?" He starts to say yes, then corrects himself, "Well no, when we buy a house, my wife decides. If it's the children, she knows. I don't know these things. I can't do these thing. My wife does. She’s a good woman. She cooks every day. Not like here." Just what a Pakistani woman told me. Cooking is eating, is surviving, is helping the family to do things to improve their lives, around which there is both pride and appreciation. Here, it’s a coin toss as to which half of the couple will know how to cook. Got TV dinner and a bringing-home-the-bacon woman or an I-made-it-from-scratch woman and a sensible division of labor? I think superwoman is taken, so you probably can’t have both. As a French friend used to say, "Make your choice."

I remember having a similar conversation in college with an older, married, Hispanic student. He said in Spanish, in the generic, "I depend on you, and you depend on me, and that is how it should be.” I remember envying his wife for having such a coherent man who found interdependence normal.

Our North American, independent, frontiersman model of relating simply falls short for me. Not that I don't get that it's a preferable model to ending up hurt, deceived, cheated or dead, because you got interdependent with the wrong person (at work or at home). Nor do I want to wear a burka. But I think we would be happier if we didn't have to do everything individually. If we could share the load. If we could compromise, respect and enjoy the difference, rather than denaturing ourselves and becoming gender and culture neutral.

During my growing up years, when women started to have to work due to economic manipulation by the slave masters (I heard it on NPR years ago and then never again), they ended up with two jobs, one outside and one inside the home. That's a good model for spiritual death. I like the idea of separate roles. I think it made life simpler. I had a boyfriend once who thought I should be able to change my own oil. I was thirty, and I thought, ‘What, I don’t do enough, raising my children, sewing curtains, cooking and going to work full-time; I have to be even more of a man now?’ As for those relatively few women in history like Jeanne D’Arc, Sor Juana, or Amelia Earhart, for example, they shouldn't have had to suffer consequences because they didn't prefer a woman's traditional role. But society seems to repeatedly rear its ugly, conformist head, beating down and molding its members to its specifications, for its own agenda, without regard for how well the shoe fits any one person. I never wanted a man’s life. It’s what I got stuck with.

I wonder if it's mostly modern day Anglo countries which have this almost genderless and uncooperative model of relating? In my boss's country, people at large may be called "auntie, uncle, brother or sister," and share no blood relation. Respect for the elderly we more than lack—we put them away and even have elder abuse. When my boss greets southeast Asian men he knows, they give each other a big, warm hug, or the "Namaste" style greeting of respect, or both. When an elderly acquaintance came in, he also took the man’s hand in his as he was breaking the hug and beginning to step back, hands held at chest level, lingering in the hold like we only see lovers do here.

I watch and I'm jealous that I missed having more Hungarian affection by coming here. Girls walked holding hands. Everybody hugged and kissed, and I don't remember the tremendous Anglo effort to keep distance or say nothing meaningful while talking a lot. Neither do I remember Hens but women, cooperating with women, doing what women do…older women in a large church kitchen, preparing pastries, affectionately touching each other as they worked together, talking, putting their hands on each other's hips to move by one another, including me as a learning child. Yes, they served the men. But they weren’t torn and burdened beyond their capacity in their roles or paying the mortgage alone. That, more than anything, is what I missed by living here and marrying an American.

At this stage of my life, I stay on the periphery of American society. I’m done (or never did in the first place) with so much about it, even while I acknowledge that it allows me freedoms which I wouldn’t have in some cultures… I can be a wage slave. Pardon me, I couldn’t resist. That just ain’t right. Lord forgive me. And please pardon our posting war as well...