| Subject: Gay Marriage |
Author:
tuan
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Date Posted: 17:42:20 04/15/04 Thu
Day la cuoc phong van cua 2 nguoi dong tinh viet nam lam le cuoi tai san francisco. Cac ban co nghi rang mot ngay nao do chung ta tai viet nam se co nhung ngay cuoi nhu the khong?
In His Own Words: At Last
Friday, March 05, 2004 11:43:14 AM By Thanh Ngo
For this man and his partner,
a recognized marriage was a long time coming.
On February 14, Andrew and I got married.
It is a romantic notion for two people to get married on Valentines Day.
Many county clerk offices nationwide were open for that very reason. What a
better way to celebrate the day than to get married to the person you love.
Andrew and I, however, are gay men. We were able to get married only in San
Francisco, the first governmental entity in the United States to issue
marriage certificates to couples of the same sex. Mayor Gavin Newsom had the
courage to say that his city would stop discriminating against gay and
lesbian couples.
Andrew and I decided to marry only the night before. There was no proposal
or engagement ring. We have been together for almost eight years. We had
talked about having a commitment ceremony with our friends and family.
Though I sometimes fantasized about having a traditional Vietnamese wedding,
I never thought getting married was in our distant future. I could never get
Andrew to agree to wear a ao dai and khang dong. Also, whose family
would bring the gifts and the roasted pig?
So why did we get married? It had less to do with love and more with civil
disobedience. What drove us to wake up early on a Saturday morning and wait
in line for four hours was the simple reason that we want our government to
stop treating us as second-class citizens.
I have marched and participated in political protests many times. Getting
married in City Hall, I thought, was just another way for me to express the
disenfranchisement of gay men and lesbian women in our society. While we are
granted some rights if registered as domestic partners in some states, it is
not the same as being married. We are denied many rights and privileges that
heterosexual couples are granted when they get a marriage certificate. Yet,
Britney Spears can get married and have the union annulled in the time it
took me to write this article. Hows that for the sanctity of marriage?
With determination in our hearts, Andrew and I woke up early on a Saturday
and drove from San Jose, Calif., north to San Francisco to get married. We
thought that we would get an early start and arrive at City Hall by 9 a.m.,
an hour before it opened, so we would be one of the first couples in line.
We would be finished quickly and home to have brunch with Andrews visiting
cousins. When we got to City Hall, more than 300 other people had the same
idea, standing in a line that snaked around the beautiful building. News
reporters and camera crews patrolled the line looking for a story.
While in line, we talked to a lesbian couple who had been together for more
than 18 years. The middle-aged gay couple in front of us had been together
for more than 27 years. The Latina couple in front of them, together nearly
a decade, brought their daughter to the event. We looked around and noticed
that most of the people in line were a little bit older than us.
While waiting, I began to think about the institution of marriage and the
act in which we were about to engage. Marriage legally allows people to join
together to form a family, the basic unit of our society. It is in a family
where values, traditions and wealth are shared and passed on. A family is
more than just two people living together.
A family is more than two roommates sharing expenses. Without being married,
a same-sex relationship is nothing more than a domestic partnership, a
second-class registration with the State of California. Even the term
sounds antiseptic and formalistic. If we were to break up, all we would have
to do is send in a one-page form to the Secretary of State to dissolve the
partnership.
A domestic partner is not a spouse. Being a spouse means committing to
building a life together. As spouses, you are joined emotionally,
spiritually and financially. The government recognizes that bond. It gives
society a way to acknowledge your relationship. You can take sick time to
take care of your ill spouse, not your domestic partner. To deny marriage to
gays and lesbians is to always relegate them to the status of an outsider.
Marriage is the union of not only two people but also of two families. In
Vietnamese tradition, marriage solidifies and recognizes the bonds of the
bride and the groom but also of their respective families.
Andrew is close to his family, so we are able to spend time with his
parents, brothers, nephew and nieces. We spend many weekends taking his
nieces and nephew to the zoo and have hosted many family holiday
celebrations at our house. Though his nieces call me Chu Thanh, it is
only to connote my age, not the relationship I have with his nephews and
nieces. I was introduced many times as Andrews friend. The introduction
would always follow with this explanation: They bought a house together
because it is too expensive for single people to buy a house in Silicon
Valley.
As we wound our way through the lines and up and down the building, I began
to get nervous and anxious. We finally arrived at the rotunda where couples
were being married. We saw a familiar judge and asked that he do the honor
of marrying us. As we were setting up to find a place to conduct the
ceremony, I was overcome with emotion. I did not understand the anxiety and
angst I was experiencing. I have been living with Andrew for more than seven
years. I wake up with him every day. I can finish his sentence and decipher
his look. He can anticipate what I would order from a menu at any
restaurant. We have acted and behaved as an old married couple. Yet my
stomach was filled with butterflies.
As I stood there holding Andrews hand and looking at the judge, I knew that
we were committing to each other in a way that our mortgage never could. I
stood there listening to the judge read the marriage vows, saying that we
had come forward to form the union between two people. I then held Andrews
hand. I repeated after the judge as I promised to love and honor Andrew; in
sickness and in health forsaking all others, and be true him for as long as
I live. Andrew did the same for me. The judge pronounced us spouses.
The following week, we went to the home of Andrews brother, Steven, to
celebrate his sons first birthday. The house was filled with balloons, kids
and catered Vietnamese food. As I was watching Andrews nephew learning to
walk and falling, more of Stevens friends came. I stood up to greet the new
guest. Steven looked around and introduced me as Thanh, my brother in law.
After shaking the guests hand, I bent down to pick up my nephew and helped
him up.
____________________________________________
From Nguoi Viet 2 - Thursday, March 4, 2004
www.nguoi-viet.com
I Have Seen the Future, and Its San Francisco
Monday, March 01, 2004 6:13:10 PM By Andrew Lam
SAN FRANCISCO - Get used to it, an eccentric aunt of mine warned us when
we first came here in the mid-70s, fresh from a war-torn Vietnam.
I was 11 years old, speaking not a word of English. My aunt, a San
Franciscan since the late 1960s, drove me and my family to the Castro
district our second week in the city, and parked. In our car, we watched as
two men kissed passionately on the sidewalk.
My God, my mother gasped, covering her mouth. That was when my aunt said
it: Get used to it, she whispered. This is San Francisco.
I didnt know what to make of that kiss. I remember staring from the
backseat of the car, however, until one of the men turned to me and winked.
Fast-forward three decades. As I watched two men on the steps of City Hall
kissing last week, having just been declared spouses by the city
authorities, I finally know how I feel: Proud.
I dont use that word lightly. Im not always proud to be American. I, along
with a hundred thousand here, protested against the war in Iraq last year.
Im not always proud to be Vietnamese either, having seen members of my own
clan at each others throat in a bloody civil war that proved pointless
afterwards.
But I have to say I am proud to be San Franciscan. For to live in San
Francisco these days is to live with a sense of whats possible for the rest
of America.
Others, including my own relatives, shake their heads and sigh. They think
San Francisco has finally gone off the deep end, that the city is seceding
from the rest of the country. But I think ours is a message thats closer to
the opposite: Tolerance is the only possible recourse for America,
especially when, as an empire, it is forsaking all ideals for dubious gains,
waging an ill-fought war in Iraq, and all but tarnishing its reputation
overseas with a might makes right mentality.
Those men in tuxedos on their way to get married, those women who hugged and
wept on their way out of City Hall with flowers in their hair, having been
declared legally married by the city, seemed to speak of something far
larger than gay rights.
In a way, San Francisco has always been a more American city than most of us
who live here realize. Though small, it has always rejected simplification.
Known for its flower power and hippie 60s, it has also become a city of
non-white immigrants in my lifetime.
The gay Mecca of the West has become an Asian city.
Whites make up 41 percent of its citizens; Asians are not far behind at 33
percent. There is no majority left in a city whose compass is pointing
increasingly toward the Pacific.
On Chinese New Year the city schools shut down. The Chinese New Year parade
precedes the Gay Pride Parade, which is followed by Carnival in the Mission.
Its a city where private passions have a tendency to spill out into the
public domain.
After all, with no real suburb to speak of, its residents live in
overlapping neighborhoods. Its a city that takes my aunts message to
heart. Get used to it. Weve had to, because, unlike expansive Los Angeles,
San Francisco has only 47 square miles.
Were constantly in each others face, like it or not. Thus, we tolerate.
We integrate. We learn to like our cosmopolitan lifestyle, our global sense
of self.
Thus, down the street from where I live, a gay couple walk hand in hand past
the old Chinese lady doing her morning tai chi next to the homeless teenager
reading a romance novel outside the coffee shop owned by Middle Easterners.
Meanwhile, a twittering flock of Asian children wearing colorful backpacks
rush up the hill on their way to school. Indeed, growing up as a Vietnamese
refugee in this open, cosmopolitan city was more or less a walk in the park.
I never felt like an outsider here.
If anything, it was the city that gave me dreams of possibilities beyond my
own conservative, Confucian-bound upbringing.
It was here that I fancied for myself a vocation that shocked my parents:
writer. It is here that I see myself as a central character in the latest
modern American novel.
San Francisco is in the limelight again, and I think for a good reason. The
scene at City Hall may seem like the Boston Tea Party to outsiders. But
were not seceding.
Were only sending back hopeful images of a tolerant America, from a nearby
future.
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