Love that crosses oceans

I’m not the most romantic guy in the world, I’ll admit. But there is one little romantic gesture I can claim that many others cannot. I’ve crossed an ocean to be here with the one I love.

This was no skip across the pond, I can tell you. I met my wife – a Filipina – while working at a public television station in Boston back in 1993. She was fresh from a master’s program in journalism at Boston University, and had recently been hired in the same department as me. We hit it off, and came back to visit her family one Christmas (with a side trip to Boracay). Before you knew it, I was updating my passport and putting my wool sweaters and winter jackets into storage.

I’m starting to think this is the modus operandi of Filipinas living and working abroad, by the way. Not that they intend to snare foreigners and drag them back to the Philippines. Oh, no; I’m sure it’s nothing that deliberate. Things just turn out that way.

Living here for nine years has been an adventure, often exciting and fulfilling, and sometimes akin to a reality show that you just can’t zap away with a remote control. It’s taken years to settle down and get accustomed to living far away from Boston. I had to give up a lot – Tower Records, Fenway Park, Newbury Street, the Boston Common, the Museum of Fine Arts – but I got to see, write about and experience so much here: Taal Volcano, the Banaue rice terraces, the Chocolate Hills of Bohol, Baguio Christmases and Manila Bay sunsets, even a street revolution (EDSA 2). I got to swim with whale sharks and watch cockfights and even catch a glimpse of Imelda once in a while. You’re never lacking for surreal delights here in the Philippines.

Somehow I’ve managed to inveigle myself into the local scene by adopting the usual expression of the foreigner – jaw gaping wide, eyes popping out – whenever I write about the traffic, or the feasts, or the million and one little Filipino traits that you’ve all stopped noticing.

But most of all, I’ve built a family and a life here. I’ve been graciously adopted by my wife’s family, which is a priceless support system for any culture-shocked visitor. And we have a daughter who, at two years of age, still knows more Tagalog than I ever will.

The idea of "crossing an ocean" for love goes over big here, I’ve noticed. Especially during Valentine’s Day, which in the Philippines lasts a whole month. I remember my brother-in-law alluding to my migration at our wedding reception: "He came all he way around the world to be with her," he pointed out, "so I guess that shows what she means to him." This got a very warm response from the Filipino guests, as you might expect. It’s got a romantic ring to it. But here’s what kind of reception this familiar old line gets from my wife whenever I use it: "Phooey."

This is probably because she’s heard me invoke the line too often as an excuse, as in: "Hey, I came all the way over here to be with you, so cut me some slack."

"Nobody twisted your arm," she’s apt to retort. And I’m apt to remind her, gently, "Well, you did twist it, just a little bit..."

And this is why stock romantic lines don’t work on two people whose lives are so entwined. We know each other’s stories by heart, chapter and verse.

Right now my wife is out of town, in a foreign country.Being in the media, our paths often criss-cross, sometimes circling the globe. I find myself looking up the website of her hotel in my spare time, even though it’s written entirely in Swedish, just to get a sense of where she’s staying, what her surroundings are like. It helps me to place her in my mind, to locate her in my heart. It’s a cliché, but we feel each other’s absence at such times. Meanwhile, back in our day-to-day lives, we get on with our chores, run our separate errands, circling back to one another at strategic points. Our lives travel along circuitous paths that, while not always strictly parallel, still wind up in the same place at the end of each day. We know the value of a common finish line, at least.

There’s a kind of surrender involved in crossing to another culture, I’ve noticed. You are at the mercy of your surroundings. You trade in most of what you held as essential and replace it with – what? Whatever works best, usually. One gets a sense of this dislocation, this need to fill the void with something familiar, in the movie Lost in Translation. That movie speaks deeply and in subtle ways about this kind of surrender.

In the end, crossing the ocean was a good idea. I’m glad I took that step, the step that took me halfway around the world. Doing so has made my life immeasurably more interesting, more meaningful, and brought me closer to the one person I would still cross oceans to be with. Who knows what life would have been like without it?