Today: rediscovered faye wong cd; ah, chinese pop...and i bought these white jeans for 10 toya!!! (that's 5 aust cents). white jeans! deliciously unpractical. and a cowboy-ish shirt for 20 toya. if only i'd brought my rm williams boots over..
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One of my friends turned 31 recently. She wants to get married; she’s been busy getting a degree and working, and now is worried – all her friends got married and had kids years ago; of her siblings (there are 6, she’s second eldest), she’s the only one who’s single and the only female without a child. After her birthday, she spoke to her family and her uncles are now on the look out: they’re going to find her 3 or 4 possible matches. Then, she’s decided, she’ll meet them, and ask them to spend time (living with) her parents, to make sure that they’ll all get along. And then she will marry.
(I asked someone else: do you think this will work? Will the uncles find suitable men? And will they in turn be willing to marry this girl? ‘Oh yes’ was the surprised response; of course.)
Another friend of mine, who’s still a young ‘un at 25, plans to get married when she’s 30. Her husband, she’s told me several times, must be able to climb a tree and kill a pig. She’s an urban girl, as are her parents, but they all spend holidays back in the village. And in the village a man would be laughed all the way back to the city if he couldn’t climb a tree or kill a pig.
She has a boyfriend (who can do both), but there was trouble recently when another girl made her move on him. She did this by moving from Moresby up to Rabaul, where he lives; she befriended his mother, spent time gardening with her (this is important; forget the boy, to get in you must get in with his parents), and ended up moving in with the parents for a while. The boy (somehow) only realised her intentions when the whole community began openly speaking about their engagement. He was in a bind: he didn’t want to marry her, but everyone was expecting it and if he didn’t he would not only embarrass himself and his family in front of the community (and his family would give him a hard time for months afterwards), but bring great shame to her. He chose the hard route and told the girl he didn’t want to marry her. His family had to pay compensation to the girl and her family; it had to be pretty big, because who would want to marry such a girl now? After she’d publicly declared her intentions for another man; and after she’d been publicly rejected? They made the payment in the traditional form, with shells, but I think cash would have also been involved.
The girl went back to Moresby, and my friend still has her boyfriend.
I think of my Australian friends and the different ways issues of the heart are negotiated.
I’ve been thinking about the cross-cultural relationship question since I held up someone at a bar and debated what he thought. Actually, that’s not entirely true: it’s been on my mind since I met P, a highlander. He was chatting to my boss and we were introduced, we talked for 5 minutes and then I left. In my mind, we’d established a “hello” on-the-street relationship. But the next day he turned up to my work, with his family in the back of a truck, wanting to take me away for lunch. He was totally drunk and not keen to take no for an answer. (Needless to say, the answer he got was no.) Then he rang work a few times, and I ran into him on the street – but, sober, we had a good chat and he gave me a bilum and things are sorted now. I know that connections are much more immediate here – you won’t spend 6 weeks making a friend, it’ll be 6 minutes – but what that connection is going to ask of you is something I still find unpredictable. It keeps life interesting.
Someone else – someone a little less insane – has asked me out twice, but both times I’ve kind of avoided a direct answer. He’s a great guy, but I feel too new: I don’t pick up on the cultural cues, I don’t know the expectations or obligations, I wouldn’t know what I was getting into until I made a mistake. Nor would I want to dictate what I wanted/expected, to set up rules about how it was going to work. And that’s not even considering the community pressures here…Aside from these minor anxieties, I’m not convinced by cross-cultural relationships generally; I have the utmost admiration for couples who try them, but.…as well as the overt work, they involve a lot of sacrifice, often on one person’s behalf; and there’s a certain intimacy you lose, that intimacy you have between people of the same culture, it’s not just in-jokes but a way of being, a way of understanding how things work, even a way of moving throughout the world – to lose that is too much of a cost for me.
Of course, I may change my story within two years. Watch out if you know how to climb a tree.
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