See Inside a Chinese Wedding Deep in the Heart of Texas -

Photo: Lauren Slusher Photography

When we ask newlyweds to think back on what they wanted most for their big day — and we’ve interviewed hundreds of them over the years — the most common response is “For it not to feel like a wedding!” Gathering with old friends and eating mini grilled cheeses in formalwear to celebrate love feels more special these days than ever, even downright miraculous. And the betrothed have never been less attached to the old wedding handbook — or the need to please their great-aunt. So in a flurry of pampas grass and perfectly mismatched-to-match bridesmaid dresses, how do you pull off a non-cookie-cutter affair? For the answers, we decided to interrogate the cool couples whose weddings we would actually want to steal, right down to the tiger-shaped cake toppers.

Here, we spoke with Mei Lum, the fifth-generation owner of porcelain shop Wing on Wo & Co. in New York’s Chinatown and founder of the W.O.W. Project, a nonprofit that aims to preserve the neighborhood’s creative culture. The activist fell in love with David Tyler Gibson, a nature lover from Houston who studied forestry and has worked to plant trees around New York as a staffer at the city Parks Department. They bridged their city mouse–country mouse divide with a City Hall ceremony in Manhattan in March, followed weeks later by a party with 85 guests on Gibson’s family’s ranch near Drippings Springs, Texas.

Tyler: We met in 2009 at the summer Chinese school at Middlebury College in Vermont. We both dated other people, but I thought she was cool and interesting.

Mei: We stayed in touch, and after college I did a fellowship in Thailand for a year, then moved to China. Tyler’s work brought him to China quite often, and we’d reconnect.

Tyler: I started to develop a crush on her, for sure. A friend asked me once, “Who’s the person you feel got away from you?” I said Mei. That was years before we got together.

Mei: For the juicy details, you should ask Tyler.

Tyler: The last time I went to China for work, we ended up kissing.

Mei: I remember having a really long conversation with him when I was trying to decide if I was going to move home or not.

Tyler: Her family was planning on selling the store, and she was grappling with the decision to take over so they wouldn’t have to.

Mei: It was 2015, and he gave me such good advice and was really supportive. I feel like our relationship is parallel to my journey with my family’s store and my reintegration into the neighborhood — understanding home and place. It all feels concurrent.

Tyler: Fairly early on, we talked about getting married. We still took our time.

Mei: I had an inkling he was going to propose because my grandmother kind of slipped. She told me, “Oh, Ty came over and he was looking at some jewelry.”

Tyler: I planned this trip to hike the Kalalau Trail on the Napali Coast of Kauai. It is a really difficult hike, up and down, up and down, for 11 miles. The sun was setting on one of the last overlooks, and I got down on one knee and said, “Look at all these challenges we’ve overcome, and this hike is just one of them.”

Mei: That was February 2022. We didn’t start talking about a plan until the summer of 2024. I think we were just enjoying being together.

Tyler: We definitely procrastinated a bit. We also knew there was this crazy backup post-COVID, when everyone wanted to get married and things were fully booked out. We did not want to go the traditional route.

Mei: I’m a really private person, maybe just from sharing so much of myself through my work. I wanted it to be small and intimate. I’m such an anti-wedding person, which is why it’s very funny that I’m doing this [story].

Tyler: Mei’s grandmother is in her 90s, as is mine, and they’re both not really able to travel. So we knew we wanted some celebration in New York City and also in Texas.

Mei: A City Hall wedding has always been something I wanted to do. I’ve witnessed so many in my daily life, as [City Hall] is so close to Chinatown. It feels like part of the fabric of the neighborhood.

Tyler: My family owns a ranch that my grandfather bought back in 1980. I went there every summer. My grandmother lives there; my aunt and uncle have a house on the property; it’s where my parents retired. The venue was right there. So City Hall and dinner with our families. And then our larger party could be in Texas.

Mei: He said spring was the most beautiful time, with all the wildflowers and blue bonnets. It felt like a monthlong celebration between New York and Texas.

Tyler: Our initial conception was way more chill than it ended up being.

Mei: I decided that since there were two celebrations, I wanted to play with separates. For City Hall, I wore a silk button shirt and slub silk pants by Cawley, then Tabi high boots and a red jacket. My mom, Lorraine Lum, is a designer and patternmaker — she worked at the Gap for more than 30 years, and got laid off during COVID — and I’ve involved her in all my schemes and projects. I had this old silk embroidered Chinese skirt, and I wanted to make a cummerbund to give the outfit a bit of a pop and a nod to my culture. She made that for me and a matching tie for Ty.

Tyler: I wore a navy felted wool suit from Paul Smith. Getting married at City Hall, it’s like going to the DMV, if the DMV was the happiest celebration of love. I don’t know if this is the right word, but it felt almost democratic. We’re all here making this commitment to the people we love. It’s really wholesome. We went with our parents.

Mei: It was quick and dirty, like everything is in New York.

Tyler: We were walking back through Columbus Park, which is just down the hill from the store and where we live, and Mei’s friends with whom she started a lion-dancing crew surprised us in the middle of the park with a performance.

Mei: They were throwing lavender and my parents were popping confetti poppers, and schoolkids were joining in.

Tyler: All the kids started freaking out. It was really sweet.

Mei: Then we did a little tea ceremony in front of the shop. We ordered dim sum for lunch from my grandmother’s go-to spot, Ping’s, which is next door. Then I organized a chef, Freya Hatch-Surisook, to cook dinner for our families and close friends in the shop that evening. It was kind of a packed day.

Tyler: Mei loves Thai food, and Freya cooked this amazing Thai feast for us. Fishcakes stick out in my mind.

Mei: And a khao soi, a bunch of really fresh vegetable salads, grilled pork with a yummy spicy sauce. The shop has hosted many dinners and family gatherings. Growing up, I experienced my grandmother cooking for everyone, and celebrating so many life milestones, like graduations and birthdays and Thanksgivings, all there. It felt in the same spirit, laying out a long table in the front of the shop.

Tyler: Then we rented out a bar on the Lower East Side to meet up with friends afterward, a natural wine bar/Vietnamese ice-cream spot called Lai Rai. They have things like fish-sauce ice cream and snacks. It was a really nice way to finish the day.

Mei: For Texas, we just wanted to celebrate, so we didn’t have a ceremony. The cocktail hour was around Tyler’s grandparents’ house and then dinner was in a field a five-minute walk from the house, down an oak tree-lined path and into a cedar field.

Tyler: At the beginning, I don’t think we fully appreciated what we were getting ourselves into.

Mei: I think we were kind of naïve. We thought, We have the venue — it’s set!

Tyler: We just began by walking around the property and trying to think through what our vision would be.

Mei: Planning an outdoor event remotely, bringing all the vendors in — it was just a lot more involved than we had anticipated.

Tyler: Friends in Austin connected us with Simone Tong, who had a restaurant in New York but moved to Austin and opened Zoé Tong and Sí Baby-Q, this blend of Chinese and Texas barbecue. She and her business manager prompted us: “You really need a coordinator, and a caterer, because we can provide the food but we can’t put on the event.” We began to realize, “Oh, there’s a lot more involved in this.”

Mei: Tyler went back and forth from New York to Dripping Springs five times between October and March because he was pruning trees, preparing the field, flattening the ground where we were going to sit for dinner — all this crazy stuff to get everything ready.

Tyler: Getting shuttles and additional bathrooms brought in, cleaning up the shrubs and vines, making sure that small trucks could get out there for the rentals …

Mei: One of my best friends, Vivian Sangsukwirasathien, did the florals. She tried to use florals that were native to Texas, but also a lot of orchids and peonies that nodded to Chinese culture. I decided to source all of our dishware and décor from Wing on Wo., from Jingdezhen in China, and because we had so much stuff, we drove a truck from New York to Texas. We made it a road trip.

Tyler: My grandfather passed away in 2021. We were going through his things and realized a lot of his clothing fit me. He had this classic western cowboy-formal suit. I took it to be tailored and wore his suit, his shirt, his hat. He had a silver bolo tie and a silver belt buckle with a beautiful turquoise inlay. Those were passed down to my uncle, who let me borrow them.

Mei: I wore the same shirt [from City Hall] and a long wrapped skirt by Cawley as well, and my mom’s jade necklace that she wore for her wedding.

Tyler: As guests were arriving, I was doing the final setup of the AV sound system. Once that finished and the party got started, I was able to relax and we could mingle during cocktail hour. We had these beer donkeys that my parents rented, and they were a huge hit, walking around with beers on ice in their little saddlebags. Chef Simone’s mixologist at Zoé Tong, Michael McBride, made signature cocktails, a Mei-tini and a My Ty.

Mei: Ty really wanted us to have an entrance into the dinner and also just a moment to gather ourselves. The ranch is big, 130 acres, so we get everywhere on a four-wheeler. We found a spot in the cedar trees and just kind of chatted while our photographer took some photos, then we drove the four-wheeler into dinner. My friends of the lion-dance crew met us in the front of the long dinner table and did their dance and ceremony, and that kicked off dinner.

Tyler: Halfway through, Mei and I gave a speech thanking all of the people who had helped put on the event because so many friends stepped up. My dad gave a short speech, Mei’s dad, Mei’s sister. I have three younger sisters, and I didn’t want to pick one! So I was like, All three of y’all can speak. When dinner ended, we walked back to the house with all these beautiful Texas-sunset colors in the sky.

Mei: I changed into western white riding pants from the Paris Georgia SSENSE collaboration, and a family friend had gifted me another incredible embroidered skirt that my mom and I thought would be really cool to turn into a bolero vest. We had six different cakes from a Mexican bakery in Austin, Comadre Panadería, and they were all delicious. The guava tres leches was my favorite.

Tyler: There was a strawberry-sesame olive-oil cake and a chocolate cake with passionfruit. We cut the cake and then had our first dance and quickly transitioned straight into karaoke. It was so much fun.

Mei: Our first dance was to D’Angelo’s “Cruising.” We karaoke’d until the end, using the back porch as the stage, while folks were in the backyard area hanging and watching and drinking.

Tyler: I kicked it off with “Friday, I’m in Love” by the Cure. Later in the night, after I had really been throwing back the Mei-tinis, I sang “Teenage Dirtbag.”

Mei: We had silk lanterns hung all along the cedar-tree path that led to the house, and we put LED flickering lights in all of them and just stood in the path before everyone left, watching the lanterns flicker and swing in the wind.

Tyler: Really, the lanterns are the thing I’ll never forget. There was no other light but these floating, beautiful Chinese lanterns. The last thing we did was go out and sit on the porch and look at them in the dark. It was magical.

Tyler and Mei were married at City Hall in early March.
Photo: June Kim

The bride carried flowers from Saffron in Brooklyn.
Photo: June Kim

While only their parents could accompany them for the ceremony inside, more family and friends waited outside to celebrate.
Photo: June Kim

Walking through Chinatown’s Columbus Park, the newlyweds were surprised by Mei’s lion-dance group with a performance.
Photo: June Kim

Confetti was thrown, and local schoolchildren stopped to watch and dance.
Photo: June Kim

Afterward, the couple headed back to Mei’s family’s store on Mott Street.
Photo: June Kim

In front of the shop, they held a tea ceremony and enjoyed another lion dance.
Photo: June Kim

With Mei’s grandmother.
Photo: June Kim

Mei’s cummerbund and Tyler’s tie were made from the same skirt. They also handmade each other ring boxes: Mei integrated a piece of natural wood with bark still attached to acknowledge Tyler’s love of trees, while Tyler made Mei’s box from old shipping crates in her family’s store.
Photo: June Kim

They had a dim sum lunch, followed by a Thai feast — both meals held on the shop floor.
Photo: June Kim

At the end of March, Tyler and Mei celebrated again at Tyler’s family’s ranch outside Austin, Texas.
Photo: Lauren Slusher Photography

There was no ceremony, so things got started with a cocktail hour around his grandparents’ house.
Photo: Lauren Slusher Photography

Beer donkeys carried cold bottles to guests.
Photo: Lauren Slusher Photography

Dinner was held in a nearby field, which Tyler carefully tended to over the course of months.
Photo: Lauren Slusher Photography

Another lion dance kicked off the meal.
Photo: Lauren Slusher Photography

Mei formed the dance group, which comprises only female and nonbinary members.
Photo: Lauren Slusher Photography

The tableware was Chinese porcelain Mei selected and drove, with Tyler, from New York to Texas. The stationery was designed by Mei’s friend, the visual artist Singha Hon.
Photo: Lauren Slusher Photography

Another friend, Vivian Sangsukwirasathien, handled the florals, focusing on Texan and Chinese-inspired blooms.
Photo: Lauren Slusher Photography

There were several speeches, starting with a thank you from the newlyweds themselves.
Photo: Lauren Slusher Photography

The Chinese-Texas barbecue menu featured dishes like Texas brisket dan dan noodles and green-bean casserole with lap cheong.
Photo: Lauren Slusher Photography