It would be an understatement to say that Shivaji Das and Yolanda Yu grew up in vastly different cultures. Shivaji was born in Lumding, a small town in Assam, while Yolanda was born in Shenyang in north-eastern China. Neither had any great knowledge of the other’s country. “I had only a vague idea about China, although we lived a mere 150km from the Tibetan border,” writes Shivaji in the book on Indian-Chinese couples that he co-authored with Yolanda—Rebels, Traitors, Peacemakers: True Stories of Love and Conflict in Indian-Chinese Relationships. “My parents often talked about China, but only of their struggles during the 1962 war, when Chinese forces nearly reached Lumding, of how they ran to bomb shelters the moment they heard the sirens, of how food became scarce and they were forced to live on potatoes.”
Yolanda, on the other hand, always thought of India as “exotic”. She remembers being fascinated by the devil-turned-Indian princess in the TV drama, Journey to the West. She also loved Rabindranath Tagore’s poems. “From these poems, I formed a magical image of India where women in braided hair covered with a delicate veil walked to the river accompanied by the melody of their anklet bells,” she writes.
Shivaji and Yolanda spoke to me about their relationship and the hurdles they faced over Zoom from Singapore, where they are settled now. I ask them what their conception of a life partner was and whether the other conformed to it. “I thought the only way to get married was through an arranged marriage,” says Shivaji. “Back then, love marriages were looked down upon. Because I was good in studies, I thought there would be lots of options.” Unfortunately, both the women his parents found through matrimonial adverts got ticked off by Shivaji’s “pompous declarations of atheism”. He gave up the idea, and instead joined an online dating platform. The filter he used to search was “no religion” or “atheist”.
For Yolanda, it was a more complex picture. She had grown up watching her father betray her mother. “I used to imagine that I would fall in love with someone and then get dumped,” she says. “So I thought that maybe I should never fall in love.” But fate had other plans for her when she met Shivaji on the dating platform. “I was intrigued because he had described himself as a ‘writer wannabe’,” says Yolanda. “I thought people were either writers or they were not. I had never heard the word ‘wannabe’ before.” They met outside a store selling used books and spent hours chatting about the “oppression of family, base and superstructure, radical education and, of course, religion as the opium of the masses”. Both were hooked. After months of dating, he proposed to her on a manual ferris wheel in India. She said “yes, yes, yes”, more distracted by the strange contraption they were on, where two men pulled a bar to keep the wheel turning. Even after they got married, in many ways, it was not easy. Yolanda remembers coming to India for the first time. While visiting Shivaji’s sister in Assam, a group of youngsters loitering at a traffic junction yelled at Yolanda, “No eyes, no eyes.” In Singapore, too, they have faced discrimination, like hostile looks from older people in public transport. Yolanda remembers fighting with a taxi driver because of his animosity towards Indians, who he called dirty and lazy. Even culturally, Shivaji and Yolanda had much to adjust to. When their in-laws visited, even simple things like whether to set the table with bowls (which is the Chinese way) or plates became a conundrum. In the beginning, Shivaji’s family would speak in Bengali when they sat together, and Yolanda was left in the dark. But soon, she eased into the rhythm. “Listening to Tagore and Nazrul songs was also part of their routine,” she writes in the book. “These songs would play for hours. I, too, began to enjoy these soul-soothing songs.... I learned to sing [Tagore’s] song ‘Ami Chini Go Chini Tomare’. It means, ‘You stranger from a distant land, you are familiar to me’.”
Shivaji also talks about the difficulties of adjusting to the Chinese culture, whether it was finding cold water to drink (which is not popular in China) or being unable to wear slim-fits (the Chinese like to “pad up” during winter; otherwise, it is seen as a sign of penury). But other than these hiccups, he enjoyed China. He found the people curious and helpful, with shopkeepers calling him ‘Haizi’ (child). The food was great too, including the “trotters, intestines and worms”.
But the person who gets to enjoy both cultures equally is their daughter, Truhi Yu Das. It is sometimes not easy being the child of an interracial couple, with the risk of being bullied in school. But she also has the advantage of being able to easily navigate the world’s two largest cultures. Their hope for their daughter is that she can be a citizen of the world, unburdened by racial or cultural divides. “We encourage her to pick up little bits of all cultures: a bit of Balinese dance, some phrases in Khmer, a culinary experience in Vietnam,” writes Shivaji. “Maybe she can be free of all baggage that bind us, but be loaded with all humanity’s achievements that make us so magnificent.”