Years ago, my mother told me about a Thai man who married an American woman against the wishes of his mother. The mother refused to speak to her son because he had married outside his nationality. Only when her son and his wife had their first child did the mother acknowledge the marriage. Incredulous at this tale, I asked my Thai mother, "You would never do that, would you?" "No," she answered, then a pause, "I wouldn't speak to you for 10 years!" I laughed at her joke, but a small part of me knew that there was a grain of truth to my mother's response: She hoped that I would marry Thai, not American.

Well, I didn't marry Thai or American. I married French. Although by the time I got married, my mother was so overjoyed at the fact that I was getting married at all that I doubt it really would have mattered to her if my husband had been from outer space. But, I overstate.

I was born and raised in the United States by Thai parents. We were a Thai family growing up in America, with the requisite strains of a different country and culture. There was a time during my teen-age years that I thought of myself as 100 percent American. I'm not sure if I was seeking the unabashed freedom that being American promised or if I wanted a respite from the Asian ideal of filial piety.

I am living in the "great American melting pot" that they used to sing about on Saturday mornings on Schoolhouse Rock. I have come to appreciate the Thai facets of my personality as well as the American ones. My husband has lived for the last 25 years in the United States. He was raised in France, but chose to make his life here. We were entering into a partnership, so we prepared ourselves for some compromises on both sides to reconcile our differences. Our hearts belonged to each other, not to our respective cultures.