After the third time Charles and I met, I sent him an email that read: “You are not Chinese. You are 16 years older than me. You have a daughter out of wedlock. These are the three reasons we cannot be together.”

He and I were introduced by common friends at a dinner party in Manila where I was living and he was visiting for work. He arrived late, sat opposite me at the table and stayed for 15 minutes. Before he left (to call his daughter in Tokyo), he also secured what he thought was a date with me the following night to watch the musical “Avenue Q.”

I did not think it was a date. I thought he simply had an extra ticket that would go to waste.

The next night at the musical, we laughed without inhibition at the hilarious, sometimes raunchy, sometimes rude, lyrics. I looked at the side of his face. I would not mind hanging out with someone who can find humor in honest observations about internet porn, racism and poverty.

During intermission, as we talked about his work in Japan running a food bank, he said, “I am not responsible for the world’s problems. I do not set out to help people.”

I argued that we all contribute to the world’s problems and therefore have a duty to respond. Isn’t this sense of duty at least partly what compels his work?

Later, he would say that my pushing back was what attracted him the most about me that night. That and my unrestrained laughter.

After he returned to Japan, we began emailing. He did not hide his feelings for me, but any feelings I had for him were dampened by the three previously listed dealbreakers.

As a third generation overseas Chinese person in the Philippines, I was raised to believe the only acceptable partners for their daughters were “lan lang” (“one of our people”), meaning other overseas Chinese like us, many of whom refer to Filipinos as “huan-a.”

At its most innocuous, “huan-a” means “outsider.” At its worst, it means “someone of an inferior race.” To marry a “huan-a” means being disowned by your own parents and ostracized by the “lan lang” community.

Charles is not exactly “huan-a.” He is a “pe huweki,” a white American, which is considered to be steps above “huan-a,” but this small difference carried almost no weight because of the other two dealbreakers. An acceptable age gap is three, maybe five years. Eight years is stretching it, and 16 felt beyond the pale even to me. Having a daughter out of wedlock adds more complication. My Catholic mother considers children out of wedlock concrete evidence of having sinned.

These factors made our third date, in Manila, awkward and strained, both of us dragging the conversation to a quick and polite end. Later, by email, I apologized for the uneasiness, owning up to my anxiety about his growing feelings for me and the guaranteed disapproval of my parents. I said I wanted to remain friends.

He found my honesty refreshing.

The next time he visited Manila, I invited him to join me in visiting an elderly Jesuit priest. I expected him to make some excuse, but he showed up for the mass and the dinner. The next day, I invited him to attend a music event at the college where I worked. The performance was terrible, and as we endured it quietly, I texted him an apology. He replied that he was happy enough to sit beside me.

Having established the impossibility of a romantic relationship between us, I did not feel the need to pretend or impress. Being myself and communicating candidly became my default.

With this openness, we inevitably deepened our friendship.

At around this time, a Swedish friend of mine believed that he got his Filipino girlfriend pregnant. They did not want the baby. I shared this dilemma with Charles, hoping he might have some wise words for my friend.

His reply? “Tell him I’d adopt the baby in a heartbeat.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I said.

He said: “My parents lined up at Sea-Tac Airport to provide a home for a Vietnamese child. Possibly temporarily, possibly permanently. They already had six kids and a foster daughter but said yes to the need.” And then he repeated himself: “I’d adopt the baby in a heartbeat.”

I marveled at this person who possessed such a spontaneous heart. Despite the three things stacked against him, I found myself falling in love.

My heart was torn by the pull of filial piety. I could walk and talk animatedly beside Charles but never touch his hand or show physical affection, afraid that someone who knew my parents might see. I could imagine how frustrating this must be for him.

One lunch, he showed me a set of “cards” he had made (they were really the backs of receipts). He wrote “hug,” “hold hands” and “kiss” on them and then gave them to me in public, inserted them in my book or drop them into my bag when I wasn’t looking. He taught me that love, when faced with the most exasperating situations, can be creative.

Five months after we met, he asked my parents’ permission in four languages (English, Japanese, Chinese and Tagalog) to court me. They were not impressed. I expected this but still felt bad for Charles.

“I’m the son-in-law they never knew they wanted,” he said.

What followed was a stressful period of my father trying to talk Charles out of pursuing our relationship.

But he was not to be deterred. Eight months later, Charles proposed to me onstage at the musical comedy “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” in the same theater where we watched “Avenue Q” a year earlier.

My mother threatened not to invite any of her friends to the wedding, and my father made a last-ditch effort to talk Charles out of it.

The wedding pushed through and, true to her word, my mother did not invite a single person. My father invited friends who chatted loudly at the reception, oblivious to the ongoing wedding program in which the M.C.s had to shout over the racket.

We have a good laugh retelling this.

Married life has not been easy. Many times, I waited for our marriage to fall apart, anticipating my parents’ “We told you so.” But much of what strains our marriage are the same things other couples fight about and are unrelated to my Chinese or his American cultures, our age difference or his daughter (she is wonderful, and our children absolutely adore their big sister).

Most of our conflicts are versions of the fight between Felton (James Franco) and his wife Whippit (Mila Kunis) in the movie “Date Night” when he says: “Is this about how I can’t do anything right? I buy the wrong soda, the wrong beer, the wrong nipple clamps.” (“You bought the wrong nipple clamps” has become a lighthearted shortcut for us to describe and repair our fights.)

An 80-year-old friend of mine from Cleveland told me that whenever anyone described her marriage to a Japanese man as being a mixed marriage, she would say, “My husband does the same things that drive me crazy that my father did that drove my mother crazy. As far as I’m concerned, when a woman marries a man, it’s a mixed marriage.”

Five years into ours, retelling to our children the story of how Charles and I first met, I mentioned the part about him leaving 15 minutes after he arrived to make a phone call to their big sister.

“The truth,” he said, interrupting me, “is that I left to meet someone else. I knew as soon as I was with her that I had made a mistake. I wanted to go back to the dinner party and get to know you better.”

I reveled in this new twist to the story I thought I knew so well.

Whenever we would have a slice of cake or pie with our afternoon cup of coffee, Charles would set the tip aside, and then, after finishing the rest of the slice, he would make a wish before consuming the small triangular piece.

Thirteen years into our marriage, I asked him about it.

No, it is not a specifically American tradition. He doesn’t remember when he began doing that. Yes, he’s made wishes about me. No, the tip isn’t really the best part — the crust is — but the tip is the beginning.

Maybe, on some days, a small part of me is still waiting for my marriage to fail as my parents predicted. Things cannot be this right or this good. But on most days, and especially on afternoons when we have cake or pie with our coffee, I view marriage as a daring wish, a series of beginnings, the best of which — like a saved tip of pie — is yet to come.

Sherilyn Siy is a writer in Japan.

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