The Backstory Pt. I: Pre-Marriage

 

           Yaejin and I met at the beginning of 2014, when she came reluctantly to Sendai, Japan as an English teacher at Meysen Academy, where I was finishing up my first year in the same position. For me it had been a step toward my dream of staying in Japan for good, though I had long held hopes that I might end up in less of an English-heavy environment. For her it was simply a temporary work experience through church connections and by no means birthed from any interest in Japan itself – although she did pick up the language quite admirably over the two years she ended up living there.

We were established as classroom neighbors and unofficial partners due to several factors, and quickly developed a warm and altogether platonic friendship. Yaejin was an excellent teacher, so my “advisory role” to her was mostly relegated to interpretation between her and our Japanese coworkers or the occasional student’s parent. Our classrooms were adjacent to one another and shared a door which we often left open during our setup and clean-up times, that we might talk across the way while performing those tasks. During one of these talks the topic of life goals came up, and we established that I wished to remain in Japan for good, whereas she was eager to get back into the evangelistic work she had been doing before coming to the school. Thus we determined that our interests and callings were in different directions, and therefore were not to consider one another to be under any threat of misunderstanding in the nature of our friendship.  Sometimes we would meet outside of work as well; at first with other coworkers, and later just with one another when most of our other friends’ schedules failed to align with ours. We greatly enjoyed each other’s company, and were conscious of a loneliness we felt for my impending departure from teaching at the school, once decided. But it was not until months after ceasing to be coworkers that either of us were aware of any affection transcending friendship. Looking back I vaguely recall having some notion that Yaejin would theoretically be very agreeable to live with, and would encourage me to engage in worthy priorities besides; but I cannot say for sure at which point that occurred to me.  Hearing about her missionary work in Mongolia certainly did inspire and challenge me to re-assess my own commitment to the gospel I claimed to hold supreme.

The final moment of clarity for me occurred during a conversation with a friend, regarding the common speculation of the viability of meaningful friendships between the sexes, and my first inclination was to cite Yaejin as an example – her being the only of my close female friends that he would know – and as I made my claim I was internally convicted that I was no longer speaking truthfully to use her name for the point I was trying to make. Aloud I quickly provided other names, but privately I realized that I had somehow crossed into a different perspective toward her from which I had assumed myself utterly safe – that point upon which the bond of our friendship had been allowed to deepen in the first place. I thus resolved, and validated on the advice of  a mutual friend, that I bore an obligation to tell Yaejin about this change in my affections, or else betray a key basis of our friendship.

In fact, Yaejin was not at all pleased with the revelation at first, lamenting its affect on our happy friendship. Somewhere along the line the idea seems to have grown on her, though I didn’t feel assured of any reciprocation until the last time we met before I left Japan in December of 2015. To her mind we were parting for good, so she allowed herself some unguardedness in saying goodbye, assuming that I’d adjust to American life and gradually stop contacting her. However this first indication that there may be a possibility for us along with the period of change in life I was entering and interest in international missionary work compelled me to consider our eventual reunion quite likely.  I would go on to spend the next spring in Cambodia with a team in Yaejin’s mission network and travelling throughout India with evangelist Glenn Cunningham, seeking to determine whether I could really envision myself doing that sort of ministry work for my own vocation. While I was in India Yaejin made her own  move back to Mongolia for a brief visit with her family before joining an evangelistic team in Korea. The simultaneous transition for us probably helped engender more frequent contact with one another, and I started making plans to join her team in Korea on an exploratory basis, determining in my heart that I would give up on our relationship if I found the lifestyle with their team to be intolerable.

Beside our own questions about whether our lives were headed in complimentary trajectories, there was an additional complication in that her family and indeed missions network at large pretty much assumed that anyone “outside” of their network would not make a suitable partner. Thus our relationship was entirely undercover on her side; and for my own part I tried to keep it mostly behind the scenes because of the uncertainty of it having any clear destination and slight embarrassment that I was pursuing such venues where I was not immediately welcomed, when elsewhere I might have been more easily accepted. So I fully expected my time with the Korea mission (2-3 months) to be “undercover” in the sense that I would not be spending a lot of time one-on-one with Yaejin there, but would rather be assessing the team’s effectiveness, lifestyle, and congruence with my own philosophies. Of course, it would be known that we had been coworkers and friends, so we wouldn’t be acting as strangers, but I was considering the venture as a make or break experience. However, after having been accepted to visit with the team, I felt compelled to email Yaejin’s father and let him know upfront that I had an interest not only in evangelistic work but also in a potential future with his daughter – at this point still very much not considering marriage a foregone conclusion, but all the same I felt it the right course of action. To my surprise, my next correspondence was from my contact with the Korea team saying that he was very sorry to have to un-invite me from visiting their team! Mr. Choi had contacted them and asked them to keep me away because of expressed interest. While I was commended for my honesty I was kindly requested to find other ways to serve the Lord – somewhere safely away from Yaejin!  Yaejin was also ordered by her father to cease contact with me and focus on her own work. She did call me once more to tearfully inform me of this edict and ask me not to give up on us even though we couldn’t be in communication. For my own part I felt offended and weary, and was ready to put the relationship on the back burner while I emotionally recovered. That is not to say that I thought we were “over;” rather, I assumed our paths would have to reconvene at some future time if it was God’s will.

Eventually I decided to get back into using my Japanese and applied for some interpreting jobs, accepting an ill-fated one in northern Georgia before moving on to a better one in Kentucky where I was very happy living among family and friends. In December of 2018 I visited another one of the teams in Yaejin’s network and had a very pleasant experience, determining that I could probably be happy working with their team, but I was reluctant to leave the happiness I had found in Kentucky, and so waited six months to request long-term acceptance on their team. When I finally did ask, I was told that it was not easy for them to bring in foreigners to their team at the time, so it would not be possible for me to join them on a long-term basis.  By now it had been three and a half years since Yaejin and I had seen eachother in person. Met with yet another roadblock to ever reuniting, I felt that I needed to simply enjoy the blessings God had given me in my environment and work. Yaejin too felt the strain of our never-ending long-distance relationship and the stress of all its uncertainty was reaching a sort of breaking point, and resolved that the only possible solution for us would come from consulting her father. We didn’t have any clear idea how he might react to her confession that we had remained in touch all this time, and Yaejin was apprehensive about how he might take the news, but nonetheless certain that it was the right step to take.

To our relief, he reacted calmly – even warmly – to Yaejin’s confession. He was surprised to hear that I was still in the picture, but took it as a good sign that I had stayed interested all that time, and told her “in that case he should come here and meet us, and if things go well I’m sure his parents will want to meet you as well.”  Well that cooperative offer floored us! All this time I had been seeing Yaejin’s father as a barrier between us, and now suddenly he became the open door to our long-delayed reunion! Yaejin relayed the invitation to me on Thursday, August 29; adding that her parents preferred me to come before her oldest two brothers left the country in less than three weeks. I was on the plane 10 days later, on September 8. Despite language barriers and my relatively unknown status to her parents, both were graciously welcoming and accepting to me. Her father wanted to start having long conversations with me right away to explain their ministry, family, and church network; in all its strengths, weaknesses, and particulars. As soon as the second or third day he was making comments like “I’m only telling you this because you’re going to be family;” a remark that Yaejin and I both took in outward ambivalence but inner jubilation. I was in Mongolia for nearly eleven weeks, during which time I was able to not only connect with Yaejin’s immediate family (10 younger siblings) and church members, but also participate in an evangelistic tour to some several small villages along the northern border. Yaejin’s father also announced to the church that she would be going back with me to the U.S. to meet my family and that we would return to Mongolia to be married in June, for which we were given kind applause, as the Mongolians were pleased and proud to hear that the wedding would not take place in Korea or America or any other more developed country than their own, as many of them had taken for granted.

We travelled together to the U.S. a week before Thanksgiving, though with a mishap that lead to a free night in a four-star hotel in Beijing and great confusion and scrambling in the Beijing airport regarding the legality of our unplanned entry into China and efforts to track our luggage and ascertain whether it was getting placed onto the flight (it wasn’t). We caused the rest of our delayed group (all Mongolians, who can freely enter China) to wait for about 3 hours on a bus -- enough time for them to have been taken back and forth from the hotel several times over! But Mongolians tend to be very easy-going and didn't seem at all concerned with the delay. Our running around was repeated at the Beijing airport the next morning when our luggage still had not been transferred to the plane as we were promised it would be. In order to solve this we had to go in several "DO NOT ENTER"s, "EXIT ONLY"s, and "EMPLOYEES ONLY"s but eventually we were told it worked out -- and we only had to do without our luggage for ten days or so before it reached us in Alabama! But it made for a humorous re-telling.
We were able to spend Christmas with my family as well. Yaejin got to meet all of the Sigler side of the family at my grandmother’s funeral in December, and some of the final days of Grandma’s house being in the family I was able to use the great oak tree in the front yard to propose on January 5. As Yaejin’s return flight and our final separation drew near, there started being rumors of a new, highly contagious virus sweeping China and spreading to other parts of Asia, so we changed her return flight through Beijing to one which crossed through Seoul, and parted ways for what we expected to be three months at the longest. Days after Yaejin returned to her family, the Mongolian government effectively shut down their airports and borders.