TODAY, let’s talk about love and how it has defied the coronavirus.
Doug Perez taught mathematics and science in a university in Wuhan during the last two years. When the coronavirus began to spread, hundreds of Americans were evacuated from Hubei province by the US State Department. The 28-year-old, who grew up in San Francisco, was not one of them.
Perez chose to stay behind because he did not want to abandon his Chinese girlfriend who, along with her brother, joined him in his apartment when the outbreak began. Now, their daily routine includes cooking, watching television and scrubbing surfaces.
“Sometimes I find I’m out of time, which is crazy,” he told the New York Times early this week. “You’d think I have all the time in the world but with the coronavirus, a lot of time is spent cleaning.”
Gabrielle Autry, 26, is also an American but unlike Perez, she lives in the eastern city of Huangzou. At the start of the outbreak, she wanted to leave and started looking for flights that would take her to the US. Eventually, she dropped the idea of going home because it would mean being separated from her Chinese fiance who is barred from entering the US because of the ban that the country imposed on travelers from China.
They’re stuck at home a little bored, the Times reported in its Feb. 9 issue. But Autry is unfazed. “Together it’s ok, but alone it would be terrible,” she said. “I just couldn’t fathom it.”
The story would have been different if they were married, the Times said. The Chinese husband would have been allowed to accompany Autry to the US.
But how easy is it for a foreigner to marry a Chinese man or woman in China?
In 1978, there was not a single inter-racial marriage in China, a BBC article on Oct. 24, 2013 reported, citing government sources. During the Cultural Revolution, China was closed to the world, public displays of affection were punished and any discussion of sex was considered Western spiritual pollution, the article aptly titled “Mixed Marriages in China a labour of love” read.
For a Chinese man to marry a Western woman was rebellious in a sense during that time and Chinese families were wary or disappointed by such unions, the report said, adding that the parents caution their children that “foreigners could be friends but never lovers or wives.”
All these, however, changed with reform and China’s opening up, the report said. “A sexual revolution has taken place in China; from the way people are dressing, couples holding hands in the streets in main cities, and young people becoming less inhibited about sex.”
It was in the big cities that the surge in inter-racial relationships was most apparent, BBC said. A Chinese actress who returned to Beijing was struck by the number of Western men dating Chinese women. “In the West, Asian women are portrayed as exotic beauties; a librarian in public but kinky in the bedroom. In China, the Western fantasy meets reality,” she said in 2012.
The stories of Doug Perez and Gabrielle Autry and their respective partners do not fit the fantasy versus reality pattern, however. You see only love in their choice of life together in a land besieged by a deadly virus over being torn apart because one has decided to flee to safety abandoning the other who cannot.
And so we celebrate their stories.