Marriage considerations that I hadn’t considered

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Marriage considerations that I hadn’t considered

As you may know, Fanfan and I are trying to sort out how to go about getting married and putting an end, for the time being, to our nomadic ways by settling down in the US when I start my graduate studies.

While we’re still chin deep in USCIS literature, I just wanted to mention a conversation I found both funny and frustrating the other night.

Fanfan called me at work, as I was hectically trying to pull together lesson plans. She was asking me a question about something, I don’t remember what, and we got to talking about what we thought was the best plan for right now. I said that I reckoned we needed to get married as soon as possible, so that we could also start the immigrations process as soon as possible. This is more or less how the conversation progressed in French, which I’ll translate here:

Fanfan: Oh yeah. I was thinking that as well, but it’s the ghost month.

Me: The ghost what?

F: The ghost month.

M: And? [I knew exactly what the ghost month is, but I was praying that she would say it’s no big deal.]

Fanfan: Well, my family might not be comfortable with us getting married during the ghost month. You’re not supposed swim, have sex, get surgery done, move, travel, or get married during the ghost month.

M: …and [Giving her another chance to say, “But I don’t care.”]

F: I’m just saying, I don’t know if my family would be comfortable with it.

We pretty much left it at that. I was worried to death that we were going to have to wait an entire month to get this all started, setting everything back a month, and I was just going to have to grin and bear it in the name of cultural sensitivity.

When I came home, I mentioned that technically the marriage we’re going to be doing here in Taiwan isn’t really a marriage marriage (since we actually want to have the ceremony in the US). It’s actually just a “household registration” which counts legally as a marriage.

The ghosts smiled down upon me, and Fanfan agreed that it shouldn’t be a problem. Sure enough, her family doesn’t have a problem with it…that I know of.

False alarm…

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