Hitched At Last

Wang Tsu-ming (not his real name), who worked for over 10 years in Silicon Valley, has finally tied the knot after 42 years as a bachelor.

For the sake of his new bride he decided two months ago to leave Silicon Valley and come back to work in the ROC. Forty-two is quite late to begetting married, but Wang Tsu-ming says he would have come back to Taiwan every now and then anyway; he didn't come just to find a wife. Yet his family always made the connection.

Every time he returned, his family would enthusiastically arrange prospective marriage partners for him to meet. After several meetings which came to nothing, they asked him to define his requirements, but he was never very cooperative: he would just say: "She just has to be female and alive" which wasn't much help. The reason the first few meetings didn't lead to anything was that he believes that marriage is something very important--the couple will spend the rest of their lives together--and so when he did not have the right feeling at the first meeting, he let it go at that.

No confirmed bachelor

Wang doesn't see himself as a picky sort of fellow, but he was in no rush to get married. Nonetheless, he says: "I never doubted that I would marry one day."

After working abroad for so many years and reaching a middle management position, he had expected to stay in the USA and retire there. In Silicon Valley, apart from his work, he devoted his time to church activities. Naturally the church community included unmarried women, "but they were like sisters--for one of them to suddenly become a girlfriend would have felt very strange."

He describes himself as someone who can easily make his own amusement. He could spend the whole day lying on his bed listening to music and reading. But in moments of loneliness he would wonder just for whom he was working so hard.

When his family first told him that the next lady they wanted to introduce was a physician, he immediately realized that a doctor would not follow him to America.

First his family pushed him into phoning her. He decided to give it a go, and the two of them chatted like friends. He felt they hit it off well, and when a while later she had an opportunity to go to the States to attend a medical conference, he played host. From that first telephone call to when they finally met, six months had passed.

Their first meeting was very important; he immediately felt something between them, and he discovered that their characters are very similar. For instance, he likes meeting people and is not shy in public, and he enjoys outdoor activities, music and reading; she is just the same.

That year they kept in close touch, and although he sometimes missed her greatly, he returned to Taiwan whenever he got the chance, and she went to the States too, so that it was bearable. They saw each other about every three months, and the separations in between made their reunions all the sweeter.

Dial BIG-SPENDER

Sometimes, when he wanted to hear the sound of her voice, he would just pick up the phone and call. That year his telephone bills were astronomical. Wang Tsu-ming won't say just how much his phone bills came to each month. He just says that when a friend mentioned that his monthly bill was over US$400, he thought to himself: "What's so special about that?"

To save on phone bills, he carefully compared the special deals available from the US's three major phone companies, and found that one of them offered a 20% discount on calls to the number the customer dials most frequently. This was just what he wanted. Sometimes there were mistakes in his bill, and when he called to have them checked, the service staff would exclaim: "My God, that's the biggest phone bill I've ever seen."

This kind of spending power did not escape the notice of the other two phone companies, which would often call him up to ask if wouldn't like to change to them.

In fact, to say that Wang Tsu-ming came back to Taiwan for his wife is right on the mark. He never had fixed ideas about who would "depend" on whom, and his wife had nothing against going to live in America with him; if need be, she could change jobs, take another qualification, and start from scratch. But he felt that as she would have no opportunity to practice her profession in Silicon Valley, and with the good income she earns in Taiwan, it really would have been a pity for her to give up her job. So when he was offered a post at a research institute in Hsinchu, he took it.

He says he is a great believer in first impressions. If the first impression is good, then it creates the desire to get to know each other better. "One shouldn't mystify the idea of 'fate,'" says Wang Tsu-ming. An arranged meeting between prospective marriage partners is like two molecules colliding to produce a "chemical" reaction. If the reaction is right, the couple will marry. If you refuse such a meeting from the outset, then there is no chance of that "collision" taking place.

And that "collision" of a lifetime has changed Wang Tsu-ming's plans for the future. Now he sees his career continuing here, and says: "I will retire in Taiwan."