The Tamesis
Our wedding was a green card wedding. That’s it. I’m wearing a white dress, but it’s not a skirt. He wears black, but he only wears black. It wasn’t so much a wedding as it was a dinner with more than 20 friends at an Uzbek restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. We were in our thirties, madly in love, but firmly pragmatic when it came to joining our lives. He came to the United States from Switzerland on an O-1 visa, a visa for foreigners of exceptional ability. I didn’t get a green card myself until a few months ago. We are all artists, writers and composers. We both come from money, but we longed to buy an apartment in one of the most expensive cities in the world. We think we are smart. Forget first dances and tiered cakes, this is the dream that sustains us.
When we got married, we had been together for three years—just the length of our O-1 visas. A year into our relationship, we had to renew his visa, which cost $8,000 in legal fees; when the second renewal approached, we applied for green cards. The math is simple, they cost about the same and the green card lasts 10 years. We have to be married as part of the equation. We were already living together and planning our future.
Our celebration venues are spacious, noisy and perfect for banquets and large gatherings. There was a family event going on next to us that spanned generations. It was the height of summer and our eclectic group was probably more of an offsite team building than a wedding. Hanging next to the bathroom is a framed article describing how the restaurant was featured in an episode. American, The show tells the story of Cold War-era spies who disguise themselves as a happily married American couple. Our parents never even met.
When we first met while on vacation in Jamaica, I was in a relationship with someone else and living in Los Angeles. He had just ended a 17-year relationship with his teenage sweetheart, whom he had followed from Bern to Brooklyn. We were dragged to a boutique hotel by mutual friends. I was talked into going on a girls trip and he was cajoled to boost morale. I sat next to him at dinner, and even though I tried my best not to touch him, I could still feel the heat of his body. I know he works in music and steels himself against silly small talk. Instead, he asked about the book I had brought to dinner and said it was different from the book I had read that morning. I was taken aback by his curiosity because he was not used to being observed. He asked me about the vagaries of my job. I admitted that I wanted to be a writer, although I didn’t tell any of my friends. I drank one shot of tequila, then another, feeling the rush in my chest spread to my hands and the tingling in my cheeks.
We flirted by talking unflinchingly about the guilt of living apart from family. My parents and I moved from Korea to Hong Kong when I was a baby, then to Texas when I was 14, and when I left Korea after college, I never looked back. He had only lived in Switzerland before and was shocked by how much he missed his friend and nephew. He was very funny, attentive, and well-read, but turned a blind eye when it came to celebrities. Within minutes we were breaking away from the main group, laughing and developing our own inside jokes. I had a lot of questions about his exes but never mentioned my boyfriend.
