[I got married on Saturday. This post is about my wedding.]
the flowers
I couldn’t find fake or real flowers for my hair, and I was running out of time to do so. I asked my oldest son to go with me to pick up lemons and limes and goi, five hours before the wedding. As we rode from the grocery store to the restaurant making the goi, I thought aloud. I said, “You know what would work? Oleanders. But those peach-colored ones. If only I could find some of those. But I probably won’t… they’re usually fuschia or white….”
And then we were passing Home Depot on the right, and their parking lot was bordered by ubitiquous oleander hedges. But not the fuschia ones or the white ones – the peach ones!
I pulled over. I parked in the corner past the wheelbarrows. I left the engine running and my son watching from the shotgun seat as I disembarked and snagged several sprigs of oleander flowers.
An hour after that, I walked into the salon with a small bouquet tucked into the outside pocket of my purse.
“Ooh, what beautiful flowers!” the receptionist cooed.
“I got them from the Home Depot parking lot,” I said.
I don’t know if they believed me, but what does it matter?
the rice
The rice came out bad. Or wrong. Or something. It tasted okay to me, but as my new father-in-law painstakingly explained, “It tastes good now, but in one, two hours, it’ll be bad.”
So we threw it all away. Dumped it all into a trash bag. The early guests gasped.
My new brother-in-law sped to the restaurant where we’d gotten the goi, to pick up replacement fried rice.
Everyone looked at me, as if it had been my decision. I looked at my in-laws. My mother-in-law was upset. Disappointed. Embarrassed? My father-in-law, though, had the impassive face of a man who cold-bloodedly performs sacrifices for the greater good.
He will serve no rice before its time. Not after its time, either.
cakes
We had two cakes. The main cake (“wife’s cake,” as Dat explained it to his parents) was supposed to be Italian cream with raspberry filling, but I think it was just yellow cake, and the raspberry was combined with cream cheese. It had simple off-white buttercream frosting and edible candy pearls that surprised everyone who encountered them.
I’d wanted pineapple filling, but changed the order at the last minute out of deference to my mother-in-law, who was getting us an Asian cake (groom’s cake, “man’s cake”) so that the elder Asian palates in attendance wouldn’t go into sugar shock. I was told that the classic Asian wedding cake was pineapple flavored.
I was relieved, because I’d been afraid they’d order taro root cake. I don’t care for taro cake, but I was ready for anything.
We cut the bride’s cake first, then the groom’s. We fed each other bride’s cake. Then my sister-in-law Van very graciously took the cake server from me so that I wouldn’t be stuck serving cake for the rest of the night. Someone else manned the groom’s cake, and everyone was served sweets tout de suite.
“Oh my God, the cake is so good!” said a friend of the Caucasian persuasian, later.
“You think?” I said. “I’m kind of annoyed because I told her Italian cream, but I think she used yellow, instead.”
“What do you mean? I thought it was mocha or something.”
She meant the Asian cake. I went and tasted it. It was very moist yellow cake with whipped cream icing and mocha filling. It was very, very good. Immediately, I cut a slab of it for my dad, who’d eaten the first slice of bride cake. “Eat this one – you’ll like it,” I told him. (All dads love mocha, don’t they?)
Later, one of my Asian friends said, “Your cake was so good.”
“Wasn’t it? It was mocha.”
“What? I thought it was raspberry filling.”
She’d eaten the bride’s cake. Someone else told her, “You should have tried the Asian cake.” She said, “I never eat Asian cake. I don’t like pineapple and taro.” But we made her try it and she was happily proven wrong.
Everyone liked the cake, whichever one they tried. I was glad.
Dat and I didn’t shove cake into each other’s faces. We’ve always said that we don’t believe in that sort of thing. If you look at the pictures that got posted on Facebook, though, it does sort of look like we’re shoving. But we’re not. We were just hungry by then, I think.
