The catch up.

 So here’s what I had with Jes in our conversation today:

Me: Hey I have a small request this time. If you reach a point where you don’t wanna talk to me again, can you first let me know before you disappear? Thanks.

Jes: Sure. We may not exchange for very long but it has been nice to hear how you’re doing

Me: Likewise. If that’s the case then I think I’m gonna spit out my thing with Bali before we lose contact again.

In the summer of 2014 I had a five-week relationship with an abusive man who almost physically abused me and raped me. When I met him I thought he was the one because his upbringing was just like mine (he was Taiwanese.) When I ended it I had a nervous breakdown because I just couldn’t figure out why the universe had to let me repeat my destiny of domestic violence. That winter I booked my first trip to Bali alone and I pampered myself by flying business and staying at five-star resorts. However during that trip I kept thinking of you a lot. I don’t know why. From time to time there have always been episodes like that where I just keep thinking about what we had. When those episodes take place is totally random. After I returned home from Bali, I gave you a call. I’m pretty sure it was the last day of 2014. You told me you had just got married and I cried when I heard it but I made sure you didn’t hear me cry on the phone. I also remember you told me you tried to find my contact info but failed.

After that I decided that it was time to stop looking. In the end everyone just wants to settle down and have a family. Most of the time the relationship doesn’t work so after they have a family they divorce and that is why the divorce rate is over 55% now (at least in Taiwan). Those who have not divorced probably just don’t have a choice like my parents. I started to believe that’s the normal. In the summer of 2015 I met my husband and because of his physical disability I could be certain that there was no way he could physically abuse me and given the way he is he would never cheat on me. We got engaged five months later.

But none of it was romantic. When we were still dating I almost broke up with him because of a storm. It was a typhoon on a weekend but we only had time to meet on weekends so I said we should still meet up. However he has sensory integration problems (which I learned after my son’s diagnosis ha) that he absolutely hates getting wet or going out in the rain, let  alone a storm, but he didn’t tell me at that time. Instead he told me that he couldn’t get a cab or any public transit to go outside of his house while I was already half way to meet him. In the end I had to return home being completely drenched.

I almost broke up with him after that; he only kept apologizing. That was a turning point of my life because I decided to convince myself that it was the best I could have. No one else in this world would come forward for me anyway and it’s time to forget about all the things I’d read and watched. I convinced myself that I was crazy for going out in the typhoon. 

His proposal wasn’t romantic either. It happened on a day where I brought a new bedsheet to his apartment and changed it for him because he had been using a really beat up one from his landlord. After he saw me there to do that, he got me a ring that was a family heirloom to propose, not on one knee. He was standing and just showing me the ring and asked me if I’d marry him.

I wanted to say no, but I acted out a scene that’s always what we see on tv, a happy, non-hesitant yes with a big smile. Because I convinced myself once again that if I didn’t take it, I’d never have a chance at marriage and a family. I’d make it work. For whatever he couldn’t do, I’d do it for him. That ring has been sitting in my bank’s safe since our wedding. It’s about a one-carat diamond but chipped in one corner. I didn’t really care for it. He was too cheap to buy any other wedding band so we ordered fake sterling bands for our wedding.

Years later probably when my older son was one or two, he got me another pure gold wedding band, which I still keep in my jewelry box and never wear it. Given the money he has and what his family gives him, that ring was nothing. I treat those things just as assets that I’m saving from my work in this marriage.

Anyway because our relationship wasn’t romantic but I I still wanted my romantic gesture I proposed a wedding in Bali. We were officially registered as married five months before our actual wedding in Bali. He again was dismissive of my proposal saying that it was too expensive but eventually I made it work and we got his parents to pay for it. I cut down all sorts of costs by lots of research, hiring local Balinese for photography, patisserie’s, etc and got my gown tailored in China. It’s like a repeating theme in my life—I made it romantic myself for myself. My BFF flew across the world from DC to be my maid of honor at our wedding. When we were getting dressed she told me jokingly that if I had second thoughts it wasn’t too late yet. I said, “well it’s already too late because we were already officially registered months ago.”

Our wedding was on December 22, 2016. It was beautiful. The weather was perfect, perfect sun set and blue sky. The chapel at the St. Regis was completely filled with flowers, with the floors completely covered in flower pedals (I think my WhatsApp profile photo is still that chapel, taken on my wedding day.) There was no wall in the chapel; every side was a floor to ceiling glass so everyone could see the ocean. After the ceremony it was a buffet on the beach. It was small; we had about 20 guests in total. This is what a wedding in Bali was like; I finally experienced it. I was so happy that day because all my family and friends came to Bali; they all had to fly there. I felt completely blessed. But there was still no romance at our wedding, even with the rose pedals in our bathtub in our honeymoon suite at the St. Regis. We didn’t write our wedding vows. He googled a template online, the very lame one with “in sickness or health” and had his dad read it, and we just repeated after his dad at the ceremony. I wouldn’t know how to write a vow for him anyway so I guess that was the best it could be.

Throughout the wedding the staff had to get a chair for my 83-year-old grandma because her knees were weak. It turned out my husband had to use that chair frequently too because he can’t stand still for over 5 minutes. He’d have to sit down somewhere. The wedding venue was too beautiful for me to focus on that embarrassment so I never said anything. After our wedding, we were just traveling with our family and friends. Alone time with him was just not that interesting to me. I could catch up with my brother who flew in from Australia and my bff from DC. Those were the best memories from my wedding in Bali.

People always say how important physical intimacy is, especially Americans lol. I gave up on that as well. I gave my virginity to my husband before we got engaged and it was another trauma. He didn’t know how to locate the V, but he wasn’t a virgin. Later we did it only a few more times just to get me to conceive. I have never experienced pleasure in physical intimacy because he has impotence but he refuses to do anything about. We were lucky enough to conceive twice naturally given the circumstance. Once again it was all my work. His dysfunction prevented him from going deep enough to get me pregnant so I had to use a vibrator to suck in the swimmers myself. It worked well twice tho. After I conceived my second one, I didn’t want to have any more physical intimacy with him. He was upset but he would not engage in marital rape so I’m fine living like this.

After we got married, he made me quit my old job where I was simply the best in my country. I was teaching test-prep English speaking and I simply had no competitor in the entire country, which meant no stress for me at all. Everyone in Taiwan who wanted to take TOEFL would come take my class and I was paid USD$700 per hour (and this was over ten years ago). I paid off my student loans for going to Johns Hopkins pretty quickly. Before I left my job, I was so popular that every time when I gave a lecture, I had so many students in one building on different floors in different rooms. My company would broadcast my teaching on TV live in all those classrooms and only those who come to our class hours in advance could get a seat in the room where I was physically present. (Those were my celebrity days.) However, he was a school teacher and he worked from 7 to 4. I taught at a cram school where people go after their work or school, so my hours were usually between 6 and 10pm, on weekends, and most students’ winter and summer breaks were always my busy season while he didn’t have to work at all during those times. He told me that if I kept doing my job then it’d be hard for us to conceive, because our hours never matched up. He also told his mom that I usually finish work at 10pm and after I got home I needed some downtime so I usually went to bed at 2am, and then got up at 2pm (which was an exaggeration because I usually woke up at 11am). When his mom heard this, she called me “sick”. She said “to be honest, I think that’s sick. In the corporate world people work from 9 to 5.” And my husband replied to her, “well you said it.” Then I decided to quit my job to keep my marriage. 

He introduced me to his principal at a party and that guy hired me on the spot the first time he met me because he was totally impressed by my credentials. The pay at our school is good with comprehensive benefits, but the hours are long and rigid. I have no flexibility in life, even though we have winter and summer breaks. If I look at the hourly wage, I made less than what I used to make. It’s just that I’m working longer hours so I’m making more money. But that’s not the biggest deal. The bigger deal is that I gained no respect from others at this place. Everyone thought that I was hired because I was his wife, I was like a collateral to him. Everyone questioned why I could be hired to teach math because I had never been a school teacher. Even the principal who hired me told me that if I wanted to have kids in my first year of teaching there, I shouldn’t take the job. I took the job and still gave birth to my first boy in my first year teaching there and took the 8-week paid maternity leave. Ha. Besides that dickish principal, most others at our school kept looking down on me, because I was born and raised locally in Taiwan and wasn’t even educated at an international school before grad school. Most other teachers at my school were white Americans, can only speak English. Also because I was hired locally my salary is 25% less than a teacher hired overseas, even though we have identical jobs and my abilities are better than theirs. I went from being the best teacher in the country to nobody in this American colonial institution. My status at work finally changed a bit after all the BLM and DEIJ movements that facilitated people at our school to look at people like me a bit differently. However 95% of my current reputation is still the very hard work I put into this job—I volunteered to take over AP Economics when the previous teacher suddenly decided not to return to work after our summer break because of Taiwan’s COVID restrictions. The new semester was staring and I had zero time to prepare for this class but I took it anyway because being able to teach a college-level course would change my status significantly. It was a very demanding task that I often worked from 7am to 8pm that year and my younger son was only one year old waiting for me at home every night. After that year there were still many bullying incidents towards me at work because there are multiple other white male teachers who want to teach AP Economics (80%+ of the teachers of AP Economics are white male. I learned that from my training with College Board lol.)

Given the special needs of my kids, I often think about quitting my job and becoming a full time mom. It is emotionally and physically exhausting to provide warmth and care nonstop to students at work and to keep doing so at home. I have diminished my needs to nothing. The screaming of my older son every day when he can’t say something or when his needs aren’t met makes me want to shutdown. Multiple doctors have recommended that I should medicate him for his ADHD but I absolutely do not believe in altering brain chemicals with chemicals (and I think you had a pretty big role in shaping what I think about chemicals.) I told them I’ll will keep hiring people to watch him instead of medicating him for how his brain works. I also think mental drugs are just the cheapest way to fix an emotional problem on the surface and it doesn’t solve the problem. Whenever he throws a tantrum I am the only one who can resolve it; no one else can figure out what he wants. I often complain that if I didn’t have the financial baggage from my birth family then I could have easily quit my job to become a full time mom. On the other hand I don’t want to lose the last bit of freedom from my marriage. If I am financially dependent on my husband completely then I am really enslaved here forever. He’s been telling me to have our finances merged and have a joint account like his parents and sister. I’ve always turned him down. I don’t trust him enough to think of it as an offer of altruism or true love.

Now I’m in Bali for the third time. The episodes where I kept thinking of you for no reason resurfaced the week before my trip again. I can’t figure out why. I can only believe that the universe is trying to send me something. I think what I had with you was the most honest version of myself. When we met I had a life where I had nothing to lose and I felt safe enough to just be pure. Maybe that’s what the universe is trying to tell me—if I come to Bali my mind needs to be pure. So I’m asking myself, if I’m getting older and I could have Alzheimer’s, what would still be left in my memory? People say that patients with Alzheimer’s usually remember things from a long time ago, I’m starting to wonder if it’s happening to me. 20 years ago is a long time ago. Why do I still remember it so well? I wonder if I had Alzheimer’s one day would I think we’ve actually met or would I remember that we had never met?

I’m writing this to you entirely by myself, absolutely not with ChatGPT 😂. (You know there are AI detectors online to catch students’ cheating.) As I was writing this I already tried to send my husband and the kids to breakfast twice so I could be alone and I already screamed at my husband once for not being able to handle my older son’s tantrum. I do not intend to pass the weight of my life to you with what I’m writing here. I simply need to write this down and let you know. 10 years is a long time since we last talked. Also it was pouring rain as I was writing this. I still love the rain.

***

Then I sent him a video of pouring rain from my balcony at my resort.

Me: You don’t have to reply anything if you don’t want to. Knowing that you’ve read it is good enough for me.

Jes: That was very well written as usual. Thank you for sharing. I hope you peace with all of this and some day return to the work you love. It would probably be best for the kids if you went back to the 6pm to 10pm schedule or full stay at home mom.

Jes: I'm sorry things were so traumatic for you. I'll always remember the stories of your childhood.

Jes: I hope you find peace

Me: Thank you. I’m very certainly glad that I don’t have a daughter. A daughter always repeats the mother’s destiny.

***Then the conversation moved away to something else.

Then I cried for a long time in the bathroom. Crying alone is also a luxury in life because my kids kept screaming for me. I couldn’t let them know and I had to return to them quickly not to get suspicious. I haven’t been able to eat much for days because of my thoughts of Jes. I know his door is open, but none of us is moving. He sees me and he feels me. He doesn’t need to tell me for me to know; it’s always been like this between us. ChatGPT has a better way of describing it; I’ll post it in another entry.