"The big day was a chance to show my parents that I understood them and a way for me to make peace with myself."The author and her husband during the Chinese lion dance that was part of their wedding weekend.This was the heavy confession I told our couple’s counselor last August, as my husband and I returned from our honeymoon in Hawaii. It was a deep sigh, a release from the weight of so many years of tiger parenting deeply ingrained in me as the child of immigrants.
For the first five years of my life, I was sent overseas to live in Japan while my parents worked long hours in the restaurant in Dallas. In Yokohama, my mother’s sister and her Japanese husband had no children and they cared for me as their own. They were loving and doting, but the price of their guardianship was the constant daily reminder that I would eventually need to return the favor.
My parents spent every dollar making sure I was at the top of my class for the components they valued: academics and white-collar office skills. While we argued often during my formative years, my teenage rebelliousness in action only went as far as choosing, against their wishes, to participate in a school play my junior year of high school and staying out until midnight the summer between high school and college. Deep down, I knew that they loved me and only meant well –- after all, the price of success was having a little less fun than everybody else.
And so, my wedding meant so much more to me than just a chance to celebrate the love my husband and I had nurtured over the years. It was my ticket out of the mental prison of expectations that my family had laid the foundations for, and that I had continued to build around myself – a chance to show my parents that I understood them and a way for me to make peace with myself.
I knew that my wedding would be a reflection of my parents, and I had to give them something to be proud of, to honor them and to recognize their sacrifices. I had poured my heart and soul into this event, and I left that evening with a sense of accomplishment, knowing that my parents understood the day had been orchestrated for them ― my ultimate gift in appreciating all they have done for me.
On the Sunday morning of our wedding, I finally found the right words to express what I felt. I realized I wanted to tell them that I had been watching them, observing quietly and learning from the way their relationship grew through the years. Under a canopy of lush red florals, I told the story of my parents’ whirlwind romance: How they met during a typhoon, married after three months of dating and moved to a new country together.
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