Asians Ex Diary //free\\ May 2026

Last night, I found an old receipt from that Thai grocery store we used to go to. The one where your mom would buy frozen pandan leaves and I’d get shrimp paste in a jar that looked like it survived a war. You used to joke, “Our love is inter-Asian — same trauma, different dialects.”

Dear Diary,

Because here’s the thing no one tells you about being Asian and falling in love with another Asian from a different Asian country: you spend half the time bonding over the similarities (rice, filial piety, saving plastic bags) and the other half quietly decoding each other’s wounds. Your family’s brand of strict wasn’t my family’s brand of strict. Your “I’m fine” meant something else in Cantonese than it did in my mom’s Tagalog. asians ex diary

I laughed then. I don’t now.