No major news this week, but we’re winnowing down sites, dates, and options. Everything is becoming a little more real–and hence a little more scary too! Anyways, here’s a fun video with a cute message that’s all done with shadow puppets.
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Consider Yourself… One Of Us
We’re just on our way back from a great visit with my parents in Snowdonia, where my folks celebrated our engagement with a nice bottle of bubbly, and really made a fuss of Donny – making sure he knows he’s part of the family. I’m really privileged to have parents who have been on their own journeys with figuring out this whole gay thing, and who are at the point now where they are excited about having a new son-in-law.
It’s a shame things aren’t working out the same way with Donny’s family – but it is what it is. Donny’s parents have been nothing but friendly and hospitable to me on my visits over there, but I don’t think they could ever see me as somehow ‘joining their family’. I have always been a welcome guest, but I don’t think the wedding is going to change me into anything other than that.
But it could be so much worse. Donny could have lied to his parents about being gay in order to spare their feelings, and so in my visits over there I’d have to stay with friends or in a hotel – nothing more than another white face in the crowd. We are spared that at least.
Last night Donny and I watched The Wedding Banquet – a 1993 Ang Lee film about a gay couple (one white, one Asian) where the Asian guy undertakes a sham marriage in order to please his parents. Watching things in the movie spiral out of control, I was very glad that Donny and I don’t find ourselves in the position of having to pretend to be ‘housemates’ in our own home. (Having said that, I did have to pretend to be ‘the friend from London’ with Donny’s aunt and uncle in Singapore, and watch on in frustrated silence while Donny was set up with a girl – less than two weeks after we got engaged. But that’s a whole other blog article.)
Back to The Wedding Banquet. Although we are now benefitting from Donny’s early honesty with his parents, when I saw in the movie how much the marriage meant to the parents in the film, and how close the mother became with the daughter-in-law, it did make me realise how tough it must be on Donny’s folks. In Chinese culture, a wedding is not just about the bride and groom. It seems to me that it’s a social event for renewing bonds of family, friendship, business and community – where the parents have as much say in the planning, if not more so, than the couple. After all, historically a wedding ceremony would have been the symbolic culmination of a financial transaction, where the bride is transferred from one family to another. How does that work when there’s no bride?
With us they won’t be getting any of that. If they do come they will be honoured guests, but they’ll just be guests without any say in how the day happens. Donny’s parents and my parents will meet and shake hands, but they will have little in common, little to talk about and little common language to talk about it in. There will be no sense of two families becoming one family – our parents will go their separate ways and probably never see each other again.
And so I will carry on being a welcome guest in Donny’s parents’ home. And that will be fine. But although they won’t be getting another daughter-in-law added to their family, I really hope they do eventually warm to the idea of having me as a son-in-law.
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Baby steps for the new year
So far with my parents, I have decided to not bring up the topic of our wedding, which I will refer to in this blog as The Elephant In The Room (TEITR). It’s a shame really, as the planning stages for TEITR are almost as exciting and fun as the eventual day will be, and I have a strong desire to share our discoveries with them. But I have made a firm decision to not bring things up with them, since Dont Ask, Don’t Tell seems to be their policy. I know this will deepen the rift between us, but I need them to show some interest, and by not bringing it up, it may force them to show interest (if there is any on their part).
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is what they told me years ago when I first came out to them. They don’t deny the fact that I am gay and that I will not be changing my orientation (no matter how hard they have pleaded in the past for me to at least “experiment”). But they were so fearful of the potential shame within their small community of extended relatives and friends, that they pleaded for me to not tell anyone. They rationalized that since Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was good enough for President Clinton’s policy for the U.S. military, it was good enough for our family.
I of course disagreed. Yet I was torn between honoring my parents’ wishes, which is what a good Asian kid is trained to do from day one, and to being honest and true to myself and others, which is what being an independent adult and member of human society is all about. So eventually we reached a detente. I would live my life as I see fit as long as no one they knew found out about my “delicate situation”. This was easy when I lived 2,700 miles away from them in Boston. And even easier still when I moved to London, which is 5,400 miles away from San Francisco. And whenever I was back in San Francisco, or with any relatives, I would just be their “batchelor” son who was too busy with school or work to settle down. So I lied to others on their behalf, despite the values they taught me about honesty.
This arrangement worked, but not when my ex traveled to SF with me, which he did with every other visit. There was one time when, after we arrived at the airport, we were whisked into the house. I didn’t even notice it at first, until it dawned on me later that it was to prevent my grandfather or aunt’s family (who lived only 3 blocks away) from seeing my ex. My revelation happened the day after, when we were invited to have dinner with my aunt’s family. But it was of course the “royal” we, which did not include my ex. He was instead asked to stay home. My mom at least bought some takeout for him and brought him back a doggy bag. And the irony is not lost–he was treated the way that I am being treated now…on the one hand like a dog, and on the other hand like a dirty little family secret.
But the odd thing is that it was not the first time my ex was out in SF with me, and not the first time the he would have met my extended family. In fact he had met them just a year before, when he was “a friend” visiting with me from Boston. But my folks didn’t want my extended family meeting my ex twice in a row, which would have “raised suspicions”.
This type of arrangement of course also creates a rift between me and my extended family. They will never get to see the full extension of who I am, only whatever facade I have created for them on my parents’ behalf. And I will always be left torn with having to leave significant parts of my life out of conversation, and to have to pretend to be something I’m not to many people who are otherwise close to me. And then there are the wider number of extended relatives to whom I have not allowed myself to get too close because of this arrangement. In many ways, it has become my parents’ version of Star Trek’s prime directive.
But in this day and age of Facebook, the distances between me and my family mean nothing when everything is just a click away. And that’s why I was so surprised to receive this message from my dad on Facebook on New Year’s Day:
“Happy New Year ! Donny and Chris, We hope you’ve had a good year , and We wish you the best 2012.”
This is the first time they have acknowledged us as a couple…and in a forum as public as Facebook. I don’t know what security settings he has in place on his account, but most of his Facebook friends are relatives, who would be able to see his post. Are they now scratching their heads wondering who this “Chris” is? Are those Singaporean relatives who had met Chris now finally putting two-and-two together? Is my dad unsure about how public Facebook can be, or was this an active decision to start being more public about the real me and to stop hiding behind facades? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions yet.
But what I will do is to acknowledge this event as an important baby step towards fully accepting me and Chris into their lives. These were only a few words, perhaps written in haste on New Year’s Day, but they are meaningful and have deeply touched both me and Chris.
Been catching up on my podcasts this week, and was really struck by a very incisive comment about Christmas which showed up in a This American Life podcast and went a little something like this:
You know that saying “you can tell who a person is in a crisis”. I think you can really tell at Christmas too. This is because Christmas, more than any other day in the year, is the one day when we’re all handed the same stage props. The same tree, the meal, the relatives, and the same set of expectations.
Thinking about it, this is a very good analogy for a wedding. Every couple gets handed the same set of props – the ceremony, the reception, the vows – to create a day for which everyone has the same expectations. Happy ones, hopefully.
The piece continues:
And then we all try and create, more or less, the same kind of day. It’s like hundreds of millions of people all set to work doing exactly the same art project. And not just any art project – a very high stakes art project, and one that everyone cares a great deal about getting right. And in that setting, the choices people make never seem clearer.
Yikes – that’s exactly how I’ve been seeing this wedding: a high-stakes project that millions of people have completed before us and millions of people will complete after us. And somehow we have to get it ‘right’, the choices we make must guarantee a perfect outcome. But, unlike Christmas, we don’t get to try again next year. We just get our one chance to create ‘The Perfect Day’.
The podcast finishes on a slightly bittersweet note on the scene of a family photograph:
This is what Christmas is all about. Everybody’s posed. Everybody’s ready. Everybody’s straining to be happy. Everybody has this picture in their head of the perfect Christmas. And of course it’s never going to live up to that picture, it’s never going to be perfect, and so disappointment is built into the very structure of the day. The best that you can do, the best you can hope for, is to ride out the imperfections.
When I first heard that I mentally substituted the word ‘Wedding’ for the word ‘Christmas’ and got an apparently insightful, but ultimately rather pessimistic view of planning a wedding. It’s always going to go wrong, there are always going to be things that don’t meet up to the ideal. We aim for perfection, but will always fall short.
But is perfection what we should really be aiming for anyway? I’ve been to several parties where the host is so caught up with making sure everything is ‘just so’ and that everyone is having fun they don’t enjoy the party themselves – and consequently none of their guests do either.
It’s then I started realising that I was reading far too much into it all, and getting far too bogged down. Unlike Christmas, a wedding is not a day based around a vague concept of happiness and togetherness that has become so disconnected from its origins to be rendered essentially meaningless. A marriage is something genuinely happy, something amazing, something people don’t have to try to hard to get excited about.
Although I’m certain the day will likely have a few wobbly moments practically, and a few bits that aren’t to everyone’s tastes, the occasion of the day itself will hopefully be so great that minor disappointments won’t have to be ‘ridden out’ – they can be pretty much forgotten.
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Zeroing In
Since Mum, Dad and my brother all moved up to Wales it’s really challenged me about the concept of ‘home’. People talk about ‘going home for Christmas’ but I don’t really have that sort of home any more. The house I grew up in has strangers in it, and I certainly no longer have an ‘old room’ to go back to and feel sentimental about. West Ewell, where I lived for 4 happy years before coming up here, has a huge pull for me with so many close and dear friends there but it was never ‘home’. But the good news is that I can honestly say that Islington has become my home.
Following on from Donny’s post I too have become a massive fan of Islington. I love going jogging round Clissold Park and visiting the goats and deer there, I love pottering down the overpriced interior nic-nac shops on Upper Street and even enjoy walking up to Lidl at Finsbury Park for the weekly shop. So it feels really right to me to think about us getting married in this area.
Yes it’s going to be expensive. Yes, it’s going to limit what we can do. I know all that, but we also know we want to get hitched somewhere that means a great deal to us. So Islington it is. For better or for worse.
Now we’ve decided an area to do everything in it gives us a few limitations to work within, but at least when you have limitations it allows you to make more constructive decisions. I had been getting thoroughly overwhelmed and bamboozled with the hundreds of different wedding options available in London, so to limit it to an area is brilliant. It means we can start zero-ing in on a workable plan.
I had set my heart on getting one of the old Routemaster buses to take everyone from the wedding venue to the reception venue but a) they start at £500 a pop and b) we would need 2 of them. Yikes. That would be £1,000 which would be better spent on better food options, or enabling us to invite a few more people. So the plan is to find a reception venue walking distance from the Town Hall. There are a number of possibilities there (Upper Street is a fantastic area for restaurants) so the hunt begins for somewhere pretty that can fit us all in, and not cost the earth.
We’re actually thinking a morning ceremony followed by a lovely long lunch could work quite well. It helps with costs, and means there isn’t that usual 2 hours of standing round awkwardly drinking champagne on an empty stomach waiting for dinner, having not had time for lunch before setting off for the service. We can then go on from there for somewhere more informal for chatting and drinking fun into the evening.
That’s Plan A anyway. We’ll see whether we can make it a reality.
Looks like the flock of doves is out though…
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The joys of Islington
So I am happy to announce that we have decided to try to do as much as possible for our wedding in the borough of Islington, where we live. You already saw in a previous post how enthralled Chris and I both were with the main council chamber at Islington Town Hall. And I was personally taken by how friendly and welcoming the staff at the reception at Town Hall were when we told them we were interesting in having our civil partnership ceremony there. (Islington has a strong history of supporting GLBT rights, including sacking a registrar who refused to perform civil unions after those rights were granted by British law in 2005).
My personal history with Islington goes way back, to the days before I moved to London, when it was still an idea rather than a reality. I still remember sitting down with my company’s CEO with a map of London. He had lived in London for 12 years and still had many connections to the city. So he marked a few places on the map that he thought I should check out as nice places to live. He remarked that Knightsbridge and Belgravia would be far out of my price range, but suggested that I check out Chelsea and South Kensington, Putney and Fulham, Notting Hill and Holland Park. I didn’t realize at the time that these were all prime places to live around central London, and that the salary he was sending me to London on would barely afford me a studio in these areas!! (I should have taken the opportunity to ask for a raise). But ranked #4 on his list was Islington in North London, which I checked out while on a pre-move visit.
I still remember walking over to the Angel along Pentonville Road. I had set off after work one day from the office at Russell Square, passing by Euston Station and Kings Cross-St Pancras Station. And I found myself feeling strangely at home.
Now fast forward a few months: I was in my temporary flat in Bloomsbury after having made the move, and I had been scanning online adverts for affordable one-bedroom flats for hours. I had previously had a bad experience with a housemate in the months before I left Boston, so I was adamant that I would live alone no matter the cost. I started my search rather pragmatically by drawing a 30 minute walking radius around the office and seeing what I could afford. Naturally most of the area around the office (Covent Garden, Soho, Mayfair) were far out of reach on my salary without doing a house share. But there on my computer screen, I was looking at the perfect flat off Kings Square, on the southern tip of Islington, in an EC1 postcode, just a few minutes walk from the Angel, and within a 25 minute walk from the office. It was the first flat that I saw, and I knew that this was going to be home–and it was where I stayed there for over two years.
So naturally when I realized I was going to stay in London for a while, and it came time to hunt for someplace to buy, I looked primarily in Islington. This time I ended up in the north-east side of the borough, near the Hackney and Haringey border. And this is where Chris and I now call home. 
What do I like about Islington? Our area of Islington, called Highbury, is relatively quiet, yet with good transport links by both tube and bus to central London. One side borders on being lily white with tons of hair salons, and even a fromagerie, yet on the other side we have a wealth of ethnic markets and a multicultural blur of activity, a little bit of craziness, and some edginess, and we are a stone’s throw from Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal Football Club. We’re also surrounded by three parks within short walking distance (perfect if we ever decide to get a dog), the lovely village atmosphere of Stoke Newington Church street (where Daniel Defoe used to live) is just a stone’s throw away, and the bars, restaurants, and hustle and bustle of Upper Street are just a short bus ride away.
And best of all, two of these “top 10 British pubs” are within stumbling distance! So Islington is where Chris and I have set up shop, and Islington is where we will be inviting everyone to our nuptials (once we have decided on a date and venue–but that’s another story).
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The Lion, The Witch and the Closet
NB: this post features neither lions nor witches.
This morning I put my relationship status live on Facebook, and was really touched by all the kind comments and likes – thanks for that.
It’s weird I’ve never really mentioned on Facebook before that I’m in a relationship with Donny – not in a big way anyway. Why would I tell people when I miss a train, or have a particularly good sandwich, but not announce to the world about my relationship with a lovely man?
I guess a lot of it comes from my Christian upbringing, which is all about loving other people and putting others before yourself. But it has the unfortunate side-effect of me keeping me quiet about things that are important to me when there is a possibility it could offend other people – particularly my Christian friends.
Most Christians are OK with people ‘being’ gay – but ‘doing’ gay is a whole other matter. When I first started figuring out what it meant to be gay most of my friends were really supportive and understanding, but when I started dating men I know a lot of people were really struggling with whether or not it was ‘OK’. So when things started getting serious with Donny I didn’t tend to bang on about in Facebook just in case of any of my Christian friends would have an issue.
But now I’m getting married. And this kind of caution has to stop. Getting married is not a secret thing, or a thing you only tell certain people. The whole point about doing it is that it is seen by other people. And I want everyone I know to fully understand that this is who I am, and Donny is the person I’m choosing to hitch my wagon to (Not literally.)
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Family phone call, part II
So I feel like I should post a follow-up to my earlier post about my family, since many of you have been asking. Since that last conversation with my mom, there were a couple of weeks where we weren’t able to get in touch, so I just left a message on the answering machine saying that all was well.
We finally connected this past Sunday, and again, the elephant in the room was not brought up. It reminded me of the period of time shortly after coming out to my parents, where every phone call was strained, and my then partner’s name (also Chris) would never be mentioned. If she had to, she would refer instead to “him” or “that person”–to which I would naively respond: “Oh, are you referring to the cat? Or do you mean Chris?” And I had to emphasize the “we” rather than the “I” and “me” every chance I got. But I also had to reinforce that they accept “us”, which includes “me” and “him”, or else they would lose me.
You see, to assign a name to a person humanizes them, and it also makes the situation–the fact that their son is gay and in a long-term relationship–real. Without re-inforcing the reality of the situation, they just could not come to grips with things, and would just continue to live in their own altered reality, with their heads in the sand.
And I still remember when they were in Boston for the first time for my college graduation, my mom’s refusal to even look at the house I shared with (my now ex) Chris, while my family waited in the car for me to join them. She of course didn’t want to meet Chris, which would put not only a name to the “him”, but a face as well. And to see the house would make everything too real, and she wasn’t prepared to do that.
So I again had to force their hand. To do this, I used my trump card. Deperate times called for desperate measures. So, I brought out a cat. The first to come out was Hero, a fat orange tabby who was deathly afraid of the great outdoors. As I pressed his face towards the car window, he let out a plaintive mew, which caused my mom to at last take a look towards the house that I just came out of. And as I waved his paw in their direction, telling Hero to say hello to his grandma and grandpa, a crack of a smile appeared on my mom’s face as she realized the ludicrousness of the situation, with a cat being presented to them like a human baby. And by the time I brought out my favorite cat, a grey-black tabby named Shadow, they were already looking in anticipation to see what mischief I was up to next. And from that point after, in future phone conversations, she would always ask about the cats.
Fast forward nearly a decade–the situation was repeated again when they were visiting Boston for my PhD graduation ceremony. But this time, not only were they inside of that same house they refused to acknowledge so many years ago, but they were playing with the grand-cats and having champagne and a snack with Chris, and Chris’s parents. What a difference a day can make. (In this case, it was literally about 3,000 days). And what a journey of acceptance they have gone through during those 3,000 days.
And this is why that recent conversation came as such a shock to me. By my reckoning, it has now been about 6,000 days since that first incident with the cats, and almost exactly 19 years since I first came out to my mom just before Christmas in 1992. It felt like after one huge step forward and they’ve taken three steps back.
So this last weekend’s call started as usual, with banter about weather and work. I was expecting at least some questioning of how the wedding planning was going, but again she wasn’t about to mention the elephant in the room. Instead, she gave me an alert about London from her Chinese newspaper, regarding massive food shortages in London and people hoarding stockpiles of canned food and “special spaghetti sauce” that is going for over 20 pounds a jar, because of rioting that was going to happen as soon as the Euro destabilized.
This left me scratching my head. There weren’t any food riots that I was aware of in London. In fact, things seemed quite normal. I had my computer on, and scoured Google news looking for anything about the food shortages, or the riots, which my mom insisted were happening, because “she saw it with her own eyes” in the Chinese newspaper that she had in her very hands.
I could even hear the rustling of her newspaper, so I asked what the brand of special spaghetti sauce was, that was going for over 20 pounds per jar. My parents still don’t really speak much English (despite having lived in America for over 35 years), and being in San Francisco, which has a huge Chinese population, they can get by using Chinese for most day-to-day things like banking, shopping, and even transportation. So I pressed my mom for information, and she spelled out the brand for me:
E-M-E-R-G-E-N-C-Y F-O-O-D S-T-O-R-A-G-E.
I was on Google in a flash, and made a horrifying discovery. My mom’s source of news was a translated version of this Daily Mail article!
So this last conversation was a let-down, in more ways than one. But at least my mom recommended that “we”–both Chris and I–think about creating our own stockpile of spaghetti sauce. And that is at least some progress.
Wow, two posts in one day! I haven’t been this inspired in…days.
So now it definitely feels like the pressure is being turned on. Earlier today, Chris and I decided to make our engagement public. We had already told family and close friends. My folks were not exactly excited (but that’s another story). Now it was time for everyone else to learn about the news, and of course the easiest and quickest way to do it was via Facebook. So with one quick push of a button, our friends, the rest of the world, and of course, the databases that Facebook maintains in order to direct advertising towards us, were notified of our upcoming nuptials.
And literally, within seconds, the “likes” and congratulatory comments started filtering in. They came from people from all the different phases of my life–childhood and high school friends from San Francisco, college and grad school classmates from Boston and Williamstown, Massachusetts, and colleagues and friends from both coasts of the Atlantic that we have met along the way. I’m off to bed soon (it is just past midnight), but I am sure there will be dozens more by morning. I was (and still am) feeling a bit overwhelmed. So to those of you who took the time to click “like” or leave a comment–here’s a heartfelt thank you!
Those of you who know me know that I value my privacy and do not take this type of public exposure lightly. Even this blog is a bit of a departure for me. But I feel very strongly that it is important to be visible, and to serve as a role model for others. And to not hide behind a cloak of anonymity. One of the things that drew me to Chris, was the fact that he does work hard to support causes that he believes in; he and his friends have worked to try to bridge the gap between the Christian world and the GLBT community and to create safe environments for kids trying to navigate between these two sometimes seemingly diametrically opposed worlds. I’m not at all religious, but I can recognize the strong ethic within Chris and the values that they represent. And it is shared values, at the end of the day, that form the foundation of a healthy relationship.
But now that this public announcement via Facebook has been made, I can feel the pressure go up a notch. A wedding ceremony, like any other ritual, essentially has an element of theatre, and the pressure is now upon us to put on a good piece show, albeit only for one day. Good thing for us, Chris is also a published playwright. 🙂
We won’t have Wills and Kate’s resources or army of wedding planners (although I do have William’s hairline), but we’ll do our best.
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Say “cheese”!
So just for the record, Chris doesn’t want confetti, and I don’t want a “cheese”-cake (unless it can be made en croute and doesn’t look crappy like this one that we found on a wedding photographer’s blog. Honestly, who wants something mouldy on display for everyone to see? Or a mound of stinky cheese in the corner of the room, with aromas emanating for all the guests to enjoy along with their meal?
In my opinion, a real cheesecake would be far tastier than the traditional English wedding cake (which is essentially a fruitcake encrusted in some frosting sugar). My American friends would find the idea of a fruitcake as a wedding cake rather odd, since you typically see them only at Christmastime, and because no one really likes eating them, they tend to be regifted. Frequently. And since part of my work is to research the drug markets for obesity and diabetes, I feel that we should be presenting healthier options if we are allowed to make any choices. Fruit cake anyone? 
But I digress. We digress. In fact, we have been musing about what we would like or not like for our big day most of our waking hours when we have been together lately. But we are definitely putting the cart before the horse, since the most important aspects of the big day–date and venue–have yet to be decided. I have to say though, that Islington Town Hall does tick a LOT of our boxes.