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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This thread is a good example of how little Americans understand Asian culture or any other cultures in that matter. [/quote]

Culture be damned - OP is a grown man he can go to his son's wedding if he wants to.
[i]not allowed[/i] :roll: 
 [/quote]

As I said...[/quote]

As you said what?
Last I checked from a cultural standpoint Vietnam is a traditionally patriarchal society and traditionally Vietnamese woman have limited rights and take a secondary place in the family.
So from a traditional culture standpoint his wife isn't in a position to tell the OP jack shit unless she went and got herself American-ified.

[img]https://media1.tenor.com/images/b1b9f637e9618cf2f1157c38b6a4450f/tenor.gif?itemid=5710743[/img][/quote]

Having married into an Asian family, I know that this is not true. The husband is honored as the head of the family. But in fact, the wife is in charge and controls all the money and puts the husband on an allowance. This is what is meant by the term “Iron Butterfly.”  This was my FIL’s downfall because, for some reason, my MIL, who had been a good money manager, for some reason started investing in these get rich quick schemes and bankrupted my FIL. Shortly there after, she died of a sudden and completely unexpected heart attack.

But I have seen this happen over and over again. When my then Asian girlfriends’ parents came visiting, they had to hide their White boyfriends. My Asian wife’s parents accepted me but demanded that their two sons marry women from their original country. My wife’s youngest brother did marry such a woman. The middle brother, however, married a White woman, which horrified my wife’s parents. That brother is an anesthesiologist and is quite well off. After the marriage, my in laws kept sending my BIL information on how to get a divorce. But then they had a daughter who looks totally Asian. My father in law kept trying to get my BIL to take her to the local cultural center to learn the language but he never did. Eventually, my BIL did divorce his wife. For years his daughter would not speak to him, but everything seems OK now.

My father’s Jewish father was deeply offended when my mother’s Presbyterian father did not attend my parents’ wedding and asked if her father did not consider our family to be good enough.

When I was dating my wife, my father told me that we should never have children because biracial children have difficult lives. I blew up at my father, who had been on the forefront of the Civil Rights movement, said that. My mother attended our marriage but my father did not. Well, we have a ten year old son. He is very bright, is a national chess champion and worked as a magazine model in NYC before I changed jobs and moved to D.C.  My wife thinks he looks mixed but my FIL and I think that he looks White. He’s on the autism spectrum and one would think that he would be bullied, as are a number of other children at his school. But all the girls like him and so he has a lot of friends. My FIL also thinks he is treated well because, like a lot of Eurasian children, he’s quite good looking.

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen. One of my best friends from grad school was in love with a woman who was perfect for him. They both enjoyed hiking, camping, and basically roughing it.  But his mother strongly disapproved because she was not Jewish, and my friend broke it off. It was partly his own decision, too. He told me that to raise a Jewish child takes two Jewish parents. That was not true in my own case but that’s because, in some ways, my Protestant mother was much more Jewish than my father. My mother is an ardent Zionist. My father’s family, like many Jewish families who had been rich in America for many generations, was anti Zionist and he was a member of the Philanthropic Board of the Americans Council for Judaism, an anti Zionist organization which at that time was made up of primarily old money Reform Jews who funded schools and hospitals for Palestinians. But I never joined the organization and have no idea what it’s like or who belongs to it now.

But my friend who broke off with his non Jewish soulmate ended up marrying the sister of the wife of his firm’s senior partner. Even though she hated hiking and camping and loved cosmetics and nice clothes, which my friend had no regard for, she was willing to convert and it seemed like a great match professionally. But his firm ended up laying him off, as it did most of its associates. Last time I discussed his marriage with him, he sounded down about it and there were many reasons not to marry. But that was a long time ago and they have children now. I cannot imagine him being anything other than a loving and devoted father so I imagine things are different now.

But the point is that it just isn’t realistic to say that because a family moves from their country to America we should be surprised that it is still important that they marry into their own culture. I knew a Vietnamese student in grad school who had been a member of the Viet Cong but had been imprisoned after the North took over, as were many of the Viet Cong because although they were communists, they didn’t want to blindly obey the orders from the North who had a different culture and spoke a different dialect. So we can’t just say that they should have stayed in Vietnam.

My 100% American Greek friends tell me that their parents insist that they marry Greeks. It’s just the way it is. [/quote]

:shock: TL; DR.[/quote]

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