Reverse Passport Bro

My buddy Norm, in the middle of a conversation one day, said, "Yeah dude, you're like a reverse passport bro." I laughed. But I guess I sort of am.

I'm middle-aged. I remarried later in life. I'm divorced. I have children. I carry a "foreign" passport. And I'm in an age-gap marriage, 29 years. On paper, I check the boxes.

For those who don't know, a passport bro is usually a Western man, often white, who goes abroad to find a wife in a culture not his own. So when Norm said reverse, I knew what he meant. Because I'm not a white guy crossing into a foreign country. I was raised in the US, but I am still very much Filipino. I didn't travel away from my culture to find a wife. In a way, I traveled back into it.

But here's the part Norm didn't know when he said it.

For most of my life, I resisted the exact thing my parents always told me. A Filipina woman, they said, is the better choice for you. I bristled at that. It felt ethnocentric, narrow, like my heart was supposed to follow a map someone else drew. And I couldn't even tell you why I pushed back so hard, only that I did. Through high school, college, my young adult years, the women I loved were white, Mexican, Black. Never an Asian woman. Even when I got to Guam and started dating Asian women, never once a Filipina.

I don't fully understand the resistance, even now. Maybe it was the ordinary thing of a kid refusing to become what his parents predicted. Maybe it was me trying to prove I was American, that I got to choose, that my identity wasn't assigned to me at birth along with my last name. Whatever it was, I spent decades quietly running from the one thing I'd been told was meant for me.

And then I went on a pilgrimage.

It was a Marian pilgrimage, and neither of us was originally supposed to be on it. We all met for the first time at the Lisbon airport, a busload of strangers introducing ourselves before heading off to our first stop, the Basilica of Saint Anthony in the old Alfama district. The church built on the birthplace of the saint people pray to for lost things, and for love.

The bus parked and we all walked. She was helping her aunt, who was in a wheelchair. But Alfama is all cobblestone, those old uneven streets, and the wheelchair couldn't make it up. So she walked her aunt up by hand, and I grabbed the wheelchair and carried it up myself. I didn't think anything of it. It's just what I do.

That was it. That was the moment. No fireworks, no eyes meeting across a room. Just two people quietly helping her aunt up a hill in a country that belonged to neither of them. A Filipina. The very thing I had spent my whole life avoiding, walking up a hill beside me, and I didn't even know yet what was happening.

I don't know what to call that except grace.

So when Norm laughed and called me a reverse passport bro, the label stuck with me longer than the joke deserved. Not because of the boxes I check, but because it made me look back at all that resistance and wonder what I was really running from. And why it took a saint, a pilgrimage, a wheelchair, and a country that wasn't mine or hers to finally stop me.

I know I'm not the only one. There have to be other men who circled back to where they started, who found at home what they spent years looking for everywhere else. Maybe that's a question for another day.

For now, I'm just a man who spent his whole life saying no, until a church in Lisbon, and a woman who wasn't supposed to be there, finally got me to say yes.

— Henri