Cup of Jo reader Tiffany Weger-Wong always wanted to have two weddings. “I’m Malaysian Chinese American, and grew up in Queens, New York, with just my mom,” she told us. “My dad and extended family are in Malaysia. I always loved going back to visit, because I have so many aunties, uncles, and cousins — my mom has nine siblings!” Tiffany knew it wouldn’t be possible for her many relatives to make the 10,000-mile trip from Kuala Lumpur to New York. But it was important to her, and her now-husband Ben, that both their families be a part of their wedding. The only solution? Have two.
You might remember Tiffany from her post-proposal donut photo. Now, she takes us through both of her beautiful wedding days…
“Ben and I met on a dating app, at the height of the pandemic. I was living with my mom in Queens, and he was in the Bronx, and we went on 10 Zoom dates over the course of two months. He wore a suit for the first one, which I thought was hilarious. After the vaccines rolled out, we finally met in person, and two years later, we got engaged.”
“We had our first wedding in 2024, at a restaurant in Brooklyn called Rule Of Thirds. My dad came from Malaysia. Ben is Jewish, so we wanted to incorporate the traditions his family loves. Ben smashed the glass, and we had a beautiful challah that his father cut after the ceremony. We also signed a ketubah, a Jewish marriage contract, which we composed together. We now have it hanging above our bed.”
“Hosting a tea ceremony is a big Chinese wedding custom, to honor your elders. There’s a very specific order to it, and it can take a while. We didn’t realize just how long, so it got very quiet, and at one point, Ben’s little nephew burst out, ‘When is it gonna be over?’ which was really funny.”
“After the tea ceremony, the bride and groom are supposed to give red envelopes with money to their younger siblings — which neither of us has. So, Ben gave envelopes to his niece and nephew, and I gave one to my younger cousin, who’s like a sister to me.”
“We found this plain arch on Facebook Marketplace, then decorated it ourselves. We hung Ben’s grandfather’s tallit (prayer shawl) over it, because Ben’s grandparents are no longer alive. It felt really meaningful to have them up there with us in this way.”
“There’s a famous Chinese cover of the Cranberries song, Dreams, by Faye Wong. I love both versions, but that’s the one I grew up with. When Ben and I first started dating, we made each other playlists, and he put that cover on his! We chose it as our recessional song. The DJ played it right as we kissed — it felt like fireworks.”
“I think the hora was my favorite part. It was just so exciting. Our moms were both screaming their heads off, but they had so much fun — everyone did.”
PART TWO
One year later, Ben and Tiffany flew to Kuala Lumpur, for wedding number two…
“In Malaysia, before doing anything else, my mom and I had to go to a Buddhist temple and talk to a priest, so he could give us auspicious dates for the event. We gave him our names, our birthdays, and our times of birth, and he gave us the date of June 14th. My whole family pitched to help — one of my aunts hosted us at her house and threw the welcome dinner, and another aunt hemmed my dress and found Ben his wedding clothes. When I think of everything they did for us, it makes me cry.”
“Ben and I wore traditional wedding clothes for the first part of the day — a ma kua for him and a kua for me. They’re a bit complicated to put on, but they’re so beautiful and intricate. The whole idea is ‘more is more.’ You want to do it up — gold everything.”
“There’s a tradition called ‘gatecrashing,’ where the groom and his groomsmen (and groomswoman, in our case) come to pick up the bride, and the bridesmaids put them through a series of challenging games in order to ‘win’ her. Like eating rice balls full of wasabi or doing Chinese calligraphy. And if they don’t complete a task, they have to pay the bridesmaids (literally!).”
“You’re supposed to be kind of obnoxious about it, too. I told my American friends, ‘Just follow my cousins. You’ll see — they will demand money.’ It’s a real performance. The groomsmen will be like, ‘Oh, we’re out of cash!’ and the bridesmaids go, ‘No problem, we take Venmo! We take USD! Pay up!’”
“One of the tasks was this really complicated yoga pose. Keep in mind, it was 95 degrees outside. I was upstairs in an air-conditioned bedroom, watching on FaceTime.”
“Finally, the groom comes to proclaim his love to the bride through the closed door. I assumed Ben was going to just say the English version of the standard Chinese script, but he surprised me by writing his own personal speech, and getting one of my relatives to help him translate it into a dialect that my family speaks, called Hakka. I was shocked, and so touched, because it’s not an easy language to learn. Everyone was cheering, and I just burst into sobs.”
“After the gatecrashing, we prayed at the shrine in my aunt’s home, and then had the tea ceremony. The Brooklyn one had seemed long at the time, but it was actually quite short by comparison. We served tea to all my aunts, uncles, and older cousins, and gave red envelopes to all the younger ones.”
“The final piece of ceremony is the bride leaving her childhood home to join her husband’s. We did the send-off part, for the sake of tradition. My mom put me in the car and started crying as though I was actually leaving — even though in reality, my cousin was just driving us around the block. I was like, ‘Mom, I’ll see you in five minutes!’”
“The second half of the day is the wedding banquet. We had it at a beautiful local restaurant. Chinese weddings are all about the food. You don’t really have dancing and toasts like you do in America. It’s a big, eight-course meal, and you just want everyone to enjoy themselves.”
“This is almost all of my cousins. Believe it or not, I have more!”
“Couples don’t usually give a big speech, but I wanted to take the chance to tell my family how much this meant to me. Being a third-culture kid, I always felt a little out of place. My mom and I are the only ones in our family who don’t live in Malaysia, and so to have them not only embrace my husband with open arms, but also to be so involved — so excited to do this for us — gave me a sense of belonging. I can’t wait until Ben and I come back with our own children and give that to them, too.”
Thank you so much, Tiffany and Ben. We wish you so much happiness.
P.S. More wedding stories, including a City Hall wedding with sneakers and hilarious wedding-day bloopers.
(Brooklyn wedding photos by Carissa Joy. Malaysia wedding photos by Moments by Jeremy.)