A Tale of Two Weddings

My mum and dad could hardly wait to relinquish me to the first man who asked for my hand in marriage.  At my parents’ house one night, as my mum was clattering plates and clearing away scraps of roast pork and garlic broccoli, my boyfriend cleared his throat momentously.  He began to announce his intentions and ask for my parents’ blessing.  But, before he had finished last his sentence, my mother, no longer able to contain herself, piped up, “Yes!  Definitely!  Yes!” 

My father grinned wordlessly like a Cheshire cat.  His eyes darted side-to-side.  His hands trembled ever so slightly.  He hesitated.  He knew he was supposed to interrogate my future fiancé, having only met the guy a handful of times but, instead, my dad congratulated him heartily, with almost palpable relief.

The ring had barely emerged from its box when my dad asked if we would consider “dropping by” in Malaysia for a “small dinner” with my extended family after our wedding.

It had been almost a decade since I visited my birthplace.  I rarely felt nostalgic about the place, except for one evening when my sister and I walked past some overflowing bins in a dank alleyway and we sighed, “Ah, smells like Malaysia”.  My only surviving grandparent had grown quite ancient; cousins who used to hold my hand as firecrackers exploded on Chinese New Year had started their own families; I had forgotten how to write my name in Chinese characters.

I told my dad it sounded like a nice idea but I should probably consult the groom-to-be.

“We counted already”, my dad assured me. “We only need six tables.”

“Who is ‘we’?” I asked, briefly forgetting basic rules of grammar.

“Aunty Min and me,” my father said, referring to my aunt who lived in Sydney.

Brushing aside my surprise that they had been secretly scheming, I called the aunt in Sydney a few days later to tell her I was engaged.  I thought it might be nice for her to hear it from me instead of through my father.

“Hi!  I can’t talk for too long.  I’m at the airport”, she said.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to Penang to find a place for you to have your wedding dinner.”

The ball was rolling, and gathering speed with the lubrication of Asian efficiency.

Before my new fiancé and I had decided on a church or reception venue or even discussed changing our Facebook relationship statuses, my dad sent me a text message:  “Paid deposit 4 dinner.”

He spent a lot of time on the telephone, shouting jovially to distant uncles in Hong Kong, guffawing with his primary school friends in Singapore, coaxing cousins of cousins in various South East Asian cities to fly to Penang.  His excitement ballooned and refused to be deflated by my looks of horror when he updated me on the growing guest list for what I had started calling "our second wedding".  

“It’s only about nine tables, don’t worry”, he said one week.

“Okay, so we have about ten to fifteen tables”, he later announced.

I never suspected my father had so many friends or was capable of organising a party of such magnitude.  The impending nuptials revealed new aspects of my dad.  I stumbled upon an Excel spreadsheet he created to keep track of guests, neatly categorised and numbered and colour-coded.  This was a man who used to click so slowly and laboriously that the mouse couldn’t recognise that he was trying to double-click. 

Using his miraculously improved computer skills, he sent me an email last week with the mysterious subject heading: “Sqmple invite” [sic].  There was no text, just a PDF attachment that had Chinese characters cascading down a crimson background. It featured a photograph of a smiling Asian man and woman in front of a blazing sunset, gazing into each other’s eyes. “Hi dad”, I wrote back, “What is this for?”  I never received a reply. 

If I discover that the Malaysian postal service is currently transporting hundreds of red invitations with pictures of me and my fiancé Photoshopped over the Chinese couple, I won’t be too angry.  My dad – usually curmudgeonly, fiercely private, monosyllabic and able to summon thunderclouds in his eyes – is as excited as I’ve ever seen him and it makes me happy.