Meeting the Folks - Part 1

Against all odds, as my second year at Golden Gate Seminary was winding down, my love life was in full bloom. Mimi and I had begun dating in December, and by late spring we were serious enough to consider meeting each other’s parents. I nervously went first, as Mimi, who is Korean, had warned me that her parents might not be too happy to see her with “a whitey.”

During a visit to the Bay Area, Mr. and Mrs. Kim met us at a Chinese restaurant in downtown Mill Valley, and upon greeting them in the parking lot, I could see that they were disturbed not so much by my race as by my height. At 6’5”, I towered awkwardly above them during the perfunctory handshakes and was forced to duck a bit at the doorway of the restaurant. Several people were gathered in the foyer waiting to be seated, one of whom was a preschool-aged boy whose eyes grew wide at my entrance. Tugging on his mother’s sleeve, he cried, “Mommy, look at that big man!”

“It’s not polite to stare,” she scolded, implying that, as a freak of nature, I was to be regarded as an object of pity. Suddenly, on one of the most important nights of my life, my height—which I had never considered to be more than slightly above normal—had begun frightening small children. Standing next to the rather diminutive Kims, my frame had assumed gigantic proportions, and matters didn’t improve any when a waitress came over to seat us who was barely pushing 5 feet. I began to wonder if we should have met at an NBA basketball game, where I would have stood a chance of blending in.

Still, the dinner was far from a total disaster. Mimi’s father was a Southern Baptist minister, having started a church in Maryland that eventually grew to over 2,000 members before accepting a denominational position in California. This gave us some common ground and ready topics of conversation, enabling me to steer the discussion away from the elephant in the room—my suitability as a prospective son-in-law. Better to survive this first meal before stepping out onto the thin ice, I thought.

But Rev. Kim decided to broach the topic himself just before the check came. Apropos of nothing, he shook his head ruefully and said, “We brought Mimi to America when she was two, and this country is all she has ever known. So why should we be surprised if she ends up with an American?”

Rev. Kim said this with a resigned, noble air, as if he were assuming all the responsibility for his daughter’s impending misfortune. It was far from a ringing endorsement of our relationship, I knew, but it felt like a place to start. Maybe if it came to that, the Kims would manage to accept me into the family—freakish height and all.