3rd
My father is a fairly hideous man with several cruel and unlikeable personality traits. He grew up in a village called Talisay in the Batangas province of the Philippines. His mother died of breast cancer when he was a young man and his father was an irresponsible jiggelo with a penchant for gambling. In his youth, my father was rather irresponsible himself, spending most of his time playing basketball and being drunk. He dropped out of college and upon moving to America spent most of his life working in factories with two aborted business attempts thrown in. He took on the female role in his marriage, doing most of the cooking and cleaning around the house. He essentially exists in one of three states at any given moment: bored, depressed, or asleep. He can pick up a quarter with a forklift.
My mother is in her 50s and is still naive and emotionally volitile, but there is a warmth about her personality that makes her likeable. She grew up in the Quezon City area of the Philippine capital. My grandmother was (and still is) a Filipina hapa who was strict and overbearing. My gradnfather was a civil engineer who worked with the US Army. They sent my mother to all the best prep schools in the capital and, ultimately, the Univeresity of the Philippines, where my mother studied interior design. She’s never been drunk in her life and waited until marriage to have sex. She was in her 30s.
The day my father asked my mother to marry him in America, he showed her a copy of his bank statement, saying that he wasn’t a rich man but an honest one. This must have been good enough for my mother because they ran off to Reno where my mother got married in a pair of jeans.
