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Getting Married

I am often asked how I met my wife, especially since she is from Thailand.

When I was working at Sperry Univac, I had a friend, named Aye, from Burma whose wife is from Thailand. I helped him with a project once to fix a door. Afterwards his wife brought us some food. She told us that when we finished she would bring us a special Thai dessert. We ate the food, one of the dishes having been a banana cut into pieces at a sharp angle. We sat around talking for a time, and finally Aye asked his wife when the special Thai desert, was coming. She replied that we already ate it, that was the banana. We both got a chuckle out of that and from then on would refer to bananas as “special Thai desert”.

My friend invited me to join him and another of his friends on a fishing trip to Canada. I jumped at the chance. We drove up to Ear Falls and rented some boats and from there had access to hundreds of lakes. We had some fun with the fact that his name was Aye, and Canadians like to end every sentence with “aye?” The fishing was good, we only kept fish which weighed over five pounds, but still all of us brought back our limit. My friend organized a fish fry at his home and  they invited my wife and her sisters to join us. I gave them each a motorcycle ride, and we showed slides of our fishing trip and ate good food. We started dating, but it was not until later when I was working in Mississippi and we were apart that we realized how much we missed each other and decided to marry. My wife (Dao), knew nothing of American customs. My Mom helped her find a wedding dress, at a farm house near Preston (where my parents had moved to), and since we had reserved the church already, she thought that all that needed to be done. I came home on vacation a week before the wedding and found nothing was prepared, so we threw our wedding together in less than one week, including flowers, reception, photographer, bridesmaid dresses, tuxedos, food and musicians.

My wife’s oldest sister, Jeed came to America as an AFS student and stayed with the Larson family in Long Prairie. She went on to study dentistry at the U of M. Meanwhile Dao’s father had passed away from cancer, and Jeed convinced her Mom that Dao and her sister Pat, would have a brighter future in America. Her Mom consented and the girls came and also stayed with the Larson family.  Dao was living with her sister in St. Paul when I met her.

After our wedding, she moved to Mississippi with me. She was still learning English at the time, and was horrified the first time she heard someone in Mississippi speak in a thick southern accent, thinking that she would have to have to learn a new language.  I too had some issues with the accent. The first day on the job, a man up on a latter said, “gimme dat wore”, it took me a bit to figure out he wanted me to hand him a piece of wire that was laying on the console where I was working.