by Diane Farr
My other most significant meeting with a family member is with a cousin on Seung’s mother’s side. Ama was only four years old when her mother passed away, and her father remarried and had more children. She, too, is one of eight siblings. I have always found all of Ama’s relatives wonderfully humble and kind. This niece of Ama’s, who was born and still lives in Korea, is the same, as well as hardworking. She is a manager at the five-star hotel where Seung’s parents have put us up for this week, and where our reception will be held tomorrow, on Saturday evening. Today Seung and I, along with his parents, are following this niece, who is also Seung’s cousin—I don’t know her name, but she is slightly older than me, so they may never tell me her name because I am not supposed to use it. If I speak to her directly, I will call her Un-Nee (like I called my Korean coach—meaning “big sister”). We are all following Un-Nee for a viewing of the room where our reception will be held.
The anteroom before the ballroom is huge. Un-Nee tells me that this is where Seung and I will line up with his mother and father and bow to every guest, one at a time. She then leads us inside to the main room. It looks so tremendous that I’m totally confused. But this cousin sits me down at what is clearly the conclusion of the English portion of this tour, and she speaks at length to Seung’s parents in Korean. When she comes back to me, to ask if I like Seoul, I say, “Yes, very much, Un-Nee.” She politely giggles like everyone else does when I call them by the appropriate billing. Seung then politely asks her how long she has been working here and without pause adds her given name, something I can’t really understand and definitely cannot spell, but the point is, he says her name and all hell breaks loose.
Un-Nee yells at him. And I mean yells. She leans over the table and wags a finger in Seung’s face also and tells him first in Korean and then in English that he will not use her first name at any time, ever. And that he should learn from me. I’m so embarrassed for Seung I can’t even laugh, because she might as well have spanked him. His parents do nothing to defend him because they, of course, are fastidious believers in the vow of respecting an elder—even a cousin just two years his senior whom he has never even met before. In order to change the subject, I ask Un-Nee (hell yeah, I’m not getting that wrong) how many people will be in this giant room tomorrow night.
She doesn’t answer my question but rather explains that my in-laws have chosen several buffets for the evening. There will be Korean food, Japanese food, Chinese food, and American food wrapped all the way around the space. It is traditional to have buffets at Korean weddings, and how many different styles of food you serve is a show of success and pride. But even with a forty-foot buffet all the way around the room, this room is too big. I point-blank ask Un-Nee, “How many people will be sitting for dinner at this wedding reception tomorrow?”
And I almost fall out of my chair when she says, “Two hundred.”
* ON SATURDAY EVENING, I DON MY HANBOK again for my next full-scale reception. At least I am getting to wear this beautiful dress twice. I’m wondering if there are other rituals I will be asked to do tonight, so I ask my mother-in-law, who says, “No rituals tonight. Just speaking and eating.”
I’m not really sure what that means, but who cares. I am always up for a party, and I truly love my in-laws. And not just because I didn’t have to do one second of planning for this event. On the first day in Seoul they drove us all over town, and on a bathroom break halfway through the day I asked Seung if I should worry about how quiet we all are in the car. I’m hyperconscious of not taking any bonding time away from them and their son because I’m not Korean. And I’m worried that I am already dampening their family conversation because I don’t speak the language. Seung laughs at me and says this is the most talking they’ve all done since he was in high school.
He tells me to think of his parents like grandparents. Like people who really love him but don’t have that much in common with him. They just want to be physically near him. And suddenly, I get it. I spend a lot of time with my grandmother. It mostly centers around food, and my telling her all sorts of things she probably doesn’t care one iota about, but she listens intently and loves to hear a good drama from me. I think her favorite thing to do with me is cuddle up and watch TV together. So from this day forward I think of Ama and Apa like Seung’s grandparents and the entire week goes splendidly. Every day that they take us on a journey, I take a little catnap in the car and they are so happy to see me sleep and know that I am comfortable with them.
Frankly, I am excited to have this night go by so that I can share the news that I am pregnant with Ama tomorrow before we leave on Monday for our actual honeymoon. I wanted to tell them the second I arrived in Seoul, but I’ve spent five days trying to talk Seung into telling them—at least before we leave Korea. But he is not yet fully on board. He feels that we should go to the doctor and have someone with a title confirm and charge me for my pregnancy results. Seung just doesn’t seem to believe this pregnancy is a fact yet, even though I have taken all five pregnancy tests, one every morning, and they’ve all given the same result.
Today I beg him to let us tell his parents while we are here this week because otherwise we will have to tell them by phone. Seung may want bloodwork to prove this is not a hysterical pregnancy, but he is also aware just how exciting and important this news will be to his mother and father. He has secretly resigned himself that it is indeed happening and now just wants to prolong the unending discussions and daily phone calls it will unleash between him and his parents for nine long months. Finally, with this admission, I tell him “tough noogies,” because I’ve only had an Ama and an Apa for seven days, but I can’t keep it from them anymore. We are telling them tomorrow after wedding number three, no matter what.
* I STAND BETWEEN AMA AND SEUNG ON THE receiving line in the anteroom. I am amazed at how many ten-foot flower arrangements are in this entry room from friends of the Chungs. I meet a woman who is like a mother to Ama or Apa, I can’t remember which, and she is quite old but so fashionable. Someone gives her a corsage and she redresses it herself and makes it even hipper. I’m so excited that I’m quasi-related to her. She, being the eldest in the family, gets on our receiving line first. As the guests start coming, I start bowing. I say hello in Korean and touch my heart with two hands as I say, “Diane.” And I bow the deepest full-standing bow possible again. I do this for every single guest for almost an hour!
By the time Seung and I walk into the wedding hall, every seat is filled. There is a dais on a stage above the crowd, and I laugh as I realize Seung and I have to go up there. We look like the actual top of a Korean wedding cake. And everyone stares at us as if we really are just dolls and not actually people. And I begin this fantasy in my head that I just married the president of Korea or something and this is just another diplomatic evening I will sit through, where I don’t understand anything but I keep smiling to spread goodwill. And I hold on to this character study all night because that’s basically exactly how it goes.
We are only sitting for two minutes when Un-Nee’s younger brother gets up to a microphone and begins speaking. This cousin, whom I have not met before tonight, is a stand-up comedian. He is handsome and actually looks like Seung but with much better, fantastically mod hair. I’m stunned as I realize he has been called upon to emcee the wedding. He speaks about Seung and me in Korean and throws in some English here and there, I assume for me. He then shows a video of photos set to music of Seung and me through the ages.
This is really sweet. Seung asked me for baby pictures months ago and I didn’t think much of it but assumed it was something for our wedding. When it never transpired I forgot all about it. But here they are, and looking so cute in between Seung’s same-age photos. And once I reach the adult years, I can’t believe that Seung’s dad has found more pictures of me on the Internet than even I’ve found of me on the Internet. Seung leans over in mock anger that there are way more pictures of me than of him. And they’re great pictures! I want them,
too.
After the slideshow a very dapper man is called to the stage. He speaks for a long time and at a certain point Seung looks over at me smiling. He leans in to whisper that this is another Como’s husband. This Como is long deceased and the family really loved her. Her husband is an esteemed professor at a university in Seoul. He is the keynote speaker of our event. I am unaware of it still, but there are yet another four speakers lined up to talk. All broken up by the cousin emcee. Wow, that’s what Ama meant when she said “eating and talking.”
Seung is smiling because this professor is saying exactly what I have been saying to all the people in my life who ask if Seung’s culture and mine are very different. For over a year I have been explaining that I see Koreans like the Irish of Asia. They are a small country, separated from their brethren on the same peninsula only by ideals. They are also victims to the whims of a much larger country (in Korea’s case, China), which has been kicking their ass for a century. Therefore, they are scrappy. They have a rugged sense of survival, but they also know how to enjoy life. They eat in feasts and many drink till they drop. And the parallels go on and on. And here is a professor saying the same thing to a room full of people in Seoul, using much less colloquial language than I do, but expressing the same sentiment. And I have a little private moment when I feel like all my homework on the way to this marriage was not just about Seung’s family. That it is about me, and who I am as this man’s wife. And I love my homework. I have never done research on anything—a country, an author, a character—that has failed to inform some part of my personal worldview. As of today I’m sure that all my research about marrying into this family, this culture, and this race will only make me a better wife and a more well-rounded person.
Which is a complete contradiction to my laughing my ass off when I ask Seung what the professor is saying now and he shrugs his shoulders and whispers, “I have no freaking idea.” But it’s not his words that are cracking me up. It’s the shrug of his shoulders that finally causes me to look at the hat on his head, and I burst out laughing.
We drove all over the city of Seoul today—for nearly six hours—chasing down the hats Seung and I are wearing. We drove from relative to relative, I think finally finishing our hunt at this professor’s house. These hats are heirlooms, worn during the wedding ceremonies of many of Seung’s father’s family members. Apa wanted us to have them for tonight. They also came with immense and ornate wraps that would go on the outside of our wedding gowns, but Ama thought they were too dusty for us to wear. My hat is like a colorful pillbox. The base is round and short and black, and there are very colorful things all around it. It wasn’t until I put this hat on that my entire ensemble actually seemed like a costume. The look of the entire dress changed with my hat, and now it seems like it belongs to a life other than my own. I wondered like a teenager, in the bathroom of my hotel suite tonight when I pinned my hat in, if Seung would still find me attractive in my “foreign” gear.
And when I looked at Seung for the first time tonight with his hat on, I mostly saw that he was just as worried about me thinking he looked silly. My immediate instinct was to quell that worry of his. I did and never really looked at his hat again. But now as he is whispering to me that he has no idea what’s happening at “our” wedding reception, I am worried that I’m about to fall into a fit of laughter that I will never be able to stop. Because as Seung shrugs and let his eyes roll back a bit, his resemblance to Mickey Mouse’s friend Goofy can no longer be overlooked. Seung’s hat is like a large black beanie on his head, with two long flaps of fabric hanging down the sides that look just like Goofy’s ears. It’s clearly not just me who saw this image, because as soon as I start laughing, Seung leans into my ear and talks in Goofy’s voice to say, “Hey, Minnie Mouse, wanna ditch Mickey and come get married to me in South Korea?”
And now I laugh so hard that I pee my dress a little.
I’m desperate to stop before I pull focus from the speaker, but just then the professor finishes. Now Seung is moving his head and upper body in all sorts of Goofy-like ways and I may just have to excuse myself to the bathroom. Until a waiter comes over and sits down on the floor between us.
The waiter explains that there is a break before the next speaker and now it is time for us to get up, circle the room, and thank the guests for coming. He explains this in English, but both Seung and I are so shocked to have someone say something we can understand, we just stare at him. This causes him to then add, “You guys seemed to have no idea what was going on, so I thought I would just help you out.”
Yes, you are right, and thank you! Seung and I whisper this and as we get up to make our rounds, his parents are already on their feet to take us table by table and introduce us. The waiter is totally right.
As we walk, I say my Korean sentences and am met with smiles everywhere. One gentleman even offers me a bottle of green-label scotch, which I have never seen before, that he says he brought for me because I am Irish. When he asks if I would like to do a shot with him, I’ve already accepted before I remember Rita’s words about drinking in front of Seung’s parents. I retract my previous statement and Seung steps in to tell me it would be okay to drink with this person. I have to raise an eyebrow, as I also remember for the both of us that I am newly pregnant. In response to which Seung does that Goofy thing with his shoulders again and I can’t even speak, I’m trying so hard to stifle a laugh.
Once we return to our raised dinner table for two (having not done any shots), the waiter stays with us—on the floor behind the linens, where no one can see him—and does the Cyrano for us all night. Sometimes he says things that seem so preposterous that we both look down at him to say, What? and then I remember to drop my chopstick and pretend we were looking for it because he’s not supposed to be up here with us, or specifically down on the floor between our seats.
Then comes the moment when he says, “Now you get up and give your speech, new husband.”
Is it any shocker that Seung is not a big fan of public speaking? No less in a room filled with two hundred, of whom he probably only knows fifteen, people, plus thirty staff members, and he has to speak in Korean. Seung really just speaks enough Korean to talk logistics with his parents. I always say he does not speak enough of the language to walk into a Korean nightclub and go home with a national. He doesn’t get the nuances of the language, nor have enough vocabulary to joke around in it. So as he stands up tonight, my first thought is He is in trouble now. But the pauses I hear him take as he muddles his way through this unexpected and impromptu oratorio are the same he does in English. And he seems okay. The softness in his tone is also the same as when he speaks English, which is incredibly disarming, and I see it working in the room. And his mannerisms seem like his own, but in fact, I think they are just a product of our generation and our mutual culture—our American culture, that is. As I look at my husband, Seung, he still seems like that guy I hit on in a bar—three times before I finally let him kiss me—even as he is dressed up in a silk robe, with a Disney character–like hat on and speaking another language. Seung’s persona supersedes his attire, his location, his words and language, and, most important, his race. He is a man made up of many interesting characteristics, precisely because they are a blend of his experiences growing up in D.C., with many friends and a family that loved him. He loves college football with a fervor that always shocks me, and he is a very competitive golfer. He is also a sneaker-head and hip-hop junkie and so well-versed in pop culture that I often wonder where he gets his intel from. But mostly, he really is just my Seung and no longer The Giant Korean. Isn’t life funny that I had to come all the way to Korea to see just how American my husband really is? It is well worth the trip for so many reasons, but especially because I go home with him forever after.
* THE NIGHT BEFORE WE LEAVE FOR OUR honeymoon, Seung’s parents take us to a very fancy restaurant on the top of a mountain in Seoul. They are excited and I am starving. But when we walk into the private roo
m they have secured for the four of us, I see that the table is built into the floor and realize this is a sushi restaurant. Which makes me seem like the biggest pain in the ass because I can’t eat raw fish while pregnant. I turn around and look at Seung and say, “Tell them,” out loud. He ignores me and sits down.
As Ama and Apa begin ordering food and I have to say no to everything they suggest, I look at Seung again and plead with him to not do this to me. Finally, with a big huff and puff, he says to the room, “So we have some good news.” His parents look at him so blankly that it’s clear they have no inkling of what he is about to say.
“Diane is pregnant” is immediately met with a giant scream. A scream of happiness, but a scream. Then silence. Then Apa says something in Korean that requires no translation. I know he’s just asked, “How pregnant? How far along?”
Having been reading my book on pregnancy I now realize I have to add on the four weeks before I discovered I was pregnant to give the right “gestation week.” Instead of saying that I’m five weeks pregnant, which would be right, I add on another four weeks, thinking I have to go back another cycle, and I incorrectly say I’m nine weeks. Both of his parents look down at my belly. Seung starts talking quickly in Korean and it is obvious that they believe I am nine months pregnant. He explains that I’m really about three weeks in and that I discovered it two days after the wedding in Mammoth.