My husband and I have just come back from watching a French movie, “Voyage en Chine.” A mother’s journey to the country and the people her only son loved. The son she was estranged from, she was too proud to reach out to. “I thought he should make the first move,” she said. Now it is too late.

My husband is like that son. He loved China, spoke Mandarin fluently, worked for the Chinese Foreign Language Press in Beijing and visited places where neither foreigner nor native had been allowed to go. This was 1970s post-Mao. He loved being in China.

I am like that son, too, only I fell in love, not with China, but with the sound of French. I majored in it in college, took classes  and never missed the monthly movie offering at the Alliance Française in Manila. I can still remember the thrill of actually understanding the French conversation around me at the French movie festival. There the similarity ends. I got depressed during my first year in France. Years later, when I worked for the French Embassy in Manila, I told my boss, “If I had met the French before I heard their language, I would never have studied it!”

Yet here I am, married to a Frenchman, but a Frenchman who loves China and the Chinese. I am Chinese, that is to say, the blood that runs through my veins is Chinese. But I was born and raised in the Philippines. There is a big Chinese community, made up mainly of people from Fujian, whose spoken language I do not understand because my parents are from Canton. Fookien and Cantonese are as different as German and French.

When I am in Hong Kong or Canton, I see how unChinese I am. And yet when I am in the Philippines, I am not a real Filipino-Chinese either. I do not speak Fookien, do not hang out with them or follow their traditions. Neither am I truly Filipino. How many times has my Filipina friend said, “Hay, Intsik ka talaga! How Chinese you are!”

Overseas Chinese were taken advantage of in Hong Kong and China. We did not get the smile (false or otherwise) given to foreigners for the top prices they paid but we weren’t given the local prices either. It was normal for a red-haired devil not to speak Chinese and when they did find one who did, he was much fêted. While we were looked down on for not knowing our own language and heritage. Shame on us!

So coming out of the movie tonight, my husband, who has refused to go back to China for fear of not finding the China he once knew among skyscrapers and McDonald’s, said, “I feel like going back there again.” And I, wondering if the kindness on screen was real.

He, exhilarated. I, jaded.