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.