This article is part of San Francisco Confesses, a feature series dedicated to anonymous stories from locals they’d never share with their name attached.
On our way to San Francisco City Hall, we stopped at Goodwill so I could pick out a wedding dress. I rifled through racks of cream lace and beaded dresses until an off-white pantsuit caught my eye. Given the surrealism of my impending marriage, I was not expecting a Say Yes to the Pantsuit moment in the musty dressing room. Yet there I was, cheeks flushed and heart pounding.
“Pants!” James, my fiancé, exclaimed when I shyly gave him a twirl. “You look cool.”
“I guess the next best adjective after ‘beautiful’ on your wedding day is ‘cool’?” I said, my voice trembling.
My City Hall ceremony was a 30-minute legal rite — no friends, no family, no emotional preparation for married life — a stark contrast to the raucous wedding festivities in my hometown.
In Hong Kong, weddings are cacophonous celebrations. Hundreds of attendees stuffed in a banquet parlor sheathed in cardinal red are served steaming dishes of roasted suckling pig and imitation shark fin soup. With mathematical precision, my aunts always gossiped fervently about the number of attendees; anything less than 200 was an embarrassment.
Weddings back home are rich with culture, an extravagant announcement of achievement for the couple’s families. Yet I found each ceremony devoid of personality, a more forgettable ordeal than the last. Even as a child, I vowed never to have a traditional Chinese wedding.
Standing there at City Hall across from James, my significant other for the past two years, was an extension of my rejection of Hong Kong and infatuation with Western culture. The city’s handover to China occurred when I was a toddler. My parents regularly discussed Hong Kong’s bleak future at the dinner table with undisguised agitation.
They raised me in an English-speaking household and sent me to summer camps abroad, hoping my exposure to the greater world would enable me to start a new life anywhere, if necessary. It was easy to internalize this expectation. I began exclusively watching E! and befriending kids from other international schools. To taxi drivers, classmates, and extended family, I pretended I couldn’t speak Cantonese.
My ticket away was desperate, hard-earned. When I opened my acceptance letter from a top U.S. university, I felt not triumphant excitement, but relief. Similar emotions engulfed me four years later, when I received my first and only job offer. There was scant industry demand for entry-level event coordinators who needed work visa sponsorship. Instead, U.S. immigration policies value those with graduate degrees and technical backgrounds, such as software engineering.
My new employer was a marketing firm that organized events for the Asian-American community. During the interview, the HR manager seemed pleased by my familiarity with both Cantonese and Mandarin.
“My Chinese is a little rusty,” I confessed.
“You grew up in Hong Kong,” she said with a reassuring smile. “You’ll be fine.”
Despite being underpaid and overworked, I secretly gloated whenever I scrolled past my old classmates’ social media posts about their new jobs in Hong Kong. Few had managed to obtain a U.S. work visa. I considered their returning home after school an admission of defeat.
A week after starting my career, I matched with a guy named James on Bumble. On our first date, he tried to guess my hometown.
“L.A.,” he declared confidently. “You have a slight Valley Girl drawl.”
I rolled my eyes. “No, I don’t!” He was surprised I grew up abroad and that I wasn’t American.
I got that a lot, especially from my new co-workers, who were mostly first- and second-generation Asian Americans and passionate about their cultural heritage.
I introduced James to my favorite dishes — mango sago, wonton soup, and Hong Kong style milk tea — cheerfully ordering in increasingly nimble Cantonese. He was surprisingly adventurous, even attempting my rejection list of thousand-year egg and stewed pig intestines on our weekly dates at Chinese restaurants around town. I was impressed.
James was curious about the Chinese lexicon, too, so I sought to dissect my mother tongue. Over home-cooked dinners, we watched videos explaining Hong Kong’s geopolitical history. Lying in bed together, I tried to articulate why I left.
Our relationship progressed quickly but carefully. There was an unspoken agreement that we both thought each other might be the one. Weeks after meeting him, I was spending most nights at his apartment while still paying for my own “place,” an illegally constructed room in an Outer Sunset garage.
A year after our first date, he accompanied me on a trip back home, captivating my family’s attention with adorable efforts to communicate via hand gestures. I gave James the city tour: the Peak, the highest hill on Hong Kong island overlooking the city; Victoria Harbor at sunset, where we watched each skyscraper flicker to life; the evening streets of Causeway Bay, a bustling shopping district crammed with crowds. On the cab ride back to the airport, I saw a city that was trying its best. The anti-extradition protests, which would cement the reclamation of my Hongkonger identity, wouldn’t happen for another 18 months.
Back in the Bay Area, James invited me to my first non-Chinese wedding at a Napa winery. The open bar, romantic vows, and emotional toasts with hilarious, raw anecdotes celebrating the couple’s relationship were mesmerizing. It was exactly how I envisioned American weddings — a triumphant tribute to how two people found life partners to experience this world together.
I clutched James on the dance floor, overwhelmed by the thought of how trillions of decisions somehow led to us swiping right on each other. It was yuan fen, serendipity; if there is yuan fen, two people can eventually meet even if they live 1,000 miles away.
In the Lyft to City Hall, James clasped my sweaty palm, giving it a reassuring squeeze.
“Do you regret doing this?” I whispered to him.
“No.” He sounded surprisingly calm for someone who had decided to marry me only a few days earlier.
The week before, I had stumbled to my unofficial home in a haze, relaying to him in tears how my colleagues and I were herded into a conference room and told the company was going bankrupt. All employees were laid off immediately without severance. My work visa was therefore canceled; I would have to find another visa-sponsoring job or leave the country within 60 days.
The news was not entirely unexpected. I had spent the past few months sending out résumés, attending interviews, and notifying disappointed recruiters that I needed work visa sponsorship. I naively assumed I had more time.
“I wish I could’ve done better,” I apologized to James. “I’m sorry.” I imagined moving back to a city that didn’t expect my return and posting a confession of failure disguised as jubilation on social media.
At least I would be back in time for Chinese New Year, a holiday I hadn’t properly celebrated in years. I imagined my future life: telling stories of my foreign adventures while wrapping dumplings with my grandparents. I could watch my siblings grow up without the need for pixelated videos. My parents would initially be disappointed but ultimately relieved they were no longer alone.
In that moment, I realized I’d come to appreciate the comfort of the simple familiarities my hometown offers — known streets, a family meal, longtime neighbors. I realized that what had been keeping me in the U.S. had shifted: it was no longer my longtime goal of escaping Hong Kong, but love.
James held me tightly and asked if there was anything we could do to prevent the divergence of our lives. “Marriage,” I replied awkwardly, introducing the term to our collective vocabulary for the first time.
Despite our whirlwind romance, we were still pragmatists who had undergone longer relationships that soured over time. Marriage was for high school sweethearts, couples that owned dogs together, relationships worthy of those tear-inducing vows in American weddings.
I flushed with embarrassment while imagining the inevitable xenophobic accusations and disapproval stemming from a hasty green card marriage.
“No,” I said defiantly, avoiding his gaze. “That’s a cheap thing to do.”
He disagreed.
I’d always recognized how my path to the U.S. was rooted in privilege, but at least I had built on the opportunities I was provided. I wanted to earn my life here.
I also wasn’t prepared to face the stigma of getting married in my early twenties — I was a stubborn, independent young woman, dammit! — especially when the marriage was not an exciting prospect of new commitment, but a weary solution to a legal dilemma.
I called my mom for advice. She sounded unsurprised, almost nonchalant.
“Why aren’t you more scandalized?” I asked. “Don’t you want to see me walk down the aisle or have a big banquet?”
“That’s not what marriage is,” she eventually said. “It’s about finding the right person who will be on your team.” I caught James’ eye across the room as she assured me that she would support whatever decision I made.
I thought about how James made my grandmother laugh by animatedly trying everything she chopsticked onto his plate. He was learning Chinese despite being terrible at languages. Every time I’d expressed survivor’s guilt for escaping my hometown’s impending future, he’d wiped away my tears.
“I don’t want our story to end here,” James declared. “Let me give you this gift. Nobody has to know.” A proposal for the books.
This gift led me to create a folder on my desktop named “Green Card Application” and populate it with artifacts of our relationship. Screenshots of our cringeworthy Bumble messages a lifetime ago. Selfies from the adventures we’d been on around the world. Scans of our birthday and Valentine’s Day cards to each other.
Arriving at City Hall, I received a text from my Mom: I hope you have a beautiful wedding, she wrote, I’ve sent you a wedding gift. It’s $999.99. With lots of 9s, it means 長長久久. A long and happy marriage.
It wasn’t a red packet, pressed in my hands as I knelt to pour her tea and thank her for her sacrifices. It wasn’t a reassuring whisper as she walked me down the aisle.
But for the first time that day, I teared up.
