(pensive music) - Yeah, so very quickly, what I had to learn was about the cultural difference between my whiteness and being run through the inner city and your Filipinoness.

And so you... - And we have this core value among our Indigenous cultures in the Philippines that's called kapwa, which is shared being, the other as part of oneself, too.

And so it comes with a whole complex of communication dynamic, right?

That is not this individualistic thing.

And a lot of it carries an indirection or requires an indirection sensing.

- What I remember is early on, you, one night, asking me, "Babe, what do you want to do?"

And I told you, I don't remember what I told you, but something like I said, "Ah, let's get a pizza and go see a movie."

And you were kind of put off by that.

And only slowly did I learn, as you educated me, that what you really were inviting was for me to very obliquely indicate what maybe I might like to do, and then you would do the same, and then we would go back and forth in a dance that was delicate and exquisite.

And arriving at the decision was every bit as important as what we actually decided to do because it was just a living out of the quality of the relationship and that kind of non-verbal, or very indirectly, verbal sensitivity and knowing of each other.

So, I'm still learning that.

- Yeah, and for my part, I also had to learn a different way, especially when it came to our conflicts, right?

Well, we have this other cultural thing that we call tampo.

It's a delicate feeling of hurt where you withdraw and you expect the other person to read you and to know.

- Yeah, that was something else I had to learn about.

- Yeah, and I would get so frustrated because you couldn't sense me, right?

And we had to work it so I would also learn to speak my heart.

- Yeah, very much a back and forth, where in any given situation, whose cultural assumptions and habits we're going to be honored, and who was going to adapt to whom.

And that's part of the synergy of, I guess, any relationship.

But it was a deep kind of thing that we had to learn and still are learning with each other.

- The other thing that we had to negotiate was the protocol around food.

You were frustrated being in the Philippines because we were getting fed- - Yeah, the first time there.

- Every single house that we visited, they would put a spread.

- So, yeah.

I had like six meals in four hours.

I just didn't- - I said, "Rather than getting frustrated, you have to understand that food is a language in my culture, as most Indigenous cultures also."