“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 622 (Sunday) – Korean Wedding Anniversary

Twenty-one years ago, on a cold day in a foreign country, I got married. Luckily, I wrote about it immediately and emailed friends back home. If not for a printout of the email recently found in a file, there would be few memories of the day beyond the folder of legal marriage and divorce paperwork.

We got married on Tuesday, November 28, 2000. Our wedding day started with coffee at Burger King. How’s that for romance? Just before 9:00 am, armed with our pile of paperwork (blood tests, divorce decrees, and other official forms) we headed to the Legal Assistance Office on Yongsan Army Post in beautiful downtown Seoul. 

So many copies left.

The first step of the three-step marital process was the final “legal sufficiency review and notarization of forms,” which consisted of three typed originals of the very official form EA Form 736-E (the Report and Certificate of Marriage) and one typed original and four copies of EA Form 738-E (the Affidavit of Eligibility for Marriage). We never learned why we needed five copies of the affidavit, and at day’s end we still possessed four of them. 

The first minor obstacle – our carefully prepared forms needed edits. Mr. Ku, our Legal Affairs forms reviewer and a stickler for aesthetics, scrutinized our forms and announced that “Massachusetts” was too long of a name and didn’t look good the way it sat on one particular line. He wanted us to shorten things so it looked nicer. Other appearances of the name were apparently ok, and he didn’t make us change it in the other two places it appeared. He also didn’t like the wording of “United States Army,” and wanted it changed to “U.S. Army.” And the real kicker, he prefers the use of a backslash and not a semicolon to separate certain pieces of information.

We went to Mr. D’s office, changed the forms to please the diminutive forms reviewer who held our marital fate in his slender hands, and returned to Legal Affairs. Our forms received Mr. Ku’s official stamp of approval and we were sent to the front desk for the notarization of signatures and congratulations from the notary. We didn’t know if “congratulations” meant we were married yet or not, but we were at least on our way.

Step two in the matrimonial journey was the visit to Chongro-ku Ward Office to register the marriage and the Certificate of Marriage. We headed to the hotel on Post to get a cab from the line that was always waiting out front. It seemed like a simple task, but there was a hiccup. The taxi driver had never heard of the Ward Office and we were clueless as to the location. He got directions from the driver of the cab behind him and we began our crawl through Seoul’s perpetually traffic clogged streets.

The Ward Office was a well-run operation. An information desk at the entrance was home base to a helpful man wearing a yellow sash across his torso, somewhat like a beauty pageant contestant. The angel in the sash got us a queue number (#11) and filled out our forms in Hangul. After the customary line cutting which we were already used to, (#12 jumped ahead of us), shoving on the part of other clients (#12 again), and payment of a fee of 10,000 won (roughly $10 in U.S. currency) in exchange for two stamps much like postage stamps, we stood before a man with a dozen rubber stamps lined up at his disposal. He checked our identification and reviewed our forms, and like a multiple armed robot he stamped and stamped, then stuffed one copy of each of our forms into a file folder, returned a stack of paperwork to us, and sent us on our way.

The final step in the process was a visit to the U.S. Embassy, conveniently located around the corner from the Ward Office. We entered the security gate, had our passport numbers recorded by the guard, turned over our camera in exchange for a claim ticket (cameras are not allowed in the Embassy), witnessed a search of my purse, and received ID badges. After passing through a turnstile, it was a walk across the parking lot and into the building itself, where we passed through a metal detector and the purse and folder of precious paperwork passed through the x-ray machine. Finally, we arrived at the American Citizens Services Office, took a queue number (#34) and waited to be called.

There were several people ahead of us with apparently long and complicated Embassy issues. Finally, our number was displayed on the magical display board and we slid our forms under the window to the person behind the bulletproof glass. We were instructed to have a seat and wait.

During the wait, it occurred to me that as Mrs. D, my initials would be “TRD” which was uncomfortably close to “turd” and I started to chuckle. Mr. D looked at me like I was nuts and the reason was shared so he could laugh, too.

Wedding day in Seoul.

Eventually, we were called to the counter by a stern looking clerk who looked like a movie villain with the power to physically crush anyone who displeased her. She handed us our officially stamped and embossed form and dismissed us. The process was complete. We were signed, sealed, stamped, married. The entire process took three hours.

And that was my Korean wedding to the man who eventually became ex-husband number two. There were no photos of us that day. The only images recorded by us were of a couple of the craggy mountains you can see while standing in front of the Embassy. There was no wedding garb. It was cold and a weekday, and we wore basic American business attire. 

A week later we had portraits done so we’d have something for ourselves and to send to our parents. Two and a half months later, we returned to the States, with grand and earnest plans to return to Korea. We talked about it often in the following years, but, like the rest of our few shared dreams and plans, never made it happen. It seemed like once we returned to America as a married couple, all the plans we had while dating evaporated and after seven years, we split up.