Wedding Blog

Part 1
Part 2 

Up until this point, everything was going perfectly and seemed like a dream. But it was now time to MEET THE PARENTS (dun, dun, dun - cue dramatic music).

My parents are both traditional and liberal (well for Korean parents). My dad speaks accentless English (rare for an immigrant Asian parent), has a masters degree in English, and is an English teacher so he’s not your typical Korean dad. My mom’s English is not as good as my dad’s, but she can understand and speak English fluently. Still… in the end I guess they are your typical, traditional, Korean parents.

Mr. Bee is half Japanese, half White and sadly I knew from the beginning that race would be an issue with my family. I always thought that I would marry someone that was Korean, my family always assumed that I would marry someone Korean, no one in my family has ever married or even dated someone that wasn’t Korean. But I would never wish that Mr. Bee were Korean or anything else because that would make him a different person than the one I fell in love with.

I knew this dinner was not going to be easy and needless to say I was extremely nervous. My family was going to be hard on him. Mr. Bee on the other hand was as calm as a cucumber - he was prepared for my family to hate him for 10 years (yes he actually said that), and he would just show my family how much he loved me. What more could he do after all. My parents, my brother, Mr. Bee and I all met at a galbi restaurant in Koreatown. My mom had booked a private room so that we could all talk.

Here’s a gander at some of the questions he had to answer:

1) Can you tell me the difference between: emotion, feeling, sentiment and sensation?

2) You seem like a very intelligent person. Do you think my daughter will be obedient enough for you?

3) Have you ever considered the economic and political direction of China over the next 30 years?

4) How would you define the word philosophy?

5) Who do you think needs the other person more: Hillary or Bill Clinton and why?

6) What were the main factors that contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?

7) Karl Marx wrote a good book on the division of labor that really influenced me. What do you think of Das Kapital?

8. Korean people believe in something called “jung” (the state of just being used to/comfortable with someone rather than being in love). They say that you’re only in love for the first three years of a relationship and then it’s all “jung”. What do you think about this?

9) Is there any chance your business could move to Los Angeles? (Mr. Bee’s company was based in New York)

Yes these questions are verbatim!

Mr. Bee also brought my father The Origins of Virtue as a gift because he had enjoyed The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, and the two books are similar in subject matter. To which my father responded, “I wonder if this is a gift. Perhaps it is more like a bribe.”

Dinner lasted three hours. Mr. Bee was calm the entire time, and answered all the crazy questions perfectly. Despite their hardest efforts to rattle him, I could tell that my family was impressed. They liked him and they could tell that he really loved me. I doubt they would have been nearly as hard on Mr. Bee had he been Korean. It was a pretty unfair situation for him and I felt horrible. I just sat there the entire time quietly sipping my soju.

The odd thing is that my parents never brought up the fact that everything was moving so quickly. We’d hardly known each other 2 months and we were already talking marriage. When Mr. Bee brought up marriage, my dad deflected the topic and said that he would first need to meet Mr. Bee’s parents. An engagement is not something that takes place until the families have met in Korean culture. It’s not only a marriage of the two people involved after all, it’s a marriage of the two families. The only problem was, Mr. Bee’s parents lived on a remote island in the Philippines that took three planes and two and a half days of travel to get to…