Vows: She Loves the Met. He Loves LeBron James.

Encounters: Andrew McCarthy’s Newest Role: Young Adult Novelist
March 31, 2017
Encounters: Siblings Who Share a Sense of Humor, Not Just Genes
April 1, 2017
Show all

Vows: She Loves the Met. He Loves LeBron James.

This post was originally published on this site

Want create site? Find Free WordPress Themes and plugins.

Vows

By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI

Sally Wang has a theory as to why she did not date many Asian men before meeting Jason Liang in February 2015.

“I was a part of the so-called ‘1.5 Generation,’” said Ms. Wang, who was 7 when she and her parents arrived in New York from Nanjing, China.

“I was considered too Chinese for Chinese men who were born in the United States, who saw me as being fresh off the boat, and I wasn’t Chinese enough for traditional Chinese men who were born in China. I was never fully accepted by either group.”

Trapped between cultural perspectives, Ms. Wang was also dealing with additional pressures at the time she met Mr. Liang, a Columbia graduate of Taiwanese descent and the founder and chief executive of BringMeThat.com, an online food delivery technology company based in New York.

“It was a rough transitional time in my life,” she said. “I was helping my mother fight breast cancer after ending a long-term relationship, and I was also in the midst of leaving a law career in Connecticut to start my own business in New York.”

Then along came Mr. Liang — whom she met on the dating website Coffee Meets Bagel — and the weight of Ms. Wang’s issues, much like her mood, began to lighten considerably. “He was kind and generous and very easy to talk to,” said Ms. Wang, 34, the co-founder and chief executive of DocFlight, a telemedicine technology company based in New York that connects Chinese patients to some of the leading doctors in the United States.

“He seemed like an easygoing person willing to try new things,” she said, “and that was something that was missing from my previous relationships.”

They had overlapped academically for two years at Harvard, where she had graduated before earning a law degree and a master of public health degree, and where he received an M.B.A.

Mr. Liang, also 34, who was born and raised in Strongsville, Ohio, said he never viewed Ms. Wang as being caught between cultures.

In his eyes, there was nothing 1.5 about her — she was simply a perfect 10.

“All I saw was a great smile, a really pretty face and a very intelligent person,” he said.

Though they never crossed paths at Harvard, they had several mutual Facebook friends from their alma mater, “which certainly planted the seed for our fated meeting,” Ms. Wang said.

It also enabled them to better research each other while trading online messages and clicking their way to a first date at a bar in SoHo, where she learned that Mr. Liang was born to Taiwanese immigrants, Sue and James Liang, and that his father is a pediatrician in Parma, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. She was impressed that Mr. Liang was only 29 when he began his business.

He learned that while Ms. Wang is known as Sally, her real name is Yuanheng, and that she loves watching ballet or going to the symphony as much as she loves visiting “different dessert joints around New York.”

When they met, she was living in Connecticut, having completed a one-year clerkship for Judge Charles S. Haight Jr., a Federal District Court judge with chambers in New Haven, and was planning to move to Manhattan. “She was artsy and quirky, which I really liked,” Mr. Liang said. “The best thing about her was that she allowed me to be myself and never made me feel like I was being evaluated; it was nice to finally be able to let my guard down.”

She also told him about her mother, Yaling Chen, a cancer survivor who is president of SRS Holdings, a real estate investment firm in Norwich, Conn., and her father, Jianshi Wang, who retired as an international civil servant at the United Nations in New York.

Interactive Feature | NYT Living Newsletter Get lifestyle news from the Style, Travel and Food sections, from the latest trends to news you can use.

“There were certainly strong cultural similarities between our two families,” Mr. Liang said. “Maybe that’s one of the reasons why our first date was so comfortable, and didn’t feel like a job interview, which was always the case with me and other women before I met Sally.”

Rachel Morehouse was one of the first of Mr. Liang’s friends to hear about Ms. Wang.

“I had never seen Jason as happy, or heard him talk about a woman the way he talked about Sally when they first met,” she said. “You could tell from the very start that she was someone special in his life.”

Ms. Wang knew she had finally found that someone special in Mr. Liang.

“It was pretty close to love at first sight,” she said. “Things just fell into place, and we grew close very quickly.”

Indeed, five months after meeting online, and just two months after Ms. Wang moved to Manhattan, she and Mr. Liang decided to move in together, “squeezing ourselves into my tiny Murray Hill apartment,” she said.

Sharing a home, however, magnified a few of the imperfections that neither had noticed while living apart.

“We would go to the Met and other museums, and I was shocked as to how little Jason knew about art,” Ms. Wang said. “It just wasn’t his thing.”

His thing, she soon found out, was sports. Sure, he loved her, but he also loved LeBron James. “Being from Ohio, he almost never missed a Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game,” she said. “And I couldn’t believe he was O.K. with spending entire Sundays watching football.

“But even though he had little interest in art museums and other things I enjoyed, he always made an effort to go along with me to those places.” Ms. Wang admitted that she was not without her own shortcomings.

“Whenever I’m writing,” she said, “I have a tendency to whisper the words out loud, and sometimes Jason says he can’t work in the same room as me. I’m also a person who has always struggled with being on time, which annoys him. But I’d like to think I’ve gotten better about it.”

In the larger scheme, Ms. Wang said that Mr. Liang “has made my life much less complicated and much more stable and complete from the very beginning.”

“He’s true to his Midwestern roots in terms of being very relaxed,” she said. “But at the same time, he’s well aware as to how East Coast people think, and cosmopolitan enough to engage with someone like me, who is more in line with Northeast culture.”

She also said that Mr. Liang’s successful founding of his food delivery company, which has since expanded nationwide, influenced her decision to start DocFlight.

“I was very impressed and inspired by the business that Jason had created,” she said. “He was someone I could lean on for business advice, which was just another aspect of our relationship that seemed to fall perfectly into place.”

Mr. Liang, who proposed to Ms. Wang with a custom-designed pink diamond ring while they vacationed in the Azores islands in May 2016, said that “while being an entrepreneur comes with a lot of struggles and challenges, Sally and I can empathize with each other when things go wrong.

“We can relate to situations that might be hard to explain to someone who is not a business owner,” he continued, “and that helps to stabilize us emotionally.”

They were married March 11 at the 3 West Club in Manhattan.

Before walking down the aisle, the couple and their families participated in a traditional Chinese ceremony in which the bride and groom served tea to their parents as a sign of gratitude and respect. It also symbolized the union between the two families.

In return, the couple received red gift envelopes of cash and a pure gold bracelet, a traditional Chinese wedding gift.

The bride wore a strapless silk dress and silver heels, and the groom an Italian wool black suit, tuxedo shirt and black Fifth Avenue oxford shoes.

At the reception, the bride’s father, choking back tears, told his daughter and son-in-law that marriage calls for patience and compromise. “May both of you be always true to each other, sharing joys and burdens,” he said. “May you live each day like your last, and each night like your first.”

Did you find apk for android? You can find new Free Android Games and apps.

Comments are closed.