My stomach hurt. The kind of pain that spreads from your stomach to the rest of your body when you know something bad is waiting around the corner. I thought there was no reason to continue watching because I knew how it would play out. The woman would be portrayed as submissive, weak and clueless. Someone who came from a poor country and, not knowing any better, married a white loser who wanted a young, subservient Thai wife. A live-in maid. I had heard and seen that story play out countless times in the media since arriving in Denmark as a five-year-old. Not once had the women and men been portrayed with dignity, with curiosity, and respect. Not once had they come close to representing my family constellation or my mother’s migration story.
My mother came to Denmark as a marriage migrant. She received a tourist visa in Thailand, came to Denmark, and put an ad in the local newspaper with the headline ‘Thai Woman Seeking’. The man who became my stepfather answered. They got married, and shortly thereafter I came to Denmark to live with them. Their love bloomed over time. It was a form of love that, in all my years in Denmark, I have only seen interpreted as a wrong form of love. People have always looked down on my mom or pitied her. They have condemned my stepfather. And they have felt misplaced sympathy for me.
There is a duality to living in the western world as a reunited migrant child, because us migrant children grow up eventually. We are a whole generation of children who obtained family reunification with our mothers in the 1990s and 2000s. We are now adults, living our own lives in Denmark far away from a homeland that feels more distant every single day.
