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27 October 2010

So You Want To Be Married By A Chinaman



The first time I got married I knew nothing about how to get married. I also knew nothing about being married but that is a separate issue. California used to have a long list of do’s and do not do’s if two wanted to marry. I believe they have since relaxed their policy, although homosexuals are still forbidden to marry, pending decisions by some old dudes who wear robes and wigs to work. The first wife and I decided it would be easier to get married in Las Vegas. At least that is how it worked out.

We met at work. The next time I saw her we talked about Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily”. That was good enough for me. The next time I saw her after that I asked her out. Our first date just happened to be on a holiday weekend which just happened to end on my birthday. So we spent the whole weekend together. This is why her father never liked me. He assumed that I deflowered his daughter on our first date. What he probably never knew was that we did not have sex at all that weekend and that horse left the barn long before I met her. She had planned to go to Las Vegas for her birthday before we met. With someone else. But he left the scene before I arrived. The Chinese would probably say it is unlucky to marry someone on a vacation if you are the replacement.

But marriage was never the reason for our trip to Las Vegas and we really never thought about it until the last minute. I proposed on her birthday. Because I am romantic like that. She never said yes. She actually said, “Yikes”. I suppose in hindsight that means something. We decided to get married in September.

Getting married in Las Vegas is very easy. You go to one government office to get the license and another to have someone say you are married. I believe the entire process set me back less than $50. No planning is required. You need not hire a coordinator, band, florist, photographer, cake or venue. No dresses or tuxedos are necessary. No months of endless decisions and changes of mind. No food tastings at overpriced restaurants. I did not even have to show any identification. She did, to show that she was over 18.

We had someone at the government office take our picture, but this was in a more innocent age when you had to have pictures developed in a lab. Kind of like “CSI” without the technodance DNA montage or sadoerotic homicide. When we got back from Las Vegas we dropped off the film at the local Sav-On, as was the custom. They fucked up the roll with our wedding pictures and gave us a coupon for a free roll of film.

Afterward she felt guilty because she had already told her family that she was getting married in September, and here she up and married without her mother. So we went ahead with the September gig and never bothered to mention Las Vegas. This meant I got to spend the next three months dealing with endless decisions and changes of mind, venues, photographers, florists, food tastings, cakes, dresses and tuxedos. I felt guilty that she had no wedding pictures and agreed to pay for an overpriced professional photographer who seemed like a bit of an idiot to me. Today those pictures are in a box at my brother’s house. Unless he threw them away.

The cake was the only easy part. I already knew where to go and I knew it would taste great. It only cost $30. And now that $30 cake is my most vivid memory of that day. It was a very good cake.

Four years and a month or two later she was living in the garage of some woman’s family she just met. A month or two later she was living with some old guy she met at work. They took a trip that she and I were originally supposed to take. He and I have the same first name. Read into it what you will.

When I say old guy I should note that he was 40 at the time. This is not an age I consider old. But she was 25, so he was an old guy.

A lifetime later I found myself living on the other side of the world in a strange and exotic land of mosquitos and motorized land vehicles that cannot stop at red lights.

I first saw Pi Chi at a train station and, frankly speaking, I thought she had a nice ass. She still does. We did the talking on the phone and e-mail thing for an amount of time that I simply cannot remember until we went on our first date. The truly amazing part is that her English blows. Even more so at the time. Her e-mails were incredibly difficult to read and took some effort on my part. When we spoke on the phone I understood maybe half of what she was saying and she understood even less from me. As bad as her English was, I knew even less Chinese. I could say numbers and order food but that would have gotten us nowhere.

I lived in 崙背 at the time and she lived in 高雄. Obviously this proved troublesome. For our first date I took the train to her. She took me to a famous beach and we watched the famous sunset. We wrote our names in the sand with a stick, neither of us able to read or pronounce the other’s. She noted that my name was unlike that of famous monosyllabic movie stars such as Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise. I gave her an endlessly fascinating history of Holland lesson and we discussed how awesome I think Amsterdam is. We never discussed the genealogy of her name. I assume it is Chinese.

We had dinner at the famous Smokey Joe’s, or Smoking Jio’s, Pi Chi style. She had shrimp linguine and I had the Mexican pizza, which was neither Mexican nor a pizza. Smokey Joe’s is actually famous around here. It and a few other restaurants are owned by Amy, a local who lived in the United States for a few years and came back home to open an American restaurant with large plates and a bunch of crap hanging on the walls. The place is decorated with totem poles, a large cigar store Indian and merchandise that is probably offensive to many American Indians. The food is not really American, but it was the closest thing I could find while living in 崙背. We used to go every weekend until we found other places, I got a kitchen at home, I got tired of their burritos and they repeatedly increased their prices while decreasing their serving sizes. A take away burrito used to fill a large paper plate. Now it fits in a standard lunch box and costs twice as much. It probably helps if you know the size of lunch boxes around here. They are small boxes used to hold one’s lunch, equivalent in subject matter if not shape to those folded Chinese take out boxes in the US and nothing like the Land Of The Lost lunchbox I had as a child.

Incidentally, I agree with everyone that the Will Farrell movie was stupid, but so was the original show. The guy who played Will could not act his way out of a trash bag. “Dr Shrinker” was always my favorite. That was one mad man with an evil mind.

At the end of our first date Pi Chi took me to the train station and we waited at Starbucks for my train. This is notable because we never go to Starbucks. Neither of us drink coffee and I am old enough to think that $5 for a cup of coffee is absurd. I think $1 for a 330ml can of Pepsi is pushing it. That would be 12 ounces in 美國英語.

Two years later I took Pi Chi to Paris and proposed. That would be some good alliteration if her name were pronounced that way. She was the first woman I ever proposed to who actually said yes. Though none technically said no, so I am batting a thousand. I assume that is good. 1000 = 100% apparently. I have no idea why 100 does not equal 100 in baseball. No one has ever mistaken me for a sports enthusiast.

Four years later we got married. She wanted to get married on 10/10 because that is a lucky day. I said as long as it was not 12/8 I would be ok. She had no idea what I was talking about. Can I be married to someone who knows almost nothing about John Lennon? Time will tell. She knows who the Beatles are and now knows more of their music than ever before, thanks to me. But George Harrison is her favorite.

We were going to get married on 10/10/06 but she developed some thyroid problems. Half of the people who work at her hospital have or will have cancer. The other half kill themselves. Suicide is a popular recreational activity around here. Pi Chi has told me of many nurses at her hospital who killed themselves because their boyfriend left them, their boyfriend would not marry them or their boyfriend went back to his wife. The men kill themselves when the local KTV closes down. Suicide is not as honorable as it is in Japan, but it is a socially acceptable solution to petty temporary annoyances. When I am finally killed in a traffic “accident”, the police will probably label it a suicide since whoever killed me will blatantly lie about what happened and it is impolite to blame 美國人. Crime investigation here is asking everyone what happened and taking someone’s side.

We eventually chose 10/10/10 because that is a lucky day and pretty easy to remember. But then while we were waiting, society decided that 9/9/99 is the luckiest day of all. By then it was too late. Not because 99 is 1999 but because we had already made an appointment for lucky 10/10 and everybody else wanted super lucky 9/9. The year 99 is 2010 to you and me.

There are at least three ways to get married around here. You can book a banquet room at a famous hotel or restaurant, invite everyone you have ever met, pay US$100 per person for everyone to eat duck face and fish eyeballs, watch people poorly sing KTV on stage and sneak out to sign some papers; or you can put up a tent in the middle of the street, invite everyone you have ever met, pay US$90 per person for everyone to eat duck face and fish eyeballs, watch people and maybe a stripper poorly sing KTV on stage and sneak out to sign some papers; or you can go to the Household Registry Office and sign some papers. We chose the latter. Pi Chi thinks that street tent weddings are tacky. I agree. I think that paying large amounts of money to feed horribly overpriced horrible food to people she barely knows is not fiscally prudent. She disagrees.

It is unlucky to be frugal with weddings. People spend the exorbitant amounts they do so they can brag about how much they spent. This is an impressively materialistic society that gorges on ritual and conformity. Feed everyone pizza and you lose face. Feed them a glazed duck’s ass and you bring honor to your country and family. As long as you paid five times more than it is worth.

If $100 per person does not seem like much to spend at a wedding, consider that even a snob can get a meal around here for less than US$3. Fish eyeballs outside of a wedding cost nowhere near $100. Wedding food is not made from better ingredients or prepared by celebrity chefs. There are no rare delicacies that one cannot find from a street vendor. This is not lobster and caviar versus a Big Mac and onion rings. The pig testicles at weddings are fried in the same way at night markets. The food is simply priced much higher because people want to say they spent much more than their friends. Keeping up with the Chiangs.

I told Pi Chi that we could have a duck face wedding if she pays for it. Apparently that is unlucky. Oddly enough, most of the things she does not want to do turn out to be unlucky. She also does not have that kind of money. Her original guest list was 200. And that was only on her side. My side will probably be a little lower. $100 X 200 = a lot of money. I do not have a calculator handy but that has to be at least $200. Maybe more. If I spent that kind of money on eel rectum for people I will never see again I would have to kill myself. And that would cause undue alarm in the KTV community.

Pi Chi agreed to get married the easy way on the condition that we have a reception at a later date. I agreed to that on the condition that she pay for it. Unless we could do it with far fewer people and at a much more reasonable price. But that would be unlucky. She agreed to pay for the elaborate reception if I pay for the wedding cookies. Wedding cookies are a stupid tradition where the wed give ridiculously overpriced cookies to everyone who will show up at the wedding. The cookies themselves are nothing special and are more like crackers than cookies. The high price comes from the elaborate boxes. The fancier the box the better you are. If your neighbor gives you a fancier wedding cookie box you might as well kill yourself. I could wrap up saltines for a fraction of the price and call them traditional American wedding cookies but then Pi Chi would never be able to speak to her family again.

I agreed to pay for the stupid cookies if we only had to give them to family members who lived in her mother’s house at some point in time. She agreed to that if we had a small dinner for said family some time before the reception. We have not yet negotiated who will pay.

At some time in the near future I will likely find myself in a room full of complete strangers, watching them eat duck face and listening to old people scream into their KTV microphone. I will be completely miserable but Pi Chi’s family will be happy and that is why she wants it. That will make her happy and that is why I will do it. But I swear or affirm to Buddha or any other graven idol that there is no way in hell I am paying for it. Compromise should not require bankruptcy.

We went to the Household Registry Office and signed a few papers. Pi Chi gave them her national identification card and within minutes my name was on the back. Women have the names of their fathers and husbands on their ID cards. There is also a space for the husband’s compulsory military service. That space remains blank on Pi Chi’s ID. I gave them my passport and alien resident card and within minutes they made several copies. My passport is new and not accustomed to being xerographed but the old one was copied more than a “Mighty Pirates” DVD in China.

Once everything was stamped we were legally married. The entire process cost less than US$5. It was only so high because I wanted an English version of the marriage certificate as well as the Chinese version. The entire process took about 30 minutes. It only took so long because I wanted an English version of the marriage certificate as well as the Chinese version. They wanted an American address for the English version so I gave them the address I always use whenever anyone wants an American address. It is a real address and someone with my name lives there. Or at least he did ten years ago. I have no idea if anyone has ever sent anything for me to him but I can only assume that it would be somewhat confusing to receive something from a government agency in Chinese. I have no idea why these people always want an American address from people who do not live there. We could have finished sooner but the clerk had to type up the American address, print out the paper, let me correct it, type it up again, print it out again, let me correct it again, ad tedium.

The English and Chinese versions of our marriage certificate have my local address, not the American address I gave them.

We took no pictures of the blasted event because Chinese wedding photographs are about spending too much money on a photographer at exotic or at least amusing locations. They are usually taken before the wedding and shown at the reception. They have nothing to do with documenting when the chain was attached. So soon I will probably have overpriced photographs of myself in a pink suit and Pi Chi in a white dress in front of some waterfall somewhere, but just like every other time, I have no pictures of the actual wedding day.

Legally wed and with reservations and appointments we were on a plane to the real world within hours.

And it was a woman who married us, but Chinawoman sounds stupid.


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