Asians Ex Diary //top\\ Info

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.

I still have your kimchi in my fridge sometimes. Not the good homemade kind — the store-bought one you said was “acceptable.” You were always generous with your critiques.

I didn’t have an answer then.

Dear Diary,

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

Things I Never Said in English

Now I do: because some heartbreaks are too precise for translation. Because here’s the thing no one tells you

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.