Posts Tagged ‘Zen’s Planning’

Dec 2012

Well guys, it’s here. It’s the second week of December. I’m not sure when that happened, or how it happened so quickly, but it feels like the year flew by (I know, everyone says that every year, but 2012 went like it had rocket boosters attached to its back). Next week is going to be a shortened week at APW as the staff takes some time off to spend the holidays with family (cross your fingers for me. Michael and I will be on a redeye when Armageddon happens) so this week we’re going to take some time to explore endings and beginnings (and we promise not to use the word “resolution” if you don’t).

To kick things off we have the second of our year-end intern Reclaiming Wife posts, this time from Zen (who, by the way, also writes a personal blog over here if you’d like to continue following her writing). What Zen has to say about life after a wedding is so much of how I felt after Michael and I got married, but couldn’t articulate at the time. We’ve spent a decent amount of time on APW talking about how nothing changes or lots of things change after you get married, but what Zen articulates so well is that often it’s a little of both. Sometimes thing are exactly as they were, but still a shift is felt.

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

I’d kind of thought things would calm down after the wedding. No more last-minute guest list upheavals. No need to worry about hauling things, and people, around. (You might think a wedding is all lace and flowers and smooches and cupcakes, but actually it’s mostly hauling. I would say at least 85%.) No more planning!

I hadn’t pictured what married life was going to be like in too much detail, but I figured it would be pretty much the same as life had been before I got engaged. Quieter. I figured I’d have more time to focus on my stories and try new recipes and meet up with my friends.

Except now I have a to-do list as long as my arm, at least as long as the list I had before the weddings: give notice of marriage at the Malaysian High Commission, consider impact of marriage on visa status, amend workplace benefits so Cephas can benefit from them, figure out what to do about finances…

And what I hadn’t quite clocked was that marriage is a start, not just in the sense that it is the “beginning of the rest of your life” (a phrase that has always puzzled me: surely every day is the beginning of the rest of your life), but in that it’s a jolt to the system. Things are different now—outside me, but also inside me.

The first week I was back at work after the wedding, an email went round my office seeking to gauge interest in an opportunity to work abroad for an undefined period of time.

Me! I wanted to go! It was the kind of work I was interested in, in a geographical region I passionately want to return to, and I was at about the level of seniority (well, juniority) they were looking for. Pre-wedding me would’ve drafted the email and only held off on hitting “send” to check that Cephas didn’t mind too much. (Probably by text: “Hey, gonna sign up for international secondment, k? See you on Sat!”) Continue reading Zen: Go Big and Go Home

Posted in: Planning: Journeys, Reclaiming Wife | 17 Comments »

Nov 2012

Wedding Graduates: Zen & Cephas, Part II

I know we said a few weeks ago that Elisabeth’s Wedding Grad post would be our last intern grad post for the year, but, well, we lied. Because this week Zen surprised us with a second grad post—this time on her and Cephas’ Malaysian wedding. And I couldn’t be more thrilled. Because secretly, this was the post I’ve been waiting for. (I don’t know about you, but all of Zen’s posts chronicling the mayhem of planning her Malaysian wedding have left me in stitches.) We talk about this a lot here on APW, but Zen’s post reminded me that no two weddings—not even for the same couple—are ever the same. And in the end, this is a very good thing. Because it means that there is no right way to have your wedding, no magical formula to making it the best day ever. So today, as you read Zen’s post, take solace in the fact that the path you’ve chosen is going to be the right one, if only because it’s the one you chose.

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

The pictures we got from our Malaysian wedding are kind of a mess. They’re not carefully composed. The lighting is all over the place. Some of them are blurry. They’re of people moving, milling, talking, eating, drinking, yelling, dancing, running around trying to restrain their tiny offspring. The pictures are like those old Chinese and Indian scroll paintings where everything is happening at once and you don’t know where to look. There is no one focal point.

The way they look is how the wedding felt: chaotic, leisurely, expansive, and warm. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that the Western wedding was about us as a couple and the Asian wedding was about our—well, mostly my—family, but that’s what it felt like. The Malaysian wedding wasn’t terribly romantic—it didn’t particularly feel like a celebration of us and our deathless love. But it felt like coming home. The English wedding had been marvellously, sweetly out of the ordinary course of things; our brief honeymoon in Italy had sustained that sense of being taken out of our everyday lives. The Malaysian wedding was something else.

Cephas, of course, will have felt differently—but for me, getting married at home was what I needed to take me back to reality. It made our marriage real, because it embedded it in the context of my—now our—family.

If the English wedding was a process of focusing in, of centering us and placing us before the altar and enclosing us in a promise between the two of us, the Malaysian wedding was about us stepping out of the focus, pulling back, and seeing where we stood in the pattern made by our family.

So I don’t remember tender moments between me and Cephas at the Malaysian wedding. I remember everyone else. There was my four-year-old cousin who, as the only boy child present, was taken by hand by his father to the bridal suite, promised the rare delight of getting to jump on the bed. (You will recall that this is arranged so that the married couple will have many sons.) He went along cheerfully until he realised that he was being followed by about twenty uncles and aunties wielding cameras, when he baulked.

“Come, boy, don’t you want to jump on the bed?” coaxed his dad.

“Don’t want this bed,” said my cousin, trying to make a speedy exit from the bridal suite. “Want another bed!”

Whereupon my aunt picked him up bodily and dropped him on the bed—but not before another four-year-old cousin, a little girl not remotely afraid of the limelight, had hurled herself onto the bed and starting bouncing, screeching with delight.

There was my mom, who plunged into wedding planning with typical intensity, standing over my aunts with a whip while they made a million fabric loofahs to decorate our house with. She also developed a psychosomatic cough from the stress, and went around rasping about floral arrangements. “Oh Mom, I feel so bad that you’re stressed because of the wedding,” I ventured. “No!” said my mom, coughing. “I’m really happy! I’m coughing because I’m so happy!” Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Zen & Cephas, Part II

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Planning: Journeys, Tradition, Wedding Graduates | 12 Comments »

Oct 2012

Wedding Graduates: Zen & Cephas

It’s what we’ve all been waiting for! (Fine, it’s what I’ve been waiting for!) After seven or so months of following along in their planning journeys, each one of our 2012 writing interns is now, believe it or not, married. Which means that this is the part where we get to join them as they cross over from wedding undergraduates to fully matriculated grads.

So today I am delighted to bring you Zen and her English wedding (Malaysian wedding to follow soon), reflecting on the lessons learned after months of unintentional family humor, inexact guest list science, and general reluctance to the whole wedding planning thing. Zen’s post reminds me of one of the most important APW lessons of all time, which is that your wedding will never be perfect, but it will be exactly what you need it to be, and often that’s just enough to make it pretty close.

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

The day before my wedding, I was lying in bed in the house we’d rented for the weekend, staring at the ceiling and quaking. My feet were cold and I was going to mess everything up and everything was awful.

I didn’t plan my weddings, which is a road I highly recommend taking if you can manage to persuade someone else to drive. Cephas planned the English wedding and my mom planned the Malaysian one, which meant I had the comfortable role of Kuih-Selector-in-Chief and Wedding-Car-Determiner. A side effect of this approach, though, is a certain amount of not knowing what you’re doing. I rocked up for the rehearsal for the Catholic wedding, figuring they’d tell me where to put myself and how to look and when to say “I do.” An hour later, I was rocking in place, convinced I would forget something or say something terrible or step on the altar and offend God and all his angels—or even worse, offend the priest.

But I am now convinced that there is a mysterious alchemy to wedding days—or rather, it is not mysterious because it is made up of something very obvious, something you’re planning the whole thing for, in a way: the combined affection of all your family and friends and people you don’t know all that well but who were presumably invited because they were more likely to be kindly disposed to you than not.

It’s all a bit scary and big and weighed down with expectation—but love is there to catch you.

So on the morning of the English wedding, I staggered up the steps to the church, tripping over my own dress and weaving. I got tugged and pulled into position, lined up with all my bridesmaids behind me, and pointed in the direction of the aisle. I looked at the rows of backs ahead of me, and I remember a feeling of serenity and rightness descending on me. I knew suddenly that I could not do anything wrong at my wedding. Everything would be okay. All would be forgiven.

Here are things I would tell myself, if I could go back in time and give pre-wedding me some advice.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Zen & Cephas

Posted in: Planning: Journeys, Wedding Graduates | 26 Comments »

Oct 2012

Zen: There And Back Again

So! I got married. Twice.

Things look different now, this side of the weddings. I’m still digesting the change they effected in my life—I suppose figuring out what it all really means will take a lifetime’s work. But it’s funny how participating in these weddings has changed how I see some things.

Name changing as a practice, for example. I’d never had any intention to change my surname upon getting married; I like my name as it is. Besides, as far as I know it’s not a Chinese custom—it certainly wasn’t the custom in the community I grew up in. My mother and grandmother kept their surnames, and I saw no reason to diverge from tradition.

I was surprised when I moved to the UK and realised how widespread name changing is. I knew it was a tradition in Britain, but didn’t really understand why people would want to cleave to the tradition, given the inherent inequality of a practice that involves women taking men’s names but men not taking women’s. Oh, I understood it intellectually—of course people are attached to their cultural traditions, and everyone ought to be free to decide what they want to be called—but I didn’t really get it beyond that.

I didn’t get it till the day I got married. And then it became obvious why you’d do it. I mean, keeping my name is still absolutely the right choice for me, and I feel very comfortable about that—but suddenly I could see why people decided otherwise. What had happened seemed so vast, so terrifically significant, that you felt you needed to mark it in some big way, in a way that would be very public, that would need no further explanation. Of course you might want a different name; in a way you were not even the same person you were before. Continue reading Zen: There And Back Again

Posted in: Planning: Journeys, The Day Itself | 35 Comments »

Oct 2012

Zen: More Than Rom-Com

There have been times when planning this wedding has felt like living out a rom-com on the theme of culture clash. It started when I brought Cephas to Malaysia with me to meet my extended family during Chinese New Year.

In the face of an endless stream of aunts, uncles, great-aunts, great-uncles, and cousins to the nth degree, Cephas was diligently courteous and attentive. My relatives were somewhat less so. An auntie, watching us benevolently as we ate dinner, kept up a running commentary on him in Hokkien.

“That’s good ah, he can eat our food. Look, he can eat chilli! That’s convenient. Easier if he doesn’t mind eating the same things. It’s good that he can speak English.”

“But he’s from England,” my sister pointed out.

My aunt’s daughter had an ex from France whose English had not been up to par, and he had clearly had lasting influence on my aunt’s perception of the capabilities of European boyfriends. “Very hard to communicate,” said my aunt, shaking her head.

My favourite story from that trip is about the time we visited my great-uncle, a retired civil servant in his eighties who speaks beautiful English. I’m not sure he had ever really noticed my existence before, or I his, but he seemed quite interested in Cephas.

“Welcome to the Chan family,” he boomed. “Who is Chan? Her grandmother—” indicating me—”my sister, is Chan. Her grandfather was Leong. Her father is Kwok.”

We walked through the living room, where, as in a lot of my older relatives’ houses, there was a red altar laid with offerings to a Taoist deity. Pictures of monks in saffron robes adorned the walls. In the kitchen my great-aunt gave Cephas misai kucing (a type of herbal tea), my great-uncle explaining that it was good for diabetes. (Cephas does not have diabetes.)

“You are from England? My teachers at school were English. We were taught by the brothers, you know. It was a Catholic school. You’re Catholic? Yes, the brothers taught us about it—they read us the Bible, we knew all the stories. We used to say our prayers every day.”

Putting down his misai kucing, my great-uncle took Cephas’s hand and recited, “Our Father, who art in Heaven.”

Cephas, being a nice earnest kind of person, bowed his head and said “Amen.” The rest of us looked respectful, but when we got to the end of the prayer my sister couldn’t take it anymore. Her mind’s eye full of monks, she burst out, “Tua Gu Gong, are you a Catholic?”

My great-uncle tapped his chest. “At heart I am,” he said gravely. Continue reading Zen: More Than Rom-Com

Posted in: Planning: Journeys | 14 Comments »

Sep 2012

Zen: Guest List Sudoku

The most important thing is to gather the people who love you. Once you do that, the details will iron themselves out. —Meg, in the book

Unlike a lot of people, I never had to worry about having to cut down on my guest list; I was more concerned about expanding it. I have far more friends than I or my parents would ever have expected in my years as a nerdy shut-in (I don’t remember anyone from my primary school, but I sure remember all the books I read then). But socially speaking, I’m still more of a spider—spinning my little web of friends and sticking to it—than a butterfly. Also, living in a country other than your country of origin means you have a lot of friends elsewhere, no matter where you are.

I sent a lot of invitations to people who, if they lived in the same country, would definitely attend my wedding, as I would theirs. But some of them have visa issues that mean they have to stay just where they are, and some of them can’t manage the amount of leave it would require, and some of them just plain can’t afford it. This didn’t bother me with the English wedding, but I was a little worried about the Malaysian wedding, which in its very structure is set up for a raucousness that demands large groups. A tea ceremony is a bit naff if there’s nobody to serve tea to.

Fortunately the Malaysian wedding guest list turned out not to be a problem. At first it was! My mother sent me anxious emails asking me to scrounge up more friends, because, “It’ll be nice to have more people of your age group around.” It was my sad but necessary task to explain that her daughter had no other friends, and really she should be pleased at my progress considering there was a time when a Simpsons hand would have had three fingers too many if we were gonna use it to count my friends. (Or, to be grammatically accurate: friend. And now Maid of Honour. Thanks for saving my adolescence from total loserdom, BFF!) Continue reading Zen: Guest List Sudoku

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Planning, Planning, Planning: Journeys | 15 Comments »