CHAPTER NINETEEN
THERE WAS a tossup between going to Vietnam and going back to Taiwan. I had a lot of friends in Taiwan and a girlfriend there that I only seemed to see once every couple of months. The trip to Vietnam was a lot cheaper but I wanted to see how things were going with us as a couple. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and after the time I had spent in Bangkok I was only re-evaluating my life and setting a course. I was up by 7am writing, gym by 12 noon, and writing some more as it came to me during the day, but basically trying to find things to do. I needed a deeper focus in my writing and I knew it.
How?
My only thought was to slow things down and see what I needed to write and why.
Things had been strained lately and I could feel the tension she was getting from her family and also her friends. For some odd reason I had never really met any of her friends. I was like the mystery man kept at bay and what was said behind closed doors, or behind my understanding of Mandarin, may have been different from what I was told. I had a habit of always believing her and usually I didn’t doubt whatever she told me.
After a year into the relationship I think I caused a lot of family problems. Being of the western culture the rule is whatever my children made outside the house working was the parents’ money and I was responsible to raise them up so one day they could do the same for their new family. Not so in the Chinese custom. As long as you lived at home the money you made was not your own and usually only a small part of it you got to keep. I argued with her until I changed that and I think it caused a lot of problems with the father.
Soon after that time I was invited to the family house for dinner. It was a large dinner and very well prepared. I had to bring the father two cartons of cigarettes which is the custom