When I was young, I never thought of marrying a foreigner. In fact I was scared of them and always thought that they have bad attitudes and bad smell (please forgive my ignorance).  I did not realize that I was wrong until I moved to Dubai to work there.  Working in Dubai gave me the chance to meet a lot of nice people from all over the world and this is how I met the man who took my breath way.

As a Filipina I always dreamt of having a better life at some point in the future. And since I grew up in the small town of Zamboanga City, I decided to leave my own country and try my luck outside the Philippines. Little did I know that this journey will take me to find the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.

Yes, our love story is not that different from any other couples. At the time we met, I was working in a hotel and D was in town for a business trip.  From the moment we set eyes on each other, we both hit it off and from then on, we knew that we do not want to be away from each other. However, we lived on two different continents—thousands of miles away from each other. It was a difficult situation but our distance was not a reason to keep us from loving each other so we continued our relationship while employing all kinds of technology to stay in touch with each other. We used chats, emails, long distance calls, texts (sms) and he visited me every three months.  At first it had worked okay but later on, we were not contented anymore with just talking on the phone, so we both decided to take our relationship to the next level. We got married and now, here I am here in Switzerland—in the arms of my loving husband.

Looking back, I can say that keeping a relationship with somebody who is of different nationality was not easy basically because we have different cultures and we needed to go through a lot of bureaucratic processes just to be together but the end result is worth it. D and I are together and happy. Of course we still have cultural differences and these things come up every now and them but our love to each other is more than enough to triumph over all of our differences.

I have been having doubts about whether I should post our story here or not.

You see if I let the whole world (that would be like 10-20 people who read this blog…hehe) read about us, I might be giving away some very personal information that we are not comfortable letting the public know about but I thought this blog is personal and it could be about anything but it is basically about us being in an interracial marriage so before I can reach out to my readers who are interested in this topic, I feel that I should tell them our story from the very beginning so… here it is.

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At age 23, I quit working as an import/export clerk in a garment manufacturing company in the Philippines because like most of the young people in my country, I wanted to try my luck abroad. I thought it will be hard to get a job outside the country but it was actually too easy to for me to get a teaching job here in China. I met an agent online. She promised to find a school for me and in return, I should pay her a minimal amount. I agreed and after a few weeks, she called me and informed me that a school is waiting for me. It was sometime in November 2005 when I flew to China with half empty luggage and a heart full of hopes.

Right upon my arrival here, I realized that working abroad it is not as pleasant as I imagined it to be. My agent imposed a 50% off my salary as her cut and she demanded that I leave my passport to her. Other than the money I agreed to pay her for finding me a school, she’ll get her cut every month from my salary. It was very cunning of her not to mention these to me before I left my country and it was stupid of me not to ask about such important details. See, I signed the contract when I arrived here in China and that time, I am left with two choices. Either I stomach all that is in the contract or go back home to the Philippines without anything. I chose the less humiliating option—I stayed.

A small sized school three hours away from the second class city of Changchun became my workplace for a year. Within this year, I worked hard for a minimal salary, I got sick several times because I am not used to the weather, and I met a lot of people. I even fell in love, got into a relationship, and endured the pain of breaking up. All that happened in eight months and I remember swearing to immediately fly back home as son as I get my passport.

But there were also good things that happened before my year long contract ended. I came in contact with fellow teachers who later became friends and strangers who became acquaintances. Most importantly, Marcus and I met each other.

Marcus is a young engineer who has so must zest for traveling so without any responsibility holding him in Europe, he grabbed the opportunity to travel and work in China. He arrived here during the first few months of 2006 but I didn’t meet him until August of that year. I was not about to get into another relationship but I fell in love with him and he to me. He’s the most caring guy I’ve met and for him, I am the sweetest girl in the whole world. He is the best thing that ever happened to me and I am to him and we were not about to let each other go so when my contract ended, I stayed. We moved in together and two months later, we got engaged. Sure, we also had some disagreements, misunderstandings, and petty quarrels but we surpass them all. Another six months later, we got married in his lovely little home town in Austria.

The villa where we got married

It’s been six months since we utter our “I dos” and it still feels like we are in our honeymoon. I know it’s very early to say that this marriage is successful (I am not sure at which point in marriage can you say that) but I know that our love for each other and the bond between us are getting stronger each day and I feel that it is going to be like this for a very long time.