Our love story is a bit different and odd. I believe God brought us together in a special way because we go to the same church yet we never talk to each other except know about each other.
My first encounter with my financé was sometime ago, a friend of mine (John Tran) invited me to tag along with him to Vietnamese New Year mini-party at his friend house in Beaverton, but there was a catch. The catch was that I have to take this girl by the name of “Trinh” back to PSU to pick up her car after the party. At the party, I thought it was friends’ hangout to eat and sing karaoke, but it was only his friend family (their parents, siblings, cousins) along with us (John, Trinh, and myself), which was a bit awkward for me at first. After eating, I start digging for cash to join bầu cua cá cọp game but I have absolutely no cash on me. I borrowed $5 dollars from Trinh to gamble and by the time we left the place I still owed Trinh $5 dollars. In the car back to PSU, we carry a few conversations here and there and the rest of the ride was just listening to my music until I dropped her off.
The next encounter was the beach house out in Lincoln City. John coordinated and invited friends to hang out and relax during spring break weekend. During one of the night, I drank liquor pretty hard and so my body started to dehydrate. Usually whenever I drank liquor and got dehydrated, I always pop an Advil pill to keep me from being dehydrated. Anyway, I started asking around for the pill and Trinh thought I was sick so she gave it to me. That’s all the interaction between Trinh and I at the beach house but somehow that event stuck to my head.
During the last week of May, I was at a “friend”’s house for a birthday party. I called her around 1am to ask her a few things related to the birthday “boy” because I thought she knew him better than me. Trinh just got off work at at time, so we started talking to each other, and we still didn’t know what really kept us talking to each other for more than 2 hours. Trinh and I didn’t feel asleep at all, so I asked her to get some coffee at the 24-hour”Fire Lodge” coffee shop in SE Portland (now changed to Southeast Grind Coffee). Our conversation lasted more than 4 hours… until 6am…. ( little strange ” first date”)
Since our first talk, we texted and chatted to each other almost everyday, but not all the time. Trinh was busy with her finals, and 3 jobs already took all of her free time. We didn’t have time to hang out after that night until two weeks later, Trinh invited me over her house for her bachelor’s graduation party. It was the first time I went to a party without knowing anyone except her and her brother, Trung…. little awkward for me again!!!
My parents and siblings were curious about the new girl who I had recently been talking to, so they asked me to bring Trinh over my brother’s house and had dinner with my family. I felt sorry for Trinh on that night for so many questions that she had to answer to my parents and my siblings :-(… But Trinh didn’t show any stress or fear at all. She kept answering all “questions” and “passed with an A+++ on this interview”…:-P… We both decided to pick the last Saturday of June to be our “dating” anniversary…
We had some fun time together on July 4 weekend of 2008 at Seaside with a group of friends… We talked more but tried to hide our feelings from other folks :-P….
And time went by… we officially “declared” our relationship with friends on my 26th birthday, Aug 1, 2008…. Our life had changed significantly since that day. We joined the choir together, took the Catholic Marriage Preparation class, shared our happy time in many events e.g. Christmas, New Year, Easter etc. Despite of some small and big arguments in last 3 years, we can now confirm that we found our other half =)
Our Engagement was on Aug 15, 2010… And our Wedding is coming up on June 25, 2011…