Wedding Alarm Bells
Spring 2007
“You have dishonored the family.”
| I was working
in Taipei as a personnel officer with the Army and Air Force Exchange
Services in 1960 when I became aware of a seemingly quiet, strikingly
beautiful colleague with black hair that reached to her waist. This was
Lucy. Sometimes she dressed in Western clothes and other times she wore
the chi’pao. Eventually I summoned enough nerve to ask her to
dinner, and she accepted. We dined at one of the best restaurants in
the world, located in the Grand Hotel, Taipei’s biggest hotel… That
dinner at the Grand Hotel’s Mandarin restaurant was the only time we
went out together in public. We dated surreptitiously, taking drives,
having dinner at my home, or dining in places where we would be
unlikely to meet someone she knew. She had to be home early in the
evening to meet the family’s strict curfew. We never went to a movie. I
never walked her to her door, but let her out of the car a couple of
blocks away from their family residence in Taipei. Until this time I
had not seriously considered marriage, but with Lucy I had a change of
mind. After paying court for almost two years, I proposed. “My parents would never agree,” she said. She was 30 years old, an educated and independent woman with a job, but this was not the United States, where young women followed their hearts and made their own decisions. “I will adhere to the ancient custom,” I said, “and send an emissary to your parents.” Lucy’s family home was in the village of Miao-Li, in the center of the island of Taiwan. She was one of ten siblings in a wealthy Hakka family. … The next day I received a message from Lucy’s cousin saying that not only had her father refused the proposal, Lucy was forbidden to return to Taipei and was a virtual prisoner at the family home. Her younger brother and the family’s servants were assigned to watch her…. I knew we had to act quickly. As an employee of the U.S. government, in order to marry a Taiwanese citizen I had to request permission from the State Department and then arrange for a representative from the U.S. Consulate in Taipei to be present at the ceremony to ensure the marriage was legal in the eyes of the Chinese. After that, I arranged for a municipal court judge, a church, the license, and the certificate of marriage. I set the time for early in the morning. Finally I sent word [through a friend] of the wedding date – September 9, 1962. Her birthday. Now I had to get Lucy out of her family home and back to Taipei. Under martial law, Lucy could not be married without her identity papers. Either by luck or premonition, she had left her papers with a friend, so once she escaped from her father’s house, she would have access to her identity papers. I arranged for a driver to go to Miao-Li, where he would meet Lucy and her friend at midnight…. About nine o’clock [the next] night, Lucy’s older brother appeared at our home in a highly agitated state. He would not come inside, so we stood outside in the courtyard while he derided us. Speaking Chinese, he said to Lucy, “What have you done? What has happened?” “I am married,” she replied. “You have dishonored the family,” he shouted. “Our mother and father deserve better than this. You are Chinese. You should have more discipline.” Then he turned to me. “You have violated all civilized precepts,” he ranted. “You have taken my sister into her doom.” ...On and on he went, berating us for about an hour. All the time he had his hand in his pocket and I wondered if he had a gun. Because he was so angry and our breach of custom was so severe, I thought anything was possible. Finally he left. |
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