The Place I Call Home by Anna Lo

Author:Anna Lo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstaff Press

11

Marriage Breakup

Whilst I was devoting much of my energy to developing the CWA and raising awareness of cultural diversity in Northern Ireland, my personal life was going downhill.

By nature, my husband, David, was a shy and quiet individual with great honesty and integrity. He is one of the most honest people I have ever known. David had an unsettled childhood, and he became very anxious when he was two years old. At that time his mother, Trudy, contracted polio and was hospitalised for a year. David, meanwhile, was put into the care of his rather stern paternal grandparents in an unfamiliar environment. Trudy recovered, fortunately, although with lifelong damage to her leg. In addition, his parents’ marriage was not a happy union, involving some incidents of domestic violence, which David witnessed.

His father, John, was a bank official and the family moved around Northern Ireland as John worked in different branches. They moved back to Belfast after a spell of several years in Fivemiletown, County Tyrone, so that David could attend the Royal Belfast Academic Institution after he passed the eleven-plus (the first pupil from his rural primary school to do so).

Understandably, David found it hard to fit into the new school, being all alone with a country accent and a nervous disposition. He was picked on and the episodes of bullying made him dislike the school environment. Being a very intelligent child, he did well enough academically, but he left education after his A levels to become a journalist, a career he always wanted, given his love of reading and flair for writing. He was already successfully submitting articles to newspapers on his travels as a schoolboy and was promised a reporter’s position in a provincial newspaper published by the Belfast Telegraph if he passed his A levels. After working there for a couple of years, he joined the Belfast Telegraph itself at its offices on Royal Avenue, Belfast.

In stark contrast to David’s childhood, mine was calm, despite the lack of material comfort. My parents were devoted and loving to each other and to us children, even though at times I felt that my father was distant. I thrived in school and, although it didn’t work out, I would have been keen to take my studies further. As a young woman in Hong Kong, I was articulate, outgoing, practical and an eternal optimist. My uncles and aunts probably saw me as rather brazen, dumping a boyfriend in a steady government job to run off to London and marry a foreigner.

Interracial marriage was not that common in Hong Kong in the 1970s and there was a perception that western men tended to have many vices, such as drinking and infidelity. My parents were not able to come to our wedding, but my mother wrote soon afterwards that her home would always have an open door for me if the marriage should not work out. This was really rather liberal of my mother, as divorce in those days was taboo in Chinese society.

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