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.
Exes are supposed to fade into a blur of bad haircuts and unreturned hoodies. But you show up in the way I check my shoes at the door. In how I haggle at the wet market without guilt. In the way I finally learned to say “I love you” in my own mother tongue — because you asked, once, “Why do you always say it in English?”
Things I Never Said in English
Now I do: because some heartbreaks are too precise for translation.
Last night, I found an old receipt from that Thai grocery store we used to go to. The one where your mom would buy frozen pandan leaves and I’d get shrimp paste in a jar that looked like it survived a war. You used to joke, “Our love is inter-Asian — same trauma, different dialects.”
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.
Exes are supposed to fade into a blur of bad haircuts and unreturned hoodies. But you show up in the way I check my shoes at the door. In how I haggle at the wet market without guilt. In the way I finally learned to say “I love you” in my own mother tongue — because you asked, once, “Why do you always say it in English?” asians ex diary
Last night, I found an old receipt from that Thai grocery store we used to go to. The one where your mom would buy frozen pandan leaves and I’d get shrimp paste in a jar that looked like it survived a war. You used to joke, “Our love is inter-Asian — same trauma, different dialects.” Exes are supposed to fade into a blur