Seventeen Years

Today is August 17, 2026. Seventeen years ago today, in a small ceremony in Massachusetts, Ruth became my wife. By midnight, she was in the hospital.

Our wedding night was spent under fluorescent lights with a blood pressure cuff and a physician who did not care, even slightly, that we had gotten married six hours earlier.

She was fine. It turned out to be nothing serious. But I had not yet added her to my health insurance plan, because we had been married for less than a day, because the paperwork takes time, because no one plans for their wife to need emergency medical care before they’ve cut the cake. In sickness and in health cost me two thousand dollars out of pocket before we’d been married twenty-four hours.

I wrote a piece recently about healthcare in Hong Kong, where we live now. About how an emergency room visit costs fifty-one dollars. About how Ruth once asked me to explain what a deductible was, and when I finished explaining, she went quiet in the way that means she’s reclassifying something she previously considered civilized as barbaric. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.

She Could Have Taken That as a Sign

But that night in 2009, she didn’t know any of that yet. She just knew she was in a hospital bed on her wedding night, her new husband was filling out forms he didn’t understand, and the first act of their marriage was a bill. Two thousand dollars. Welcome to America. In sickness and in health. Emphasis on the sickness. Emphasis on the bill.

She could have taken that as a sign. She didn’t.

She could have taken a lot of things as signs.

She could have taken Adams, Massachusetts as a sign. Population 7,995, of which she constitutes roughly the entire Asian demographic. A town with a church on every corner and a bar between every church, where people give directions using landmarks that burned down in 1987, where a man’s house number is a birthright and a grocery run takes forty-five minutes because someone’s mother wants to tell you about her hip. She married into that. A woman from a city of 7.4 million people married into a town where the Chinese auction had never seen an actual Chinese person until she showed up.

She could have taken my friends as a sign. Trevor, who owns a Chinese bridal sedan chair for reasons no one has ever asked about, and who paraded her down the street in it within hours of meeting her. Trevor, who pulled up to the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort in a Chrysler K-car that looked like it had been rescued from a demolition derby, and then screamed for a banana in a hotel bathroom while she sat on the bed reconsidering her life choices.

She is not a reasonable person. She is something better. She is game. She has always been game.

What Seventeen Years Means

It means she left everything. It means a woman from one of the most dynamic cities on Earth looked at a man from a factory town in the Berkshires and said yes. Not because she didn’t have options. She had options. She could have dated a banker. She has told me this. She has told me this many times.

She chose this. She chose Adams, and the friends, and the husband in shorts who writes about her on the internet. She chose the chaos. She chose me.

And here is what I need to say, the part that matters more than the comedy, more than the stories, more than seventeen years of material that I have mined for LinkedIn engagement like a man panning for gold in his own marriage.

The Real Courage

She is the bravest person I know.

Not because of the hospital on our wedding night. Not because she survived Trevor. Not because she let two men carry her through Adams in a sedan chair while neighbors came to their porches. Those things took courage, sure. A specific, low-stakes, this-cannot-possibly-be-my-life kind of courage.

The real courage is quieter. The real courage is a woman who left her city, her family, her language, her food, her system, everything that was easy and familiar, and built a life with a man from a place she had never heard of.

The real courage is staying. Through all of it. Through the shorts, and the LinkedIn posts, and the friends who are, by any objective measure, clinically insane. Through the years in Hong Kong together, building something real, something permanent, on the other side of the world from where we started.

Love Letter

I write about her because she is the most interesting person I have ever met. I write about her because our life together is the funniest, strangest, most improbable thing that has ever happened to me.

The guy loves the girl. The girl, for reasons that remain mysterious to everyone including the guy, loves him back.

Ruth. I love you. I have loved you since before the hospital and the two-thousand-dollar bill and the night our marriage started with an IV drip instead of a honeymoon suite.

They should wish that. What we have is ridiculous. It is chaotic and loud and occasionally on fire.

It makes no sense. It has never made sense.

Happy anniversary. Seventeen years. Here’s to seventeen more.

You could have married a banker.

I’m glad you didn’t.