Photo by jude hill/Flickr (Creative Commons)Not long after actress and writer Diane Farr exchanged her first “I love you” with her now-husband, Seung Yong Chung, he gave her some crushing news: Their relationship would not go over well with his Korean parents. “I’m supposed to marry a Korean girl,” he told her.
Upset as she was, Farr remembered the rules imposed by her own Irish-Italian parents, who had once forbidden her from dating anyone who was black or Puerto Rican. And many of her friends’ parents, she later learned, had also imposed similar rules on their children.
She was determined to fight for her beau, and he for his parents to accept her. The couple’s story, which has a happy ending, is the basis for Farr’s new memoir, titled “Kissing Outside the Lines: A True Story of Love and Race and Happily Ever After,” published by Seal Press. She provided a taste of their story in a recent “Modern Love” column for the New York Times.
Farr, who lives in Los Angeles, talks here about the road to acceptance within her husband’s family, how her parents changed their attitudes about race and love, and the road that lies ahead for their three children.
M-A: When your husband told you that his parents would likely not accept you, how did you make peace with that? There was the possibility that they never might, or that your relationship might cause him to be alienated from them. How did you cope with that?
Farr: From the first conversation I had with my husband about his parents’ wish that he marry a Korean person, I felt badly for him. Specifically because it was such a double edged sword. He had this new, great love in his life – but he had this fear of telling the other people he loved about it. I think the inherent sadness of that made me want to “help him,” find a way to possibly make the two parts work together.
It was a very real possibility that I would never be accepted by his family and even worse, that he might be disowned or at least never spoken to again because he wanted to marry me. As I detail in my book, from our first conversation where Seung “admitted” the long history of conversations about who was welcome for love in his house, and who was not, I told him I would support him if he wanted to persue our relationship because I was a grown woman, with my own job and my own career and my own mommy and daddy.
I wasn’t financially dependent on his parents, he did not live with them and I did not “need” them. My real hope was that he would not lose them because I guessed he did need them. I said I was willing to work with him to attain that, first and foremost.
M-A: What was it like meeting them for the first time?
Farr: There was so much vetting done before my first meeting with them that it was incredibly smooth compared to the ardous path I had just climbed to get into their company. My biggest travails were with Seung’s aunts and uncles who were, sort of, auditioning me or interviewing me and at times just staring at me without one word, to decide if I should have an audience with his mom and dad. By the time I got to his parents, they were a walk in the park.
M-A: In your essay, you mention being surprised that many of your friends whose parents imposed similar rules were willing to abide by them. Did any of them rationalize their parents’ rules, and how?
Farr: Everyone rationalized their parents’ rules – including me. My parents were not that different than Seung’s. They had their own list of who I could and couldn’t date. What surprised me most about so many of my peers and about Seung was that they hadn’t fought for their right to pick their own partner with their parents.
