I should have been just another case of arranged marriage.
I grew up in a provincial capital of a very conservative country, where arranged marriages were absolutely and unexceptionably the norm. My family was comfortably well-off, thanks to my father being a very hard-working entrepreneur who had migrated from China as a young man, with nothing but a set of clothes and a bright mind. Our family business of rice milling and exporting made him prominent; it also meant that his 5 daughters would be a great ‘political’ asset if he set them up with the right marriages. Especially so for a migrant; people of Chinese descent were denied legal citizenship in my place of birth, Cambodia; marriage networks could equal legitimacy.
My relatives and family friends all naturally expected that the five of us would have arranged marriages, just as with their own children. Social practices and the cultural ‘upside’ should have made this a no-brainer. The only “freedom” for young people was to choose a suitor who brought wealth or advantage to the family.
My father said, no. Instead, he decided we would be free to grow up and choose our own partners.
That decision raised a lot of back-biting comment in the neighbourhood. Even in the second half of the 20th century, what were daughters for? The answer was plain: to secure good family alliances (if “outbound”) and to be diligent and obedient carers for their newly acquired family through to old age (if “inbound”)?
When my eldest sister reached “the zone” at 16, the queue of suitor-parents knocking on our front door grew. My father gently but firmly refused all approaches. After a while, the criticisms began and steadily grew louder.
The critics, however, didn’t have a chance. Something had motivated my father to be solidly determined that this alien concept of “freedom of choice” would take root.
The “something” that had prompted the 6 foot frame of my stubborn dad to turn away would-be suitors at the door came in the shape of the “four foot nothing” chopstick-thin force of nature that was his mother.
I recall how that had happened. One of the very few conversations I ever heard them have directly had been on this subject of arranged marriage. My grandmother – a brilliant self-taught storyteller and Chinese opera buff, who entranced the neighbourhood with her knowledge and wisdom almost nightly as they gathered around our front yard patio – spoke few words directly to my dad from the day she was allowed to emigrate from China to join our household. This reticence was her ‘peacemaking’ stance – my mother had never wanted her in the house. My father was a very loyal son but hopelessly in love with my mother.
Reach for Freedom
One typical evening, with a yard full of neighbourhood kids and some of their parents, the recitations had begun as usual. Suddenly my grandmother had broken off and, without turning to my father who was seated a few metres away towards the year of the yard, she had spoken to him.
She always chose her conversations carefully. This time, she had started with a single sentence: ‘Rang tamen ziji zhao dui xiang’ (literally, ‘Let them look for their own partner themselves’). My dad had remained silent and impassive. Then slowly he had looked towards my mother. For the only time in my memory, my mother had simply agreed with her mother-in-law, nodding when the old lady added: “If they choose their own partners, then they will be responsible for their own futures”.
Decades later, I can still feel the intensity of that statement like a warm breeze. Even at 13 I knew enough of her story to understand the pain underlying that simple but radical thought.
My grandmother had been a “living widow” from her mid-20’s, and remained so until she died at 100 years old. Married by arrangement, sight unseen, to a man who traveled frequently out of China, she had worked hard to build a home. Her thin shoulder were weighed down by the family she had been married into: sick mother-in-law, a sick older sister-in-law, eight younger brothers-in-law and another sister-in-law with ages ranging from 18 to 6 years old. She worked hard as the dutiful daughter-in-law as expected, while heer husband traveled on business 11 months a year. At 25 she had fallen pregnant but soon after had been abandoned when her traveling husband decided to take a wife in Thailand. Even after the birth of their one child, my father, he did not return and he provided little support which petered out as the Depression and World War II intervened. She received barely one letter a year, at new years. In this way she occasionally heard of his new life and his several children. Her son grew up penniless; most of his half-bothers and half-sisters had college educations. Remarrying was out of the question for her – simply not permitted. But having been “married out”, my grandmother still had the entire household of in-laws to cook for, clean for, run after and be scolded by, all day long.
This she did for the next four decades until the elders died and she was finally free to join her son who had long before moved to Cambodia in search of work.
That evening, in our front patio, was the only time my mother openly agreed with my grandmother. And so we became free to choose our partners, a new freedom and a new duty for each of us to be responsible for those choices. Most of my siblings chose well, as did I.
Peaceful skies
Why did my mother agree? While my siblings and I benefited, it was not done for us. My mother is a traditionalist; however this was one tradition she did not want to see continued. She herself had been forced to marry a stranger – my father – in an arranged marriage; to a very good man, as it happened, but nevertheless an indignity that she had struggled to ever articulate. Finally she had found a voice.
Very nice story, love your choice of words.