“So what are you? A concubine?”
A few years ago, my mother asked me this over the phone. I’d told her that I was in a polyamorous relationship—that the man that I was seeing already had a girlfriend.
I had, before this conversation, felt buoyed by my new relationship status. Polyamory re-frames commitment as non-exclusive, expanding where our affections go and what we seek from others outside of our primary romantic relationship.
I’d believed that my participation demonstrated that I was an evolved person, leading on both cognitive and romantic frontiers. This, after all, seemed like a modern kind of relationship, appropriate for a woman such as me, unafraid of sex and infinitely explorative. Never had I been so undressed by a single word: “concubine.”
“No, Mum, I’m not a concubine,” I whispered into the phone.
“But he’s already seeing someone.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not seeing anyone else?”
“Not yet.”
I was annoyed at her. My relationship history until this point, at least in my mind, had been defined more by its failures than its successes, a canvas on which a picture is drawn by punctures rather than paint. I could sense my mother’s disapproval and the infantile yet vivid pain that comes from bearing it.
“So he’s cheating on his girlfriend to be with you?”
“It’s not cheating,” I said. “It’s accepted. In the open.”
“So you’re like Ah Ma.”
We skated in a loop, starting at “concubine” and arriving at something similar. My Ah Ma, my grandmother, was my grandfather’s second wife, concurrent with the first. For most of my life, I didn’t question this state of affairs. My grandfather was dead by the time I was born, and I wasn’t raised to see this as entirely unusual.
In 1949, bigamy and concubinage were outlawed in China. In the Chinese diaspora, such as the one in Malaysia I was enmeshed in, this practice continued, though it is no longer legal for non-Muslims. My mother is one of 10 children, 7 of them having the same mother she did. My grandfather had crossed the South China Sea by boat from Fujian to Malaysia. He was poor, though this did not stop him from having two wives and raising 10 children.
My Ah Ma was, likely by her own account, a willing participant. She accepted her place as the second wife of a married man. My insistence on consent did little to dissuade my mother from seeing my relationship through the lens of her childhood. I could envision the trouble haunting her expression. Did I really sacrifice everything, I imagined her thinking, for my daughter to be a concubine?
“I’m not like Ah Ma,” I said.
“But why, then?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”
“I never should’ve told you.”
Because of my defensiveness—a certain sign that I had confronted an uncomfortable truth—the conversation did not end well. Yet in the months that followed, and as the polyamorous relationship unraveled on old notes of miscommunication and disrespect, the truth in front of me grew uglier, closer to the parts of myself I’d sought to hide.
In The Waiting Years, by Fumiko Enchi, a Japanese-government official and patriarch is concerned with both his legacy and his carnal desire. The women surrounding him, including his wife and the adopted daughters he holds as concubines, are concerned with simple survival. Each woman suffers the despair of being supplanted by another, of being wasted on an aging official, of their eternal entrapment in the family compound.
The novel, published in 1957 but set in the late 19th century, presents the question “Have things really changed at all?” It’s clear to me now that what my mother had tried to ask was “Are you accepting this relationship because, in your mind, it is the only option on the table? Are you really so scared of being alone? And if this is the truth, then why?”
During my childhood, my mother, who raised me and my sisters alone after my father’s premature death, had proselytized for the importance of financial independence. “You must always have your own money,” she would say. And she was right. She couldn’t understand why her daughter, successful in more ways than one, was willing to accept this arrangement.
It seems that although we may depart from history, it lives on in our bones. There are scores of women who dive into polyamory wholeheartedly, and all without losing their heads. For them, it doesn’t represent compromise but expansion and freedom. And yet there are others, like me, who have accepted less because they believe that without a certain kind of love, even if that love is venomous and cruel, they will not survive.
I have long speculated in therapy about where this comes from. Perhaps I’ve inherited the fears of my mother’s generation. Perhaps it’s my awareness of being trans—of absorbing narratives of my own undesirability. After all, only 20 or 30 years ago, the grandest life that most trans women could hope for was an arrangement.
My complicated situation lasted less than a year. Polyamorous relationships, ideally, involve the establishment of clear boundaries, much like the rather un-amorous process of drafting up a contract. In truth, I wanted monogamy, but I have often been a poor negotiator. My feeling was: if I didn’t have this love, then what would I have?
More than that, I was an even poorer enforcer. There were many betrayals of trust stemming from an enthusiasm to break terms on his end, and an unwillingness to exercise freedoms on mine. I feared inflicting the same hurt I’d grown accustomed to enduring, and I didn’t have the heart for it. A relationship that I’d hoped would be fun became an exercise in managing pain, and I’d framed this sacrifice and submission as a part of love: seeing an empty plate as full. With the language of polyamory, I spoke of my pain as liberty—something old as something new. I chained my hands to the past while kicking toward the future.
Nobody was responsible for my delusions but me. There were some lessons, too, ones that I’ve carried over into monogamy. Being aware of signs of jealousy, for starters. The reality is that desire for people other than your partner is probably quite normal, and not a call for panic or action. If having one partner already requires a lot of admin, then having multiple means even more logistics, more negotiating, more tedious definition—something to be grateful for in monogamy.
I was not a concubine, but perhaps I existed in its hangover. To that extent, my mother was right, as mothers often are. It seemed to me that my relationship was a lie, not because what I felt for him was false but because I’d been dishonest with myself. Though we may never guarantee the truth from others, to ourselves we at least owe that promise.
Nicola Dinan is a London-based novelist and the author of Bellies. She was recently a panelist at the Miu Miu Literary Club during Salone del Mobile, and her new novel, Disappoint Me, will be published by the Dial Press on May 27
