Getting engaged is cause de etra celebratione, in any nation. Or so I thought until I found myself sound asleep within a half an hour of getting engaged here in Korea. I could blame jet-lag, but I think the post-popping-of-the-question deep sleep was more the result of decision-lag: you spend so much time thinking about making a big decision -- getting married, moving abroad, buying a new house -- that when the actual moment arrives it sets you free in a way that you did not expect. The celebration is in the open landscape of a future; the clouds have cleared and your plane can take off. Why rush right into the future; there's plenty of time for a short nap.
An engagement in Korea is set in motion by the marrying couple but only becomes official when the two sets of parents sit down to decide how to carve up the marital turkey. Once the date is set, the couple can announce their plans publicly, in other words they can make those precious calls and tell the story of their engagement: "Our parents met, and they said April 12th was fine." Hooray! Nara says that because the meeting of the parents takes precedent over everything else, Korean men often will not even technically propose in the sense that they may never utter the words "Will you marry me?" Sometimes the woman will make light of this at the wedding, refusing to say 'I do' till her husband-to-be asks her to marry him first. I think this has to be a point in favor of gender equality, and should be studied further by feminists.
So even though I apparently didn't have to propose, since it was going to be impossible to set up a parental summit I decided to take matters into my own hands. On the flight from Chicago to Seoul via Tokyo, I found myself occasionally digging my hand into the bag carrying the ring, which was also transporting a bag of Chex Mix, Cool Ranch Doritos, and an already half-eaten bag of Sour Patch Kids. These snacks plus the ring were my four most valuable possessions, ones that I could not risk stowing in my checked luggage. When I began to fill out the customs card, I wondered whether I needed to declare the ring (since it's so valuable and precious and especially expensive). But that immediately seemed like a stupid presumption. Any woman could wear a ring on her finger and wouldn't be required to declare it at customs much less to take it off of her finger in the security gates.
I also felt compelled to tell someone about the purpose of my trip. I did not feel like a regular passenger, and thought maybe I should try to get an upgrade to business class or economy plus at the very least. Instead I was seated next to a large man wearing safari clothing. When I sat down I immediately felt a rush of hot air sweep into my nostrils; it was as if I'd opened the morning hot-breath oven and inside the oven last night's dinner was still roasting. The flight from Chicago to Tokyo is 13 hours, and suddenly those 13 hours seemed a lot longer and quite a bit hotter. No, this guy would not be the person I'd select to share my news. Fortunately the row of three seats in front of me only had one passenger in the window, a young Asian woman, and I seized the opportunity to gain a little more breathing room.
A moment after I was settled in my new seat, I felt a poke on my right shoulder coming from the finger of the hot-breath man behind me. "Was it something I said?" he asked with a smile on his face. Disarmed by his friendliness, I grasped for the right humorous excuse, one about me having long legs or being a loud snorer. He seemed to accept, and surely he didn't mind the extra room himself. The Asian woman sitting next to me turned out to be from Thailand. She was heading home to visit her family while her American husband sorted out their next destination; they had both graduated from business school and were deciding whether to look for work in the US or relocate to Asia, maybe to Singapore where he had a job offer with Price Waterhouse.
She seemed like the perfect person to tell about the ring in my bag. After we'd talked long enough to be embarrassed that we hadn't properly introduced ourselves, she told me her name in what I know to be standard Thai-to-westerner fashion: first you tell a westerner your real name - the one with 30 syllables - then, after the foreigner's eyes grow wide, you shorten those 30 syllables down to one easy-to-remember syllable. I made her write down her given name (she is, after all, part of an important story): Pastraporn Rittikosi Nichols. The Nichols part I could handle, and probably could've just called her Nichols if it were socially appropriate. Fortunately she did read the 'Try Again' message in my eyes and quickly shortened her name to Pap. This I would not forget.
Pap became my trans-Pacific confidante. Though she really had no choice but to listen unless she pulled a swim move to extricate herself from the window seat, she listened to the story of how I ended up on a flight back to Asia to make one of life's biggest decisions. Sometimes it's just easier to tell a story like this to a total stranger, maybe because the story takes on a fresh, untold quality ripe with opportunities for enhancement and embellishment. There were no such embellishments in my story to Pap, except for a fudging of a few details -- like me not having a job, a detail which, though the subject of a story in itself, would break up the flow of the romantic tale I was weaving for Pap. It helped that Pap had a similar story of her known. She had met her husband while in the U.S. as a student, and in some ways her story was mine, only in a different setting. As in my relationship, the origin and development of her international relationship was all about timing. Had she decided to study in Bangkok or New York instead of Boston, had she majored in finance instead of economics, had she deferred her enrollment as she thought she might once, she would not have met the man who would become her husband.
Timing also shaped the arc of her relationship, how fast it could progress, and what could be shared with others. She and her husband, for example, had lived together prior to getting engaged for nearly six months, which she decided was a fact best kept from her mother and father in southern Thailand. For the sake of everyone involved, it may be true that the cultural onion can only be peeled back one layer at a time. I had to learn this in my relationship, too, pacing the meetings I would have with Nara's family, putting the brakes on plans we made in the first month of dating.
To Pap, my story was a page-turner mostly because she understood it from every angle. As a woman, she could identify with Nara's feelings of apprehension and anticipation; as an Asian woman, she knew the dynamics of a communal culture and the norms which guide a family's opening up to any outsider; as the wife of an American man, she heard in my story the same struggle to find that geographic and cultural middle place from which to start a new cultural thread.
Because she understood me so well, I offered her a few of my Sour Patch Kids. She declined, pointing to a toothache. But I sensed that she appreciated the offer; the Sour Patch Kids were, after all, my second or third most valuable possession.
In Tokyo, Pap and I searched the departure information screen for our next flights. Her flight to Bangkok sent her to the right while my Seoul-bound flight catapulted me to the left. She thanked me for being a good seatmate and I thanked her for listening. I found gate B18 and waited to board my flight to Seoul, where Nara awaited my arrival. It was up to me from here on out.
I found the right place
And I found the right person
THE END
Atta boy, Steve! Congratulations! A round of Sour Patch Kids on me!
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