Intercultural relationships in Australia

Australia has a successful, multicultural society, as demonstrated by the following statistics.

QUOTE
The 2016 Census shows that … nearly half (49 per cent) of Australians had either been born overseas (first generation Australian) or one or both parents had been born overseas (second generation Australian) …  In 2016, there were over 300 separately identified languages spoken in Australian homes. More than one-fifth (21 per cent) of Australians spoke a language other than English at home.
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Ref: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected] … 0Release3, accessed 19 March 2018

QUOTE
In 2016, ... 31.6% of couples were born in different countries, and 13.9% were born in the same overseas country.
UNQUOTE
Ref: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/3310.0, accessed 19 March 2018

This figure does not show the intercultural marriages between people of different cultures who were both born in Australia. The number of intercultural marriages would be much higher if these were included. Intercultural marriages are common in Australia and widely accepted as being normal. 

I am an Australian born male with English, German and Welsh ancestry. My wife is Vietnamese born with Vietnamese and Chinese ancestry.
When meeting a Vietnamese woman in Vietnam, as I did, it is quite normal for her to introduce you straight away to her family, so that way the family can give a provisional approval to the relationship or not. Although my wife had previously been married, had an eight year old son, and was forty years old when we married, I still had to officially ask her mother permission to marry.

We have known each other for twenty years and been married for sixteen years. We have a ten year old daughter, born in Vietnam. My wife is very happy living in Australia, and after growing up for eight years in Vietnam my daughter never wants to live there again, although we do like to holiday in Vietnam.

For me the advantage of being in a multicultural marriage is that I am happily living with the woman I love. We look after each other and our daughter, who is still at school in Australia.  That my wife is Buddhist and I am Christian is not a problem, because we understand and respect each other's religion. My daughter is learning both religions and can choose her path later. 

We all speak, read and write both English and Vietnamese. One advantage of knowing a second language is being able to choose the easier language to say something. It is often far easier to express something in Vietnamese than English, even for me.

We eat both Vietnamese and Australian food, speak both languages, and celebrate cultural events in both cultures. For example, both Christmas and Buddha's birthday; and Western New Year as well as Vietnamese Lunar New Year.  Being in an intercultural marriage allows us to we have a foot in both camps, which makes life so much more interesting in every way.

One minor problem for me is the Vietnamese attitude to time. To arrive an hour late to an appointment is acceptable, to arrive two hours late is perhaps sometimes stretching the point. I get round this problem by accepting my wife's “rubber time” when it is Vietnamese friends who have invited us for dinner, and using my Australian time when  Australians invite us for dinner.

Another cultural difference is that Vietnamese go to extraordinary lengths to avoid answering “Yes” or “No”, and so the answer often has nothing to do with the question. For example, if I ask, “Do you want to go swimming?” my wife could answer, “I haven't washed my hair.”  I just have to keep asking the question until she answers, “Yes” or “No”, or point out, “You haven't answered my question yet.” 

Another linguistic problem is that the Vietnamese language where ever possible omits personal pronouns and does not use verb tense, so that often I do not understand a story my wife is telling me, because she has omitted who is doing what to whom and when. And when my wife extends this habit of no pronouns or tense into English, the whole story completely falls apart even worse than in Vietnamese.  It makes life interesting. 

Also interesting are the many times that I over hear Vietnamese people talking, not knowing that I understand every word. While waiting with a tall Australian workmate at a Vietnamese bread shop one day, the two female sales assistants were contemplating the comparative sizes of our penises. When paying for our lunch rolls I commented in Vietnamese, “I do hope these are tasty rolls.”  The stunned look on their faces was precious. Ho ho!

My Vietnamese wife used to get a lot of odd looks in Vietnam when walking with our daughter, who is very pale and very Western looking. Strangers would often ask her, “Whose child is this?”, or “Is this your grand daughter?”  Some people simply refused to believe her when she answered, “She is my own  birth child.”  Nobody asks her in Australia, where multicultural marriages are common. 

One by one over many years almost all my Australian friends have married Asian wives from the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand and my son married a lovely, polite fellow student from mainland China.  Indeed Australia is a lucky, multicultural country.