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My first wedding was a modest affair performed in a small Lutheran church about half a block from Anna's house, Anna being the bride. My best man was Bob DuPree, a gay radio announcer a couple of years older than me and who I regarded for several years as a brother and who my parents loved. I knew that he didn't date but we all just glossed over that. Mr. Clifton Britton, the director of The Lost Colony in Manteo, NC and drama teacher and directors of the Goldsboro High School Goldmaskers drama department was the guest of honor. Mr. Britton had directed Anna and me in several plays during our senior year, he and his well-known dramatic productions being the reason I transferred to Goldsboro High in my senior year.
There were probably a hundred or so of our friends and family there. Aunt Lissie, who hadn't been wild about Anna's and my courtship, directed the music and my cousin, Joe Durward Creech sang. Instead of the traditional wedding march, Anna and I being somewhat rebellious chose: Oh Perfect Love.
This wedding represented young, passionate love, a vision of everlasting love, love that could overcome any obstacles, but love that couldn't foresee the eventual differences that would eventually tear us apart. It was good while it lasted.
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No one in the wedding picture taken just after Soon E's first marriage was smiling, save for a young boy in front. And it wasn't just a matter of everyone trying to look serious. Soon E's family was not at all happy with her choice of a husband, an Amerasian with an unknown American soldier as his father. During that period, most Korean people didn't look favorably on a full-blooded Korean marrying someone of mixed blood and Amerasians, even with a Korean mother, were treated to a harsh life.
Soon E had had some incredibly stressful hours up to the time of the wedding, for a while fearing that Hakkun was not going to show up. Soon E had already given birth to their first child, Kyung-in who was left in the care of a neighbor on the day of the wedding.
Hakkun was late, it turns out, because he was trying, in vain, to come up with the $120 needed to complete the purchase of a wedding ring and necklace which he had secured several days earlier with a $20 down payment. Click here to see Once I Was Happy.
So it isn't hard to see why Hakkun wasn't smiling.
My second wedding was a major production. Donna wanted her dream wedding and had the money to produce it. Separate horse-drawn carriages transported us from Donna's house to a gazebo especially constructed for the wedding in the middle of a 35-arce tract of land where Donna was building a huge house for her retired parents and a gigantic barn that would later house a myriad of miniature horses. We had a string quartet and a DJ armed with cassettes of our favorite music. My son, Eddie, was my best man. Beside the gazebo was a huge tent with tables for the extensive guest list.
After almost five years of off-again, on-again torrid romance, on a weekend visit when I learned by accident that Donna had become involved with a singles club, I stormed out and told her never to contact me again.
I settled back into my life in New Jersey and was determined to forget about her. But one night, a few months later, she called as I lay on my single bed in my miserable boarding house room. She said she had been thinking about us and was convinced that we could be happy with each other. She said she wanted another child, that her cousin had just given birth to another illegitimate child and the baby was going to be placed for adoption. She didn't want to push me but said that she thought that once I thought it over I'd be convinced that we should marry and adopt the child.
The next thing I knew Donna called and said she wanted us to take a trip together to Puerto Rico, one of our favorite places to discuss the future. She had already set up the flights and hotel arrangements. She flew to New Jersey and we spent the night in a nearby hotel. The next day we boarded a flight for Puerto Rico. After the flight had taken off, Donna took out some magazines she had bought. To my surprise and delight, they were wedding magazines.
We spent the first two days in Puerto Rico in our room, never leaving. By the time we took the flight home, we had already started planning the wedding and planning our strategy to adopt her cousin's child.
There were several months of frantic activity with me making almost weekly flight to Massachusetts. We seemed to have been closer than we had ever been. Then came the wedding. I have always felt that once Donna realized we were married, she began to regret it. We were unsuccessful in adopting her cousin's child. We were unsuccessful in having our own child. Then we turned to International Adoptions.
Once we had the three Korean sisters, things between us began to fall apart. I was forced out in January of 1990 and Soon E came in December.
In Korea, each family has a list of it's members in a family register. When a woman marries, her name is added to her husband's family register and removed from her father's family register or her previous husband's family register.
Soon E's and Mr. Mr. Lee did not have a wedding, not even a ceremony. When they decided to marry, Soon E went to the town office where Hakkun's family register was located, picked up a copy of copy, took it to Mr. Lee's home town, and had her name removed from Hakkun's family register and added to Mr. Lee's family register. That was it: no wedding march, no vows, no kissing the bride.
Before we were married, Soon E and I had already been living together for three years and were already, as we often said, married in our hearts.
It had been a long, hard battle to get to this point. First, Soon E had to get a long-distance divorce from her husband in Korea, in itself very complicated. Then we had to wait until Donna and I finally reached terms for a divorce. In the meantime, there was a lot of INS red-tape to go through: getting a fiance visa, having several INS interviews, medical exams, paperwork, paperwork, paperwork.
Donna's and my divorce had dragged on through the fall of 1993 with no end in sight as I fought to get some reasonable visitation rights with the girls. But I finally decided it was better to take whatever I could get in order to restore Soon E's legal status in the country. With my divorce, we could get married and Soon E could get a green card and begin the road to citizenship. Until that happened, there was always a remote, thought not inconceivable, danger that she might be deported.
After the judge declared Donna and I divorced, there was a waiting period. We scheduled our wedding to take place as soon as the waiting period ended. Our Korean friend, Mr. Ahn, an elderly steward in the Andover Korean Church, wanted very much for us to be married in a church but Soon E and I just wanted to get it done.
We asked our pastor Rev. Song to officiate at a simple ceremony in our condo, with a few of our closest friends. And Rev. Song certainly made it brief.
After the ceremony was concluded, we all went to China Blossom, one of our favorite restaurants, for dinner.
Now Soon E and I could get on with our lives but it would be without the girls. Donna's lawyer had very skillfully constructed the visitation plan in such a way that I was never able have any visitation rights. I knew that if Soon E had had to choose between the girls and me, she would have chosen the girls. But regardless of how much I loved and missed the girls, I had made my choice back in December of 1990 and I've never once doubted, even 19 years later, that I made the right choice. |
