"We" Went to America for a Same-Sex Wedding

Not long ago, same-sex couples from mainland China went to the United States to marry as a group for the first time. Here is how some of their stories began.

It would have been even more perfect had they arrived on June 26, US local time. That day, as Pride Month drew to a close, the US Supreme Court ruled that marriage between people of the same sex is a right that belongs to everyone. Same-sex marriage is now legal in every US state.

For everyone in the community, Zou Shan included, it was a historic day. But June 9 meant just as much to him. That day he, his boyfriend Ling Yun and six other same-sex couples held their weddings at the West Hollywood Library in Los Angeles.

In this public library in the "City of Angels," seven couples in carefully chosen formal wear, white roses pinned to their chests and make-up done with care, exchanged rings to "Over the Rainbow" and said "Yes, WE DO."

Zou Shan and Ling Yun were the third couple to hold their ceremony. They got up a little after five that morning, put on the wedding outfits they had brought from China and waited backstage. "I was a bit dazed. My mind was blank. When everyone's ceremony was over, I don't know if it was the emotion or the atmosphere, but in that moment I cried," said Zou Shan, who almost never cries, looking a little embarrassed.

In fact, the day before, when they went to the local courthouse for their marriage licenses, several couples were already in floods of tears.

The mayor of West Hollywood came to witness the wedding. Local residents, LGBT organizations and media outlets such as Reuters, ABC and the Taiwanese paper Overseas Chinese Daily also sent the newlyweds their good wishes. With cameras from all over trained on them, Ling Yun felt the photos were taken "really fast, click click click, like a press conference."

This rather unusual wedding made headlines in many foreign outlets, which used the couples' real names. Zou Shan and Ling Yun had already made headlines in various Chinese media. "I think appearing on camera is a kind of public service. For a group like ours, we ourselves are the best platform," Zou Shan said.

Liu Xin and his boyfriend Hu Zhidong were another of the couples. "The wedding was short, but you could really feel the acceptance and goodwill in the eyes of everyone there, especially the local LGBT organizations." What made Liu Xin happiest was that several good friends of his in the US came to witness his wedding too.

This was the first time same-sex couples from mainland China had gone to the US to marry as a group. Alibaba launched the event together with the gay social app Blued and three LGBT organizations. Couples could sign up directly on the Blued website. Blued, the Beijing LGBT Center and PFLAG China did the first round of screening, narrowing more than 400 couples down to 20. Their promotional videos then went up on Taobao for a public vote, and the 10 couples with the most votes won a free honeymoon wedding trip to California.

In all, 75,069 votes were cast. Zou Shan and Ling Yun received 4,654, and Hu Zhidong and Liu Xin 4,422. Every couple in the top ten had more than 4,000. Sadly, three couples could not make the trip because of visa problems. Of the seven couples who went, six were male couples.

"Many of us had blank passports that had never been used. The Blued staff were truly meticulous in preparing our paperwork, in a way many travel agencies couldn't match," Liu Xin said. He liked the sense of closeness, of people putting themselves in the couples' shoes. For that reason, he said, as an ordinary gay man he would support gay-friendly brands from the bottom of his heart.

For Taobao, this was this year's Valentine's Day marketing campaign. Taobao planned and launched it, and Mercury Home Textile came on board as brand sponsor. The cost of the whole wedding was settled between the brands and the US ground-handling company and travel agency.

Yet the care that went into it exceeded the couples' expectations. "We thought it would feel more like marketing, but in the end there were lots of surprises," Zou Shan said.

They landed in Los Angeles on June 6, and that same night the staff took the seven couples to a well-known local gay bar to unwind. The next day they visited Universal Studios, the famous film studio on the northwestern edge of Los Angeles. After that, each couple received a US$1,000 shopping voucher to spend at the Beverly Center, a favorite of many celebrities, and the organizers arranged for an American gay couple who had been together for 15 years to host a dinner for their Chinese guests.

The biggest surprise was a pair of Tiffany rings for each couple, which nobody had known about. Coming out of their Beverly Center spree, they were already a bit tired when the staff announced that the next stop was a wine tasting at a winery. Ling Yun expected nothing of it: "We had no idea what a winery was about or why we were going. We figured they'd have us taste some wine and then push us to buy it. We thought it was a sales pitch."

Knowing nothing of what lay ahead, the seven couples arrived at Malibu Family Wines, whose vineyards cover 1,000 acres of mountainside. Off-road pickups carried them slowly over the hilltops and around the back of the mountain, bodies swaying with every rise and dip of the ridges, and they felt as giddy as if they were on a roller coaster.

"First we took in the exotic scenery. The air was very fresh, and we could see lots of wild animals around: zebras, cows, and Stanley, the star giraffe from The Hangover Part III. Then the truck charged up a slope and we were all stunned," said Ling Yun, waving his hands with excitement. "The trees in front of you were hung with twinkling lights. As soon as you got off the truck you saw three huge banquet tables ahead, laid with tablecloths, decorated with satin ribbons and set with fine wine glasses. When we got to the table and found the Tiffany boxes, everybody went wild. All we wanted was to take photos."

Besides the rings, Zou Shan was moved by smaller details. He and Ling Yun had brought their own brooches for the wedding, only to find the organizers had prepared white-rose boutonnieres at the venue, which touched them deeply. After the wedding, their marriage certificates would normally have been mailed to China six weeks later. "But in fact they had pulled some strings in advance without telling us. That day a staff member drove more than two hours to hand in our paperwork, then picked up the certificates as a special exception and brought them back to surprise us."

These certificates, issued by a US government, have no legal force in China. What the couples care about more is the sacred meaning of the wedding as a ritual.

The phrase "a sense of ceremony" came up again and again in our interviews. "We always hoped to have a ceremony like straight couples do, with family and friends there to bless it and witness it," Zou Shan said. The day before the wedding (June 8), after Liu Xin's boyfriend Hu Zhidong picked up their license, he posted about it on Moments and received congratulations from many colleagues. He cried at the time: "In fact, the approval of family and friends matters more to us."

Liu Xin and his boyfriend have been together for nearly eight years and had long thought about and planned to marry. "This event came along at just the right moment, and it felt especially meaningful, so we took part," Liu Xin said. "We always hoped to hold a ceremony like this, whether in China or abroad, mostly to give ourselves a beautiful memory."

On the Monday that Zou Shan went back to work in China, he handed out candy to his colleagues, carefully tucking a toy bear into each bag, because the bear is the token of their love. He did not tell his colleagues it was wedding candy, but one long-time colleague said "Congratulations," and a former colleague he had written off as a chauvinist "straight man" messaged him on WeChat to wish him "a happy marriage." "That really surprised me," Zou Shan said.

Zou Shan and Ling Yun met on Sina Weibo in 2012. That day Ling Yun posted a photo on Weibo for the first time, and Zou Shan saw it. "I remember it was a photo of me with my hands clasped in a New Year greeting. My dad took it. The bathroom light was very bright, I was still in a padded jacket, and my hair was a mess because I hadn't combed it."

Zou Shan commented under the post: "So cute." That was their first small point of contact online. Later they met at a friend's gathering, liked each other, and began chatting on and off.

At the time Ling Yun lived in Suzhou and Zou Shan in Shanghai. As their feelings grew, a long-distance relationship stopped being enough. On weekends and holidays, Zou Shan would drive from Shanghai to Suzhou on the evening his time off began and spend it with Ling Yun. Soon after, Ling Yun's company sent him to Shanghai on a month-long secondment. "That was when it really felt settled. It was the first time I felt I wanted to give myself to one person."

Ling Yun is out not only to close colleagues; he came out to his parents back in 2010. His parents are also volunteers with PFLAG China and have quite a "reputation" in the gay community. Ling Yun's father, for example, recently helped draft a same-sex marriage bill, while his mother goes on the YY voice-chat platform every day to talk with other parents, helping them understand "coming out" properly and sharing what she has learned. Sometimes she tells stories at home about "lalas" (lesbians) that even her son knows little about.

Like Ling Yun, Zou Shan knew very early that he did not like girls. At 16 he told his mother, in all seriousness, that he would never marry a woman. He was not, as his mother assumed, too young to know his own mind. He already understood his sexual orientation. "I stumbled on a gay forum and it all made sense. There was no hesitation or struggle. I just realized it naturally, and I had always liked good-looking boys." In middle school he did chase girls, but only because "everyone seemed to be doing it, so I did too."

Ling Yun did struggle with his orientation for a while. He kept wondering whether he had done something wrong. Only after reading widely online did he learn he was not alone, and gradually he grew sure of himself. Around 2000, both Zou Shan and Ling Yun were at university. That was when they began going online and learning everything they could about gay life. The gay website Danlan appeared that same year.

Coming out to one's parents, whether it goes well or not, hits a family hard. When Zou Shan first tried to tell his mother about his orientation, she gave him the cold shoulder for the better part of a year, avoiding the subject and never letting him finish, convinced that her son had "gone bad" while studying in Beijing.

When Ling Yun told his mother he liked boys, this woman who never cried in front of others could not stop the tears. "Our generation never had any education about this. In our generation's eyes, what was homosexuality? It was foreigners following a fad. The moment he told me, my mind went blank. All I could think was that homosexuality was just foreigners following a fad, so how could my son do such a thing?" Ling Yun's mother told us.

At first she kept hoping Ling Yun would change into what she had always imagined, a man who liked girls. Later, after constant "battles" and compromises with him, she hoped he would hold a sham wedding with a "lala" and have a child. "We thought that if he didn't marry and have children, he would be alone and miserable for the rest of his life. That would be too sad," she said. If he could hold even a nominal wedding with a "lala" who wanted the same arrangement and have a child, she reasoned, someone would look after him. She and her husband even resolved to keep the secret for the rest of their lives. But then, through her son, she discovered more gay films and books and joined groups for mothers of gay children. She also learned that gay people make up 3% to 5% of the population. Gradually she became a "gay rights fighter" who wanted to tell everyone, "My son is not a bad child, and as his mother I must protect him all the more." Later, with his father and mother's help, Ling Yun came out to his grandfather, his uncle and other relatives without trouble.

"How we see it now is that children only need to think about how to come out to their parents. What happens when relatives find out is not their business. That's for the parents to worry about, and sometimes the parents are just overthinking it," Ling Yun's mother said.

When it comes to coming out, this family has been fairly "successful," and Zou Shan and Ling Yun have both been fairly lucky. "Your parents have already pictured in their world what your world will look like. Then one day you tell them this thing (your sexual orientation), and their world collapses completely. You have to know how to rebuild that world from scratch," Zou Shan said.

Liu Xin and Hu Zhidong have always been half out of the closet. Liu Xin very much hoped that marrying in the US would let his parents learn his sexual orientation. Although media outlets of every kind ran the story as a headline, his parents still have not seen it, and he now has to work out how to come out to them in his hometown.

Many gay couples share the wish Zou Shan and Ling Yun stated in their application video: "Our greatest wish is that same-sex marriage in China can be legalized as soon as possible, so that people in love in our community can legally become partners and live better under the protection of the law." Just as in the US now.

After the wedding, both couples went back to their old lives. "I cook, he washes the dishes and does the laundry. He eats everything I make, and in the end he finishes whatever I leave. We argue and bicker too," Liu Xin said.

Since 2012 Zou Shan and Ling Yun have kept two cats, a black one called Xiaobao and a white one called Dabao. With Ling Yun's father and mother, they live in a quiet residential compound in Shanghai's Pudong district, and it was here that we talked with them about their wedding and their story. "We go to and from work together, go shopping together, and on weekends I cook at home and he does the dishes. It's a very ordinary life," Zou Shan said.

(At the interviewees' request, Zou Shan and Ling Yun are pseudonyms.)