Just popped in to wish you luck **HazleNutCoffee, **and also to say that it’s not only “Asian parents” who have a problem with grown children living in sin. I know from first-hand experience that a lot of American Bible Belters are the same way.
I’ve not had to deal personally with such large cultural gaps, so I may be giving advice out of turn here. That said, for whitebread Americans, my family is a pretty eclectic mix…even just within the parent/grandparent/sibling-thereof sphere, we’ve got a nun, a teabagger, a pentecostal, a communist, and a new-age spiritualist, among others. As the least a-shit-giving member of the family, it falls to me to act as messenger between opposing groups. I rarely get a chance to deliver news that doesn’t cause apoplexy for someone, so I’m quite used to (my version of) the sort of situation you describe. Here’s how it would likely go:
Me: Hey, [pentecostal], I’ve got some news. I’m moving in with my girlfriend. My address will now be (blah).
[Pentecostal]: When is the wedding?
Me: No wedding, just moving in. Please update your address book.
[Pentecostal]: BOTH OF YOU WILL BURN IN HELL! (Seventeen-minute rant follows)
Me: That’s neat. Give my love to [cousin]. Bye.
Like you said, they really can’t do anything about it except bitch, and you can’t do anything about the fact that they’re going to do that anyway. Might as well just get it over with.
I grant, though, that this gets easier as you get used to doing it. It would royally suck the first time, especially with something that’s likely to be as volatile as this. All things considered, I’d still recommend the sledgehammer method, but I know it won’t be easy. I’m sorry that you’re in this situation, and best of luck.
I don’t think you understand Asians. The dynamic is different. They won’t just bitch, they’ll disown you if they’re unhappy.
It really depends on how you carry it off. I did the same thing with my exceptionally Catholic parents, but due to the intervening years whereby I was (so far as the information they received) perfectly behaved in their eyes, well…let’s say, my mom STILL believes my now-wife and I slept in a single bed together for almost a year before we were married without having sex. (My dad, he of the switching religions for perceived convenience six times before settling on Catholicism to marry mom, I think he’s pretty aware what the real score was.)
one chinese girl i know solved the problem by not telling anybody until she knew she was pregnant, and luckily it was a boy. She and the BF were there for thanksgiving, and she told them that they were moving in together. Hilarity ensues, with all the screaming and yelling and the final disown ban hammer dropping. So as she was gathering the coats to leave she said that she was so sorry that they would never meet her baby boy when it was born but she would send them a picture of him, but she would understand if they tore it up … abrupt about face on the whole uproar <evil grin> something about only child and first born grandchild seems to erase any objections 
Haha, the ban hammer, I love that.
So, there you go, Hazel, just get pregnant (make sure it’s a boy!), then tell them. Easy, peasy. 
If you two are really serious about one another and you honestly think that he is the one you will marry someday why not have him call your parents and explain his intentions now and tell them that he plans to ask you to marry him someday? Then next month when you call and tell them you are moving in together it won’t seem like such a huge deal because they already know his intention is to marry you, unless of course you feel like they might go off on him about how their daughter will marry a nice Korean boy and they will never approve or something like that. If that is the case you should just tell them that you moved but, much like Brigadoon, your apartment vanishes and reappears so they might not ever be able to find it.
I’ve mentioned to you before that I have Korean parents. YES. My parents are awesome parents and even pretty mellow for Korean parents (like, they gave us no flak about dating and eventually marrying white guys) but compared to American parents… yeah. Uh, I can’t give you really helpful suggestions for this particular problem, as the way both my sister and I dealt with it was to actually rent/furnish an apartment and then just spend as little time there as possible. (This had its upsides and downsides… my spending lots of time in his space started driving him crazy, but then getting married and living in “our” space was much easier than what my other friends experienced.) Which sounds like maybe not an option for you. And yes, all my American friends thought my sister and I were crazy.
However, in general… We have have other conflicts with our parents – the one where I said I could not be a doctor, which led to a tense Thanksgiving weekend, and much worse, the one where my mom found out my sister had had a one-night stand (her ex-boyfriend told mom… oh, that’s a great story), which resulted in a) LOTS of screaming, b) my mom bringing the full force to bear of KOREAN PARENT DISAPPOINTMENT, c) LOTS of screaming/crying phone calls among mom, sister, and me, d) my mom giving my sister a really cold shoulder when we went on vacation later that month. She did get over it after about a month or so, though the snippy comments remained for about three years. Now (6 years, two boyfriends, and one marriage later for my sister), she seems to have forgotten it. My dad to this day has never found out; my mom (correctly, I think) decided he would go ballistic. Even more than she did, I mean.
On the other hand, my mom was pretty sure that my sister was having sex with the subsequent boyfriends (she would call me and tell me about how she found condoms at my sister’s place), but she decided at that point she didn’t want to know, and never confronted my sister about it.
I’m not sure what the moral of this is. I guess it’s that yeah, it’s going to suck. Possibly quite badly. But eventually (especially if/when you and your boyfriend get married) it will be fine.
Also… I bet your parents are, actually, proud of you. They would just never tell you so, because that would be wrong and they wouldn’t want you to get, like, arrogant, and obviously you know that anyway! (I’m not saying you do know that, just that that’s how my parents think.) My parents have the habit of telling me or my sister how awesome, respectively, my sister or I am (usually when they’re trying to impress on us how they wish we could do better at X “which your sister does much better”), but they never do it to our actual faces. The only time I can remember my mom actually telling me she thought I was doing a good job was two days after I gave birth to my own daughter, and I think that was after my sister chewed her out for telling me (immediately after a relatively hard delivery of a relatively large baby) that next time I should diet so that the baby wouldn’t be so big! Ah, Korean parents. Nothing like 'em.
I’m white-bread American (and so is my husband), so I can’t help you with the Korean angle. However, Mr. Snicks’ parents were also pretty conservative, their parents even more so. Before we married, my then boyfriend told me more than once that moving in together was just not on, in no uncertain terms. Which I understood, because of his family. Imagine my surprise when he called me up and said, “Hey, Mom and Dad are OK with us moving in together.” I was speechless.
Turns out, they’re more frugal than they are conservative. His sister (bless her, many times) was talking with his mother about the whole deal, told her that “you know that he’ll be over at her apartment all the time and vice versa, right?” and explained about how much money would be saved with only one rent (instead of both of us paying for separate apartments) and bingo bango!
So, are your parents overly-frugal or concerned about your cash flow? Play that up; maybe it’ll help. “You know how expensive apartments are and his place is really nice…” Does his apartment have 2 bedrooms? If so, you could play that up too, even if your sleeping arrangements vary wildly from what they believe.
Luck to you.
Or wait till someone else in the family gets pregnant out of wedlock. Hey, it worked for us.
We only lived together 6 months before the wedding, and that only because we were moving out of state and moving separately didn’t make any damn sense. Even so, we were expecting a fair ration of breast-beating and teeth-gnashing from his grandmother. Fortunately for us, the old lady was handily distracted by one of his unmarried cousins getting pregnant by some guy none of us had ever even heard anything about. Actually, “getting” is somewhat misleading; they waited to tell Mamaw till she was nearly waddling pregnant. By the time all that was sufficiently disapproved of, there was no time or energy left to disapprove of us.
I get the Asian-parents thing. I fully understand the oppression of the high-expectation/unreasonable standards/nothing-is-ever-good-enough-for-them parents. Exactly who I grew up with. But the biggest mistake you’ve made is lying to them. I know it’s a big hurdle to get over, but you have to realize they’re going to be disappointed no matter what, and frankly that’s their problem. The sooner you get over it, so will they. You’re a fully privileged card-carrying adult. Act like it.
That’s not too bad, at least either of you gets complimented. My mom’s thing is telling me and my sister how awesome her friends’ kids are.
Another white American girl here, so I’m sure there are cultural things going on that make it different for you.
That said, my parents were also quite conservative and letting them know I was living with my then-boyfriend (who I did eventually marry) was HARD. First they wondered why I would do such a thing. Was I pregnant? Had we secretly already gotten married? And when I made the mistake of mentioning that it made financial sense, and my mom asked me what the difference was between that and prostitution. Ouch.
It took a few months, but it blew over. Keep the lines of communication as open as you can. Be prepared to take your lumps but stand your ground. Do not apologize. I repeatedly told them, and then demonstrated to them, that I was exactly the same daughter they’d had all along. I was happy, healthy, secure, and still shared most of their values. This too shall pass.
Heh. We get that a lot too. My favorite is when she tells me about my cousin “who only went to a three-year school and she makes five times as much as you do!”
…The three-year school in question is Cambridge University.
I’ve known an extreme case of this:
A woman of Chinese descent, an acquaintance of mine, hid the fact that she had a live-in boyfriend from her parents for TEN YEARS! Fortunately for her, she lived in Californai and her parents lived in Florida, so they didn’t visit often. But whenever they did visit, she’d have to clean her house of any trace of the boyfriend’s presence, and he’d have to sleep elsewhere during the visit.
Finally, after this woman’s mother died of stomach cancer, and she still didn’t have the nerve to bring her boyfriend to the funeral, she got up the courage to tell her father about the relationship – although not that it had been going on for many years behind their backs. He was more accepting than she had expected, and within a year girlfriend and boyfriend were openly engaged, then married.
I always wondered what my parents would say if I got into Cambridge. Probably “Sure it’s the best school in the world, but it’s not the best school in the universe. And you didn’t get a full scholarship.”
But the worst is when they compare me to just one characteristic of people they would have disowned years ago. Like “Look at my friend’s son, he loves Korean food, I wish I had him instead,” notwithstanding the fact that he’s in jail right now.
/thread hijack
After seeing a couple of threads like this, what I’m wondering is if there are ANY Asian parents that are mellow and not-perpetually-disappointed? I mean, damn, I would’ve been disowned 40 times over by most of the parents in this thread, and I was a good, quiet, studious girl.
Not as near as I can tell. Even my FIL, who’s Filipino (one of the more relaxed Asian parent types) always felt the need to tell my absolutely-wonderful husband how disappointed he was in him several times a year.
My girlfriend’s parents are very conservative and, while we don’t live together, we were recently traveling together.
After the trip, she was telling her mom about it, and about one of the (nice) places she’d stayed before I arrived, and we stayed at one more night. She went on, and her mom backed her up.
“Just a second. So, was that one bedroom or two at [nice place].”
“Well, just one. It was already paid for from work.”
“And is that the first time?”
(playing dumb) “Well, we’ve never traveled together before.”