by Diane Farr
In a casual meeting among two Asian people of similar status, they each do a head nod toward one another (although people under age fifty seem to do a handshake and a head nod, or just a handshake at times). In a more formal setting, the more senior person may do a small head nod, while the more junior person should bow their head below the other’s heart. And the third bow is only really done during a wedding ceremony, or if I manage to get an audience with a king or queen while touring the Far East.
Un-Nee stands up and puts one foot behind the other and turns the back foot out. She bends both her knees until her back knee touches the floor, and then bends from the waist until her head touches the ground. Full prostration, Asian style, looks so graceful because you are erect when first lowering down, and then your entire upper body folds over so that you look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa during descent. I will do this bow in excess of thirty times over the course of my Korean wedding. Un-Nee tells me that Seung’s female relatives will assist me. I have my doubts about this, but I keep them to myself.
Un-Nee is unsure of which rituals I should do for my Korean wedding because she is unmarried, but as I research or hear something about a particular step, she can tell me exactly what it is supposed to look like. And since I have never met an Asian person under age fifty in this country who has even seen this ceremony, I’m gonna pick which rituals to do and call it a day. And where am I learning the most about this ancient skit that my future relatives are not willing to help me with? The Internet.
Not just any old site on Korean culture. I finally piece together my entire Korean ceremony on IKEA’S website. Yeah. A Swedish teenager founded a store for affordable yet attractive furniture that can be built by anyone, as long as you have fifteen hours to spare. It has morphed into a worldwide phenomenon in home furnishings—and spawned the most articulate, thorough, and crucial provider of information for my nuptials.
A section of their website honors different homes around the world and links to a page on traditional weddings. I pick my five rituals from this site and use them exactly as a framework for the entire event.
The much harder thing for me, in fact, is figuring out where to tell Seung I am getting all this intel on his culture without revealing my private language and culture studies. My Korean big sister also gives me a ton of reading material, including a book by an American who immigrated to Seoul and has become a popular newscaster there. His book is like a Korea for Dummies on culture and language. I keep telling Seung I am learning so much from this man, when in fact his is the only book she gave me that I actually have not read.
But really, Seung and I are so swamped trying to work as hard as we always have, plan our three wedding events and the honeymoon, and talk to our parents almost daily that there is little time for talking to each other. On good days, we combine our wedding homework with a date. On bad days, we combine our wedding homework with a fight. Most days land exactly in between.
The day our wedding bands are finally ready is a particularly busy day for me at work. But we are both so excited to see the rings that I am sneaking out for a “lunch date” anyway. We found a jeweler in the Valley who would make both the rings we imagined and let us each put a secret message, engraved inside, for the other. We’ve decided to let each other read this message today because there are so many payoffs on a wedding day, but you really need some reminders that the event is supposed to be a celebration of your love during the planning phase.
But I am shooting eight scenes, all on the FBI “war room” set, which means pages and pages of exposition to read, remember, and recite on camera. I can usually do this easily—except when it comes to names. And on a crime show, there are always a lot of names. Each episode brings the bad guy, the bad guy’s friend, the bad guy’s friend turned informer, the bad guy’s former friend who is the mislead for the bad guy, the victim, the victim’s friend who speaks or vouches for them, the victim’s nefarious friend who might also turn into a bad guy, and so on. I write these names down on things. On my folder or message sheet that I carry in the scene, or on my computer screen, or even on my hand if it works for the situation. And if only one hand “works” on camera, I write names on the other hand that will stay off camera. On this day, my left hand has five names written across it. It looks something like the cover of Everything Is Illuminated by the time lunch comes.
As soon as the bell on the soundstage rings, signaling the last shot till after lunch, I run to my car. I am racing to the jewelry store for the forty-eight-minute break, of which I will spend at least thirty minutes in traffic. My friends in hair and makeup will say that I don’t need touch-ups until I’m on set, buying me eight to ten more minutes before the assistant director will knock on my trailer, telling me, “Back to work!” in the most polite way possible.
It isn’t until I’m being buzzed through the second set of metal cage–like doors and looking up into a security camera that I realize I am still wearing not only my wardrobe but also my props—meaning I have a gun strapped to me.
As I step inside, through the last security precaution and into the private showing room, I have an urge to disclose my very real gun. But to just come clean and explain to the people behind the counter that it’s not loaded, I would have to “pull the gun” here in the doorway of this room filled with diamonds. So instead, I begin panicking and talking incessantly.
Sitting down next to Seung, I’m chattering like a crazy person. He asks what’s the matter and when I don’t answer him or stop talking long enough to even inhale, he is probably worried that “ring day” is setting me back into my fears of marriage. Then he sees my hand, with five men’s names written across it. I imagine that this feels like the paint spots all over again. And where is my beautiful engagement ring? Seung wonders. Pinned to the inside of my underwear, like it always is when I’m filming.
There was no way for me to get my hands into my pants and unlatch the safety pin securing my jewel near my jewel without exposing the fact that I am packing heat. But you know what, I’m here. And I have fifteen minutes before I have to turn around and head back to work, so I’m going for it and getting my engagement ring anyway. But as soon as Seung sees my shoulder harness, he, too, goes into panic mode, wondering through clenched teeth, “What are you doing with a g—”
“Hello! I’m on my lunch hour!”
But Seung’s panic is different from mine. He is inherently honest where I am controlling. So while I’m trying to manage the situation, he comes clean. Of course, he doesn’t foresee what will happen after he immediately turns to the jeweler and says, “She has a gun but it’s ...”
Yes, time stands still in that moment. And I begin talking louder than Seung, trying to bring the jeweler’s attention to me, as well as all of the mounted cameras that are moving toward us because the owner just hit his silent panic button. First, I remove my fake FBI badge and lay it on the table. Then I take my fake FBI personal photo ID and lay that next to it, so when I then swing open my coat to remove my gun to lay it on the counter, perhaps no one will shoot me. Needless to say, by the time I am done explaining all of this again—to an actual policeman who is very annoyed by me but perhaps empathizes with the fact that I am trying to pick up my wedding band on my lunch hour, so he lets me off with just a warning—I barely have time to see my hidden message.
“Seung for Diane,” as in “sing a song for Diane,” is what he wrote in mine. I kiss Seung and whisper in his ear that I want him to sing for me when I get home tonight. I then leave him with both rings in his hand, to take back my props and race out the door to get back to work.
Once I get outside I turn back to look in the window, knowing Seung can finally breathe in and read his secret message. Etched in platinum I wrote, “K-Power forever.” Which refers to a “gang” Seung joined as a child. When his family first came to America, they stayed with a relative. When they were (barely) on their feet they moved out of that house and got their first apartment. This one-bedroom that mother, father,
Seung, and his sister would live in was not only small, but also quite dangerous for him, as it was in a low-income project that no other Korean people lived in.
Gang members only a few years his senior picked on him and sometimes physically attacked Seung, even in primary school. To find the strength to go to school in these early years, Seung told himself that he was in a gang called K-Power, for Koreans only. And that someday it would be filled with his people. It was only a few years until his parents could afford to move to another, bigger one-bedroom apartment, thankfully in another suburb in Virginia where he would not be accosted because of his race. Seung thrived in this safer environment, but still didn’t know any Korean or Korean American classmates. He privately clung to the idea of his gang—of one, but a gang nonetheless. Soon after he asked me to marry him I asked if this meant I was a member of K-Power. Seung inducted me on the spot. Since then the couple that introduced us has been included as well. Neither of them is Korean, either, but we all want to run with Seung, which was what he was really yearning for anyway.
THE GUN EPISODE IS later topped in stupidity when we are almost arrested a second time, while planning the wedding. The Korean ceremony will take place during our Friday night rehearsal dinner, in the middle of a field alongside an abandoned farmhouse and a babbling brook, under a tent frame with only fairy lights hung around the metal frame (sounds so pretty, right?). Unfortunately, the terrain is so flat. In the center of twenty surrounding tables, the ceremonial rituals Seung and I will be doing with my parents and his will mostly be done on the ground. So in order to raise us up high enough in the grass that people can see the goings-on, I need a stage. I then have the same problem for the following day’s American ceremony on the mountaintop deck. Barry has agreed to officiate for us, and we’re still hunting for Buddhist monks who will do chanting and a blessing. But between all of them and a maid of honor and a best man, and two readers, we need two levels on the “altar” or there will be so many people standing during the ceremony that it might look like backstage at a U2 concert.
I decide the best way to make a stage that can be transported around and rebuilt over the weekend is to collect discarded shipping pallets. They are four-foot squares about eight inches off the ground that are used to ship tile or paint or other heavy industrial goods on trucks. They are generally discarded and sometimes very beat up after shipping, but if you’re willing to scour an entire major metropolis for the best trash, they are like grown-up Legos.
We don’t exactly steal the pallets from garbage piles behind retail stores in my area, but we don’t exactly ask for them, either. Outside one particular Home Depot, whose dumpsters I begin to visit almost every night, Seung and I start fighting over wedding invitations. We are loading our fourth or fifth pallet for the night into my SUV (to add to the thirty in our garage to go underneath the buses) when both of our strong feelings prevent us from noticing the security guard who’s obviously had enough of our nightly pilfering.
When I see the guard is fast approaching us, I tell Seung to get in the car and do so myself. Seung, of course, wants to address this man who is feverishly talking into a walkie-talkie. I get the car going and pull it alongside Seung and roll down his window. I then “ask” him to get in the car for a second time, but let’s understand my tone is well beyond an “ask.” When Seung ignores my loud voice, I try a soft one. I promise that if he gets in the car this second and lets me dust this rent-a-cop, I will never ask him to get another pallet with me for the rest of his life. Seung gets in and I race out of the Home Depot parking lot just as they are locking the gates to the driveway to keep me inside!
Seung and I do not laugh about this “getaway” for a long time. And we have a steadfast rule about not letting the sun go down on our anger. After this second incident with the law you would think I might have slowed myself down, or perhaps reconsidered a wedding planner. Because just as threatening as jail time should feel, I’m also an actress who is occasionally mentioned in gossip rags. Stealing what at best might be considered construction material, but in print would probably be called trash, is not a good look for me. But by now I have slipped into the zone that I warned Seung about just before we got engaged. The one in which I can become so myopic about getting a task done that I get swept inside of it and lose the meaning. I am aware that Seung has tried multiple avenues to get me out of “wedding-orbust” mode, but it’s not until he finally realizes why I am doing all this insane planning that he awakens me to my own fixation.
When I give Seung a list of things to call his parents about, to ask them if there’s anything on it they would like me to do—including invite people I’ve heard them mention only once, serve a specific kind of liquor to their guests that is very expensive and I would have to import, and have six-foot flower arrangements that I have seen at Korean occasions but really have no idea how to find—Seung says, “No more.”
He actually grabs me by the shoulders and asks why I’m running my decisions by his parents when I’m not even consulting my own. It takes more than one session of pillow talk with Seung for me to even realize and then articulate that I am trying to make his parents proud of me and thank them for their acceptance of me. Yes, I want my wedding to be all I can dream it to be, but I celebrate myself all the time. I’ve never felt that a marriage, or the party to usher it in, defines me. But the competitor in me who feels shunned by the extended family is trying to now use my wedding to put on a show on behalf of Ama and Apa. I worry incessantly about embarrassing them or making them look foolish for supporting me, thus driving me to the overcompensation lane of the bridal superhighway.
So now it’s back to the therapist’s office so I can further admit, even to myself, that I am also trying to prove to the other relatives the error of their ways. Which is not what this day is about. At all. When I get out early from shooting one day and finally throw this admission onto the kitchen counter, with the samples I am also carrying from a Korean grocer who was suggesting menu items I might serve, Seung calls a moratorium. No seeing his elder relations for one month and no wedding planning for the entire weekend. He also asks if I will join him for dinner with his cousin Charles and his girlfriend, Breanna, this Saturday night.
* CHARLES IS SEUNG’S COUSIN. BREANNA IS AN actress I worked with years ago who was the catalyst for Seung’s talking to me the second time he and I met at karaoke. They have been dating for almost five years, but I haven’t seen Breanna in a long time because she does not attend many family events. Which may have to do with the fact that many Koreans and Korean Americans do not bring dates around their family until they are betrothed to marry them.
Or it might be because Breanna isn’t Asian. She is a mix of just about everything else—black, white, and American Indian, to name a few. At first glance, though, she is a strikingly beautiful black woman. Although I have spent a lot of time with Breanna at work and on the evenings when the cousins get together, I rarely get to see her just with Charles. By his side at dinner tonight, she is demure, supportive, and a gentle influence. At least here, with Charles’s cousin Seung present, Breanna lets her man do most of the talking, and this charms me somehow.
The four of us talk about the fun parts of our wedding, and we ask Charles if he will introduce us to the guests at our Korean ceremony on the Friday night, and perhaps explain something about why this entire family is so gigantically tall. Charles agrees. Breanna kindly compliments our invites and says she already knows what she is wearing. Part of me wonders how this first group outing will fare, when Seung Yong marries a “white” woman and Charles brings a “black” woman (whom we both hope he will marry) as his guest with all the family present. Until two days later, when I hear that almost none of the relatives are coming.
Seung is busying himself with something in our bedroom and not facing me when he says all of the aunts and uncles who live in the Los Angeles area are not coming, nor are any of those who live in Korea. From what he can tell so far, every member of his father’s
family other than the Como (who lives in Hawaii, and, although I still don’t believe it yet, sang my praises) is declining.
The Chungs are a large family, and like most, they have their own drama. Seung is clearly very upset about these mass declines, though, and he is trying his best not to wind me up further. Apparently this is a done deal. He says the siblings have been talking and trying to find a way to all meet on common ground despite some family rifts—but that it has failed. Of course, no one bothered to address us in this matter. But via his mom and dad, Seung is learning that none of the relatives he was so excited to share this big event with will be in attendance. Seung is saying this has only to do with their own issues and not the fact that I am Caucasian. But I am doubtful.
Regardless, I’m trying so hard to find that voice I had a year and a half ago when I first told Seung his family’s support was not important to me. That all I cared about was him. That I would support him in any way he needed while he did his best to manage his people. But this sentiment seems to have left me. Or at least it’s being held hostage because I can see these people have hurt Seung—my wonderfully kind man who complains about nothing.
Why is no one seeing the fact that this is not Seung’s fifth birthday party? He is a grownup with his own feelings, and he loves these people despite everything I see them do. And what exactly is this about, anyway? Is there a rift between these grown siblings? Does that exclude their wives, then, too? The answer in everything I have seen so far in Korean culture is clearly yes, but I’m also well aware that these wives have their own relationships with the other relatives and their children—particularly Seung Yong. So how am I supposed to believe this doesn’t have something to do with our marriage being biracial? Is there any way to take that out of the fray, along with the obvious domino effect that is already in motion when the other sons in this family bring their non-Asian dates?