The photos from my Chinese wedding are beautiful. I shouldn’t have been surprised—when I spent my summers in China as a teenager, I’d always have a day of 艺术照 (yì shù zhào), where a photographer would dress me up, pose me by telling me to smile (but only slightly, 微笑 (wēi xiào)), and then Photoshop the hell out of the proofs.
I remember telling them to please, please not make my skin so white. The shade they thought was beautiful, I found sickly, not even getting into the colorism of it all. But I had to admit—the resulting photos were quite pretty. At an age when I desperately wanted to be pretty, I loved the outcome despite the artifice. It affirmed the life lesson that if I wanted something, all I had to do was suffer through hours of make-up and eyelid tape, the weight of fake lashes, and doing what I was told. All I had to do was become someone else. It was a lesson I’d take into college, law school, and beyond.
I always thought that when I saw my wedding photos, I’d want to share them immediately. Isn’t that what people did, like it was the thing to do? Besides, the algorithm loves weddings and wedding photos. Shouldn’t I give the ghost in the machine what it wants?
But as I swiped through the bright, saturated frames, I didn’t want to share these with anyone, much less social media. I could only see the artifice. I flipped my phone around to show N one of the photos.
He zoomed in on our faces. “You look pissed,” he said.
I finally smiled.
This was why I married him, even though I hadn’t wanted to get married in the first place. He knew me. He knew me better than did my parents, my relatives, the photographer, the make-up artist, the wedding planner, the wedding emcee, the chefs—the entire cohort of people who contributed to my “special day.” He saw how I truly felt, even as I tried to hide it for the sake of the photo.
N and I met in Family Law, a class about marriage and divorce. The professor, a fashionable divorcée, taught us about the history of marriage. How the capital-G Government justified state intervention in otherwise private relationships because it believed marriage, and families, to be the building block of society. In order to have a good society, society must regulate its building blocks. Ensure that only the right kinds of marriages take place, between the right kinds of people, producing the right kinds of offspring. We discussed theories against incest and polygamy, debated the legality of same-sex unions,1 and contemplated whether race-matching could be considered in adoptions. It was the first law school class I’d taken where there were no right answers, and it opened my eyes to how I’d been living—and the array of ways I could live.
A recurring theme of the class was how marriage had changed, how it was still changing. One practice exam question asked, simply, What is marriage and why does it matter? It was against this backdrop that my partner and I began dating, talking about not just marriage and family but what they meant. If marriage was no longer a pure socioeconomic vehicle between two families, what was the point of getting married? To register our psychological and emotional bond with the State of New York?
I’d rather register my friendships. Those were the relationships I found frustratingly fleeting and insufficiently committed, a series of people whom I loved dearly getting pulled away from me by the nuclear family’s painful gravity.
In post-academic life, I noticed the diminishing itinerary of group get-togethers and group trips. Where was Spring Break in Cancun? Crashing Thanksgiving with friends because it was too expensive to fly home? Summer trips to visit that one friend interning in Paris?
Or as this Reddit post asks: Did anybody else think there would be more parties?
I’m not exaggerating. Only 4.1% of Americans attended or hosted a social event on weekends or holidays in 2023—a 35% decrease from 2004. Only 59% of respondents in a survey had even attended a birthday party in the previous year. That’s 2 out of every 5 people who didn’t even go to a birthday party!
I go to my fair share of parties—I love them, I always throw one for my birthday—but even I don’t feel satisfied with how often I see friends in adult life, how committed people seem to be, or more often not be, to their friendships. I wanted friendship commitment ceremonies more than I wanted a marital commitment ceremony. My friends, more so than my romantic entanglements, were the ones I wish I had legal recourse against when they hurt me, excluded me, left me.
So I set out plotting how to turn my wedding into a friendship commitment ceremony.
First off, it had to be a wedding. Not a graduation, birthday, or new job party—a wedding. Weddings are the only large party in adult life that guests make the highest effort to attend. I’d use the normative heft of a wedding to transport my true intentions, dress my real desire for intimacy in community as a Trojan Horse wedding.
My partner and I went about planning. The more we imagined what we wanted out of our friendship commitment ceremony—excuse me, wedding—the more I realized I wanted no familial influence on the celebrations. Absolutely zero. I didn’t want to take their money to finance it; I didn’t want to invite their friends; I didn’t even want to give them a speech.
(As a lover of words at my core, I knew their words had the potential to ruin me, like so many of their missives during my adolescence did. Better to leave their love unsaid. It is in the quiet spaces of our filial relationship, after all, where I can sense their care, like the soft whir of hummingbird wings. If you tried to look, you wouldn’t be able to see it.)
But I am not completely without love for tradition or obligation. My parents have hurt me immensely and cared for me immeasurably. I knew that some level of tradition was desired in Chinese culture when it came to weddings—but I didn’t want to offer any of that in my wedding, the version I wanted to have.
So I did the next best thing (or so I thought). I told my mom I wanted to go back to China and celebrate with everyone. I would take as many photos as people wanted, without complaint, and wear anything people wanted me to, also without complaint. I’d become the pretty, obedient, docile girl I felt my parents always wanted and I never was. I set out to become a living, breathing, smiling doll.
As my mom sent me PDFs of venues and outfits to choose from, I took a deep breath to remind myself: I could give them this. I could give them—and my grandmothers and uncles and aunts and this morass of relatives who came before me—what they wanted. It was just for two weeks. I thought of the wedding banquets, the roast duck and stir-fried cabbage with chili peppers. It was just for two weeks.
It was for two whole weeks.
I’d originally intended to vlog my Chinese wedding, so I could post one of those cute wedding vlogs that is such a staple of lifestyle channels. It would scream, Look at how cute my family is! Look at how lovely these festivities are! Selfishly, I also knew that wedding content does numbers on social media—because the algorithms can’t help but reflect our traditions back at us. There’s a reason why trad wife content does so well—we can’t help but admire, or gawk at, what we collectively understand to be the “right” way of doing things, even if we ourselves don’t find it “right” for us.
I wanted to do the “right” thing. And I wanted to capitalize on the potential algorithmic advantages of doing the “right” thing, even if I thought it was the “wrong” thing for me.
I arrived in China sleep-deprived but fully emotionally ready to be a Good Girl, be a doll. I thought this through! I actively chose this! And I’d been making progress in therapy! My college friends had even recently commented that I was so therapized!
But you know what they say… when humans make plans, God laughs.
The difficult part about seeing your family is how easy it is to fall into old dynamics. I was annoyed with my parents for most of my teenage years; so when my mom immediately had us go to dinner with her friends after our 20-some hours of travel, I got annoyed. When she promised it would just be a “light dinner” but it was actually at a brewery with platters and platters of fried foods and skewers and beer, I got annoyed. When she made a joke to her friends about how I was participating in this Chinese wedding ceremony despite having written an essay about getting married on Thursday and hating it by Friday, I got annoyed. And when she thanked N for “making me a mother-in-law,” I got annoyed. Why was she thanking a man for bestowing upon her a status that didn’t even matter? Like this was a graduate degree or something?
And finally, when she gave me a patented Dirty Look after I said I preferred to stand during the meeting with the wedding emcee, I got really annoyed.
The rehearsal was a disaster. Unlike an American wedding, it wasn’t just walking down the aisle at the right time. It was a complicated, complex choreography involving a 20-pound cape, stepping over a saddle, fake flame, and apple, and then pirouetting clockwise so my cousin could take the cape off. Other props included: tea cups; a scroll; a seal; a flower ribbon. At different moments throughout the ceremony, we had to change props, bow in different directions, turn and bow again in other directions, smile and look pretty.
We were so confused.
“Don’t worry,” the emcee said to us, in Chinese. “If you get lost, just listen to what I’m saying!”
I sighed and translated this for N. He just laughed at the absurdity.
The next day, the day of the wedding, when the make-up artist knocked on my hotel room door at 6:40 in the morning, I felt duped. Like I’d volunteered for one thing but then been conscripted into another. I wasn’t even partially myself—I was an actor, playing a part of this show while all the guests around me, most of whom I’d never met or met when I was very young, ate food and enjoyed the show. I felt incredibly alienated by this conscription into a role I’d never signed up for… even though arguably, I did sign up for it by agreeing to the Chinese wedding in the first place.
“It’s dinner and a show,” my cousin explained to me, shrugging. “You’re the show.”
I had been prepared for many realities, but not this one. I couldn’t even have fathomed this one. It felt like no one heard me, no one was listening. It felt like my childhood all over again.
The irony was made all the greater by the reading of our vows during the ceremony:
When we met ten years ago, we were two main characters building our epic life stories.
十年前，我们相遇了，各自编织着属于自己的故事。
It wasn't apparent that our stories would overlap much, but together we found something more epic than our sagas:
那时候，我们并不知道彼此的故事会有那么多交集。但在一起，我们发现了比我们的故事更了不起的东西
we found a safe place to put our performances to rest, where we could be our authentic selves rather than perform our roles as protagonists.
我们找到了彼此安放的避风港，在这里，我们可以卸下角色，做最真实的自己。
Somewhere where belonging and acceptance are not conditioned upon the success of our performances but rather the fact of our existences.
在这里，我们不需要靠表演来赢得归属和接纳，我们的存在，本身就足够了。
So we vow to remind ourselves and those around us that we belong. We all belong—in our bodies, in this world, unconditionally.
因此，我们立下誓言，永远提醒自己和身边的人：我们属于彼此，属于这片天地，无需任何条件。
We vow to help each other be fully present in each moment and cherish the experience of our stories as they unfold, no matter where they lead us.
我们立下誓言，彼此携手，活在每一个瞬间，共同珍惜这段故事的展开，无论它将带我们走向何方
We vow to grow and spread this love so that others may find this joy, this freedom, this belonging.
我们立下誓言，将这份爱与归属感不断延展，让更多的人能够感受到这份自由与喜悦。
And above all, we vow to do our best to enjoy the passage of time. This is it, right now, this is time, and it is passing. What a wonderful place to be.
而最重要的是，我们承诺，尽全力去享受时间的流淌。此刻，就是当下，这就是我们的时间，它正温柔地向前流逝。而我们，正在这美好的时光中，一起走向永远。这正是最美好的地方，最浪漫的时光。
Yep… as we spoke about our union helping us put down the roles we thought we had to play, we literally role-played.
Is family simply an allocation of roles? Mother, daughter, son, father—all in relation to one another? Is it possible to have a family without roles, or at least without preordained roles? Roles that we agree to, negotiate, which come from genuine desire.
It’s this push-pull that makes growing up and family difficult. I want to make my family happy, play the role that they want me to because I want them to be happy—but at the same time, I want to be myself, I want to be heard.
After I got back from China, I contemplated going no-contact or low-contact with my parents. I just needed a break. I felt, frankly, betrayed by how little agency they’d afforded me during the entire trip. Communication errors like how they didn’t honor the itinerary that we’d come up with together ballooned in my mind until they became symbolic, just another representation in a long line of instances where they didn’t respect my preferences, listen to me, or even ask me, for that matter. They just took me along, like a doll.
I’d wanted to be a doll for this trip. But I’d forgotten just how terrible being a doll was. It’s tolerable being a doll for a few hours, even a day—but a week? Two? That was, clearly, beyond my limit.
I’m a good eight months out from that trip now. It took me eight months to feel okay enough about the situation to be able to talk about it. Truth be told, I felt so terrible about the whole experience, I never even opened the wedding presents we came back with. And someone gifted us Hermès! I didn’t immediately open the Hermès! I still haven’t opened it! Which should really tell you something about how traumatic I found the entire experience.
Since then, I’ve also interacted with my parents again. And met my friends’ babies, seen how small and helpless their newborns are, how their toddlers still need so much help in the world. In those moments, I remember that I used to be that small, too. That my parents and grandparents, despite all of their flaws and frustrating traits and seeming inability to listen to me at times, once cared for me when I was utterly helpless and unable to do so myself. And they did that when they were younger than even I am, when they were just kids, too. While it may not have been perfect—and in many ways, was far from perfect—it was the best they could do, and for that, I have to be grateful. Their best is all I can ask for.
Does that mean I’ll go on a trip with them again? Hell no. I still need to recover from this last trip, and I’ll also need to communicate to them ahead of next time—again—exactly how much control and agency I’m expecting when we travel together. This past trip wasn’t the best, but you know, you live and you learn. You get so angry that you stop talking altogether, and then you communicate your wants in a calm manner ahead of the next time. And hope they can rise to the occasion, but if not—I’ll probably need another eight months to get over it again, and then another few years before we try again. Again.
But that’s family, right? And that’s also the type of friendship I want with my friends—this commitment to trying again, and again, and again. And often failing and falling short and hurting each other. But trying again nonetheless and committing to each other again nonetheless. One of my friends—whom I want to live with one day, if we can make it happen—calls it familyship, this higher level of commitment to friendship. And I really like that—familyship.
So while my extra small Chinese wedding wasn’t what I wanted at all, it’s what I got. And if it made any of my relatives even slightly happy, then it was worth it. And now I can plan my real wedding—the friendship commitment ceremony, the hippie dippie, non-traditional wedding of my dreams—without any familial guilt at all. And that’s worth something.
Also, I think I’ll open my wedding presents this weekend. Even the Hermès. ◆
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Yes, I’m that old—I went to law school before gay marriage was legal.
