Dating : How I met my wife (Belly of the Beast preview)

Editor’s Note: Constant readers know that John Ploskina doesn’t have an editor. This is good news if you love freedom, but bad news if John Ploskina needs a job. He does. Don’t forget to send his best content to Breitbart, the New York Times, Info Wars, the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, etc. Meanwhile, John is finally moving out of an abandoned restaurant and into a real house. While that’s happening, please enjoy this brief snippet from his upcoming nonfiction book In the Belly of the Beast.

A is a nickname for my ex-wife. I use this pseudonym partially because I don’t like to type her name and partially to protect her privacy to some extent. I was an Anonymous hacker and I assume many of my fans are same. Leave her alone. Harassing her won’t help me.

I met A in Taiwan in 2004. Taiwan is an Island Nation off the coast of China. I lived there for about two years. I made a living teaching English to native Chinese speakers of all ages. Mostly kindergarten and grade school students. Kindergarteners were my favorite students. I think we were roughly on the same maturity level at the time. I wrote songs for them and played games with them. They treated me like a celebrity.

Often while grocery shopping an ecstatic Taiwanese five year-old would run screaming through the isles to hug me. “GOOD MORNING JOHN!” was their battle cry.

Since I taught most of my kindergarten classes in the morning, “GOOD MORNING JOHN!” was the first English sentence these children learned. They didn’t understand it very well. As a collective, my youngest students decided that “good morning” must be part of my name. I discovered this when I tried to teach them “good afternoon” in my second English lesson.

“GOOD AFTERNOON GOOD MORNING JOHN!”

Good Morning John became my eternal nickname in Taiwan.

I met A through online dating and we had our first face-to-face in a coffee shop. She is a Filipina and she’d been living in Taiwan for about six years on a guest worker visa. She worked for HTC as a team lead in their Quality Assurance department. Her team worked on some of the first Android phones. We talked about technology, politics and history for four hours and then had an intense make-out session. That’s a good first date, IMHO.

English is a cradle tongue in the Philippines, so my wife was a much better English speaker than my Han Chinese girlfriends. Since she’d been in Taiwan longer, her Chinese was better. I often found myself trying to speak Japanese to Taiwanese girls. Many Taiwanese students choose Japanese over English as their second language. Some even chose SPANISH. This renders me helpless. I hate ALL European languages but English. Like any proud American.

Sometimes, it’s just easier to ask simple questions in Japanese because Chinese is too damn hard. Sometimes girls use linguistics to hide from dorky white guys. Doris Yeh, the bass player from Taiwanese Death Metal supergroup Chthonic, used that dodge on me once. That was before they were famous! Whatever.

Technically, A wasn’t supposed to leave her company dormitory most of the time. HTC held her passport, and she was treated like a second class citizen in Taiwan generally. Most Filipino guest workers are maids, construction workers and whores. Most Chinese are very race conscious (racist if you’re white). My ex-wife is a rare specimen. She has a degree in Communications Engineering from MIT. The Mapua Institute of Technology.

I had to help her sneak past security guards so that we could escape by motorcycle and spend time in parks, museums and karaoke bars. I think we decided to marry after about four months and return to the US after about four months.

Everyone thinks she’s a mail order bride for some reason.

I also happened to have a degree in Engineering. My time island hopping in Southeast Asia was partially a delaying tactic. I graduated from college right after the Dot Com Bubble burst in the early 2000s. When I signed up for college, first year computer science graduates were driving around in luxury cars. In 2003, my grades didn’t stand out and I was longing for adventure. I paid $500 for a one way plane ticket and I wasn’t sure I would ever return to the United States.

A convinced me otherwise. Once we decided to have children, I wanted to raise them in my home country. She immigrated to the US on a fiancee visa in 2005. She quickly found work in QA, and I started my meteoric rise in the software industry.

Our son, Saul, was born in 2010. He has a minor Autism Spectrum Disorder, but he’s a wonderful kid. I have a very close relationship with him. I take him canoeing. I teach him about computers. I tried to learn about baseball so I could teach him.

I’ve never been abusive to my son, my ex-wife or any lover. No one ever thought so until I asked for a divorce in 2016. My ex-wife and I were unhappy, but she didn’t want to suffer the indignity. She refused marriage counseling for years. My Mother always says “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Apparently this is true. My ex-wife does have temper problems and my shrinks and best friends did describe her behavior as “emotionally abusive” while we were married.

After I asked for a divorce, I think my ex-wife started telling everyone I treat her the way she treats me. I was always the peacemaker in our relationship. I was always trying to calm her down and help her with anything she needed. Part of her story is that my marijuana use “changed my behavior.”

My family and my boss believe her lies. I lost my job and most of my family isn’t speaking to me anymore. Because of the faulty PFA system in Pennsylvania, I haven’t seen my son in six months and it may be years before I see him again.

That’s where I stand in 2019. It reminds me of a horror movie or something.