In February 2022, a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, I sent my partner a panicked text: “Maybe we should get married.”
He thought I was joking. For years I had told him I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to get married, despite him having made clear that he wanted to marry me. I am the child of divorced parents; I was skeptical of the utility of marriage. At best, marriage was an (often expensive) expression of love — love that could be expressed in other ways that didn’t involve a change in legal status. At worst, I feared, marriage was a social and legal prison.
But that was before Russia’s invasion, before pundits and op-eds in Western media outlets began asking: Will this embolden China to invade Taiwan? Within a day of the attack, I began receiving messages from friends and family asking if I was sure it was safe to stay in Taiwan. Maybe it was time to move back?
I had been living at least part-time in Taipei for more than six years. I had moved here on a Fulbright, fully intending to return to New Jersey once the 10-month award period was over. But at the end of the fellowship, I wasn’t ready to leave.
Now I had a life here: a path I jogged, orchids I watered, friends I went out with. Most importantly, I had a partner I loved, a good man who reminded me to bring an umbrella if it looked like rain, who left me love notes and cut fruit on days depression weighed me down, who took me on impromptu trips to see fireflies in the mountains.
The problem was that my partner is Taiwanese. I don’t mean Taiwanese-American, like me. I mean local Taiwanese, someone who had never spent much time around Americans, fluent in Mandarin and Taiwanese and nothing else. I have joked with him that most Taiwanese who date foreigners improve their English. With us, I improved my Mandarin.
I have worries about our different backgrounds: if my mediocre Mandarin and his nonexistent English would stifle our communication; if our different food preferences might cause friction; if we might someday disagree on where to raise children; if he could learn English well enough to move to America someday; if the sum of our differences would leave me feeling lonely and never fully understood.
One thing I never used to worry about, because it never occurred to me, was what to do in case of war.
But that day, the barrage of ominous media coverage and texts from friends finally got to me. I started to think about the scenario in which Taiwan was invaded by China, and I evacuated to America. If we weren’t married, would I have to leave him behind?
“I don’t want to be separated if something happens,” I said to him. “I want to know that if I go back to America, you can come with me.”
After a long pause, he texted, “But I’d be worried about leaving my mother.”
“Maybe we can bring her with us.”
“She’ll never leave,” he said. “She has too many relatives and friends here.” And what he said next nearly broke my heart. “If I leave, what if I can never return? What if I regret it for the rest of my life?”
I understood too well that fear. I had the same fear when, on March 18, 2020, I boarded the last flight from New York to Taipei that would arrive in Taiwan before the country closed its borders to foreigners without residence permits. I hadn’t been sure I was making the right decision.
As my mother waved goodbye to me at the departure gate, I felt a wave of nausea. I didn’t know how the pandemic would unfold, if I would ever see my mother again, if I was making a choice that I would spend the rest of my life regretting. And yet I boarded that flight, in part because I didn’t want to be separated from the man waiting for me back in Taiwan.
That night, two years after the flight, my partner and I sat on the couch, somber and serious, and discussed it again. Should we get married? Would he come with me to the States if war broke out?
“Couldn’t you convince your mother to come?” I asked.
No, he said, she would never be convinced.
“What if we had a child?” I asked. We had planned to try for a baby in the next month. Despite my misgivings about marriage, I had always known I wanted a baby. I’d even told him it mattered more to me that we had a child together than for us to be legally bound.
He paused. “If we had a child,” he said, “then of course I would go. I can’t let our baby grow up without their father.”
“So I’m not enough but a child is?” It was an unreasonable question, a touch petulant. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand his dilemma. I just wanted to understand his limits, his rationale. I wanted to know what to expect from him.
“It’s my mother,” he said.
I nodded. Of course. What is a woman you have only known for a few years compared to the one who birthed and raised you?
“What would you do if you were me?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. We were at a stalemate. His response had rendered the question of marriage moot — after all, even if we got married and he could come with me, he’d said he probably wouldn’t.
We didn’t discuss it again and China didn’t invade Taiwan. And then a month later, I discovered that what I thought was a three-day hangover was a baby.
Even after I learned about the pregnancy, I was wary of marriage. I had heard the laws in Taiwan often favor the husband, that non-consensual divorce is hard to attain, that child custody cases historically favored the father.
But as the little bean inside me grew, I began to reconsider. I thought about how much more difficult it would be for our family, bureaucratically, if my partner and I weren’t legally recognized as a unit. We had already missed out on certain government subsidies for pregnant women because we weren’t married; if we remained unmarried, my child’s birth certificate wouldn’t name his father.
It was also more than that. Now, with a baby, my partner and I were inextricably tied; we weren’t just two people who had chosen each other because we liked each other. We had become a family. It was no longer a matter of not wanting to be separated. Now a forced separation would be a tragedy in our nascent family story that would alter the course of my child’s whole life.
We got married that July, a muted civil affair at the household registration office in Taipei with two of our friends serving as witnesses. My partner wore a suit; I wore a cheap white dress. After we signed our marriage papers, we exchanged $20 rings we had bought at the night market the day before. Inscribed on the edge of my husband’s ring is an aphorism: “Joy is joy doubled, sorrow is sorrow halved.”
A few months later, I gave birth to our son, both of us nearly losing our lives in the process. It was the first time I saw my husband weep. For days, he cared for us with patient tenderness, without complaint despite his sleeplessness. I watched him cradle our baby against his bare skin, his eyes hollow with dark circles, and thought: How lucky I am to be married to this man.
Our son is nearly 2 now. We research preschools even as my family in America continues to ask when we’re moving back. They say China will likely attack Taiwan by 2030. I nod and listen but, like many Taiwanese, push those thoughts away. I must plan for the near future, one that assumes my son will go to school in Taipei and his paternal grandmother will live 10 minutes away.
My husband and I don’t talk about what will happen if war breaks out. We don’t talk about what it would mean to leave his mother behind or for him to adjust to a country where he doesn’t speak the language. We know where our marriage papers are, both the original certificate and its English translation, in a drawer next to our passports.
We take our son to the playground and eat noodles and have dance parties to “Baby Shark.” Even as speculation swirls, even as we pray to never face an impossible choice, we live our lives here. It’s all we can do. And take solace in the knowledge that, whatever comes next, we’ll face it together.
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