“We really wanted to make sure that we were able to help people with the best value they could get to make this an epic trip,” Tim said. Additionally, and off their site, they helped several groups organize itineraries that would extend their vacations across Vietnam or elsewhere in Asia. “We took care of everything just to make sure it was as smooth as possible.”
Celebrate Vietnamese handicrafts
While the grooms wore white suit jackets at the beginning of their ceremony and western-style black suits at the reception, they donned custom red silk suits for their “I dos” and dinner. Golden phoenixes were carefully embroidered across their torsos, “powerful emblems of our commitment to nurturing one another’s growth,” as they put it.
It wasn’t the only touch from local artisans. While traveling through Da Nang on their October 2023 planning trip, the couple had been charmed by con thổi tò he, small clay figurines you can blow into. Guests were surprised and delighted to find Tim and Andrew commissioned the figurines to be molded in the Chinese zodiac animal of every single guest. “We asked everybody to give us their date of birth during the RSVP stage,” Tim says. When guests found the animals waiting at their dinner plates, everyone couldn’t help but begin testing them out. “There’s a cool photo where Andrew and I are both blowing on this whistle, but what you don’t see is that everybody was doing it,” he said. “That was a really cool moment, this whistling noise [ringing out] early in our reception dinner.”
Pay homage to your parents
Beyond the aesthetic references to their Chinese heritage, the couple decided to enact an ancient ritual as part of their wedding day: They honored their parents with a “very much abbreviated” tea ceremony, as Tim said. In their construction of their wedding space, they created a slightly raised platform for their parents. “Our parents were literally elevated from the rest of our guests, and we wanted that to show respect to the previous generation,” Tim said. Before they proceeded to their own wedding ceremony and vow exchange, the couple entered and knelt before their parents to serve them tea.
While they’d taken care to arrange the ceremony respectfully, they ran into some cultural issues anyway. Andrew’s mother got the agenda for the wedding day and called the couple in a panic at 11pm the night before. In their attempts to modernize and simplify the ritual, she worried that they would offend other elder family members, who are typically served tea after the parents. Luckily, it didn’t take much rearranging for them to share tea with some of their other relatives, specifically aunts and uncles, on the day. “It was more a clash between generations than cultures,” Andrew said. Earlier in the planning, Andrew’s mother had also expressed concern that their invitations were going to be primarily black, which would represent sadness and bad luck in Chinese culture. With that in mind, they switched to a celestial motif in deep jewel tones in their invitations, which were also designed by The Planners.
Pick the best of both cultures for food and drink
Working with the resort, the couple selected a menu that fused the best of Chinese and coastal Vietnamese dishes. Favorites, Andrew said, included a Chinese-style fish maw coup and a more Vietnamese pomelo salad with soft shell crab. Their mains were stir-fried lobster in a ginger sauce and roasted suckling pig, while desserts were a coconut sago with pineapple-ginger soup, and a pineapple lime sorbet. There was also a special touch at the cocktail hour to keep their guests energized: “Vietnam has a huge coffee culture, so we had a Vietnamese coffee cart there, along with a refreshing, cold herbal tea,” Tim said.
Bring out the crowd pleasers
In a celebration packed with carefully calibrated details, there were two more that all but guaranteed their party would stay in high spirits. During the reception, Tim and Andrew surprised everyone with a lion dance, a joyful moment associated with Lunar New Year and other major celebrations in which two performers come out in vivid, exuberant costume—and then shocked them further by shedding the costumes and revealing the newlyweds themselves were the performers. Then, to end the night, a screen descended, microphones appeared, and guests were treated to that beloved pan-Asian pastime: hours of belting out karaoke.
