[Mmike11]

Hello,

My girlfriend is from Hong Kong and her family is a conservative Chinese family. I am an American.

I have a son and recently went through divorce. She knows about the divorce and my son. The issue is informing her family.

We are trying to find the best way to inform them but have been trying to find the best way to inform them. In their eyes they won't accept my past. To them divorce is either infedelity or physical domestic abuse. These do not apply in my case. I filed for divorce due to verbal abuse and unable to work as a team. They won't understand this.

Anyone else have a similar experience??

[healingme4me]

Hi Mmike11,

I see this is your first post on PC. I don't really have any tried and true suggestions for how to get a significant other's family to accept differing viewpoints on values. Sounds like a very difficult position to be in.
How long have you been together? Are they still overseas?
Welcome to PC!

[TishaBuv]

Hello and welcome to PC!

My husband’s family is also very conservative and view divorce as an unspeakable thing. My father in law once told me I must have bad DNA because there were divorces in my family! My in-laws are also nearly 100 years old and very provincial, with no relatives, so no one to have gotten divorced.

My nephew married a Chinese girl (we are American). It was a very cool blending of two cultures at their wedding. I thought both sides bring something good to each other.

My only suggestion is to explain to her parents that our American culture is much more liberal about divorce as a solution to being in an unhappy marriage. Say how you have learned from your bad choices prior and know how to be good to your spouse.

[hprodf]

It's hard to give specific advice when we don't know about their views, but what I will say is to try and understand their perspective and proactively try to understand what issues/questions they may have and prepare answers as best you can to them to try reason with them.

The other aspect is understanding formality. A lot of asian cultures have strict cultural formalities to matters like this, so it's best to make sure you understand how to handle the matter from this perspective.

Ultimately, I think it's important to just be honest and up front. From personal experience, many people will initially appear very difficult to get approval from, but ultimately if you can get to the very heart of the matter, that you're looking out for their daughter's wellbeing and happiness, many will come around to this.

Originally Posted by Mmike11

Hello,

My girlfriend is from Hong Kong and her family is a conservative Chinese family. I am an American.

I have a son and recently went through divorce. She knows about the divorce and my son. The issue is informing her family.

We are trying to find the best way to inform them but have been trying to find the best way to inform them. In their eyes they won't accept my past. To them divorce is either infedelity or physical domestic abuse. These do not apply in my case. I filed for divorce due to verbal abuse and unable to work as a team. They won't understand this.

Anyone else have a similar experience??

It takes work on working on how to explain your case to them
No need to learn Chinese for that
But you may want to learn about their culture and how lightly or heavily they take divorce cases
You know you have a good explanation, you just have to explain it right