My Story:
Sacrifice and Selfless Love make Marriage Perfect.
The secret to the law of sacrifice is that it ultimately leads us to our own self-actualization, salvation, glory, and eternal happiness.
Sacrifice and selfless love exemplifies Jesus Christ, and he has shown us with his own blood the way to eternal salvation and glory: “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it” (Luke 17:33). Growing up as a Mormon, I was taught to emulate such qualities of the Christ. Because of such teachings, I was able to let go of my self-egos and material comforts in order to seek my eternal salvation and glory in my marriage.
On January 18, 1992, I got married to a nonreligious but a kind college classmate of mine. By the time we got married, my husband was working at a bank in San Diego. We bought a home near his work—Carlsbad, California, a paradisiacal city by the ocean. Our house was envied by many. It was on a hill-top of La Costa Golf Resort, and it had a pool in the backyard and an ocean view, a few steps from it. It was indeed in the heart of a scenic place which attracted travelers from all over the world for an idyllic vacation by the seashore.
We were also lucky to have purchased a foreclosing flower shop for pennies on the dollar from the bank which my husband was working for at the time. My husband quit his job to run the business with me. Working diligently, we turned the business around in a couple of years, and by its third year, we were the biggest and the most successful flower shop in town. In addition, my husband’s trading company was starting to reap huge profits. We bought a nice car, we hired a live-in help, and we frequently dined at some of the fanciest restaurants in town. Life was good, at least on the surface.
As picturesque as it may sound, however, I had never felt a day of genuine happiness in such a privileged surrounding. The house was spiritless, occupied by an apathetic soul (me) due to prolonged inactivity in the church after being married to a non-member, an agnostic soul (my husband) who was burning with worldly ambitions, and an indolent soul (my husband’s sister) who was unmotivated to engage in anything that was worthy of her pursuit, not even school.
Gradually, the spirit of the Lord—my once constant companion who I could always depend on for comfort, peace, and happiness—was departing from me. For the first time in my life, I felt what it was like to lose the gift of the Holy Ghost. I started to suffer pangs of hunger for the spirit of the Lord I once had. I could no longer wait. I had to go back to my Lord, for I was dying internally.
I started to talk to my husband about joining the church. But each time, he would turn hostile, causing the two of us to quarrel bitterly. He said that he, a Chinese man, would never consider joining an American church. To avoid further turmoil in our relationship, we agreed to absolute silence on the topic of religion in our marriage.
Since talking about it was forbidden, I employed a different method to soften my husband’s heart. I hired only the Mormons in our flower shop, hoping that he would see the light of Christ from the LDS employees. This worked to a certain extend. He was moved by their kindness, responsibility, and honesty, even by some of the teenaged employees.
Though deeply impressed by the noble qualities of the LDS employees, my husband rejected all spiritual invitations by them. In fact, by the eighth year of our marriage (1998), it was clear to me that unless I take drastic measures my husband would forever remain an agnostic, a worldly person resentful of all spiritual engagement. This also meant that for so long as I condone his current lifestyle, my soul will shrivel up along with his, since I had stopped attending the church in order to keep my marriage functional by mostly catering to my husband’s needs and desires.
One day, while I was yet struggling with such issues, my husband received a call from his senile grandmother from Taiwan. In a frail voice, she begged for my husband’s return to Taiwan. She said she was too old and too weak to take care of herself and her alcoholic son—my husband’s father whom he could not get along with. Grandma also questioned whether I would be willing to live in Taiwan to take care of them.
My husband hesitated; he could not give his grandmother an affirmative answer right there and then. “Why now?” He thought. In his mind, things were great for us in America. He saw lots of potential not only with our flower shop but with his other business in China as well. Things were at its pinnacle.
While he was struggling within, I, on the other hand did not. I knew what my answer to his grandmother’s plea was. To me, his grandmother’s call was a heaven’s call from God, showing me a narrow path that I must take in order to convert my husband into the gospel. I figured that my husband would be more receptive to the gospel message if it was taught in his mother tongue in his native land, Taiwan.
However, my decision to put an end to my pseudo-Edenic life in Carlsbad was challenged by many, including my own husband. I had to reason, persuade, and even argue a few times to convince my husband to give up everything we had in America to go back to Taiwan. He was not the only one whom I had to defy: his mother, his mother’s best friend, his aunts, uncles, and a few friends of mine.
I was even contested by some of my husband’s female acquaintances I had met in Taipei. They were victims of adulterous Taiwanese husbands. Thus in good faith, they advised me to hold onto my marriage in America. “Don’t expose your young, handsome, capable husband in the wild, carnal city of Taipei,” they exhorted. However, no one could convince me to do otherwise.
At last, I was finally successful in willfully redirecting the trajectory of my life. My husband and I did indeed forego of all our luxuries in America. We did this by hastily selling everything we owned in the U.S., surrendering not only our prized materials at rock bottom prices (a beautiful home, a successful business, a nice car, etc.) but also leaving behind my lifelong friends and family in the States. All of these sacrifices were required on our part to take care of his senile grandma and his alcoholic father in Taiwan, both of whom none of his other siblings were willing nor able to care for at the time.
Yet, I did take advantage of my husband’s deep appreciation towards me right before I left the U.S. I demanded of him to become my Sunday escort to church every week for one hour as soon as we arrived in Taiwan. He was dumbfounded by this request and thus resisted by trying to bribe his way out of it. He offered me huge sums of money and diamonds but to no avail. Left with no options, he agreed to my request. I was exuberant, oblivious at the time of the harsh trials that awaited me in Taiwan.
It was 1998. Once we had moved to Taiwan, my husband—in order to abide by our agreement—started to go to a LDS church for “one hour” a week. Nevertheless, to my dismay, the life in Taiwan proved to be almost too good for my husband, to the point of him not returning home until the dusk of the night on a daily basis. Just as I was forewarned by the betrayed Taiwanese women, my husband indeed started to drink heavily and indulge in the night glitters of what the great city Taipei had to offer to its carnal and ambitious men.
However, my husband was motivated to and thus kept his part of the promise. The deal was that as long as he went to the church for an hour each week, I would grant him his complete freedom in all things in other days of the week, regardless of how much I may disapprove of what he was doing. He liked this deal, so he kept his part of the deal, but with the least amount of respect for the church itself.
He started out, therefore, as someone who cannot even be designated as an investigator, for he had absolutely no intention nor showed any signs of joining the church. Every Sunday, while my husband was fast asleep, my six-year-old daughter and I would walk to the church first. Then about a half hour later, my husband would show up, find us at the sacrament meeting, sit with us until the congregation started to sing the closing hymn, then leave hastily in order to avoid all solicitations by the missionaries and the ward members. Nonetheless, as long as he did this much every Sunday, I kept my cool with him. Although his night life which included his many male and female friends was emotionally insufferable, I never nagged nor restricted anything he engaged in for the duration of six years that I lived in Taiwan.
Worse yet, there were other external factors that exacerbated my situation in Taiwan. The weather: The sweltering humidity burned me in sweats during its extremely long summer months. The infrastructure: Neither the dilapidated building I resided in nor the haphazard city planning itself gratified me much. Nothing in Taiwan looked anything close to what I was accustomed to in the U.S. The bugs: I hated the mosquitos that would surreptitiously bit me in sleep and the humongous, flying cockroaches which at one time even landed on top of my hair. The transportation: I hated the crowded city buses, life-threatening taxis, and toxic-emitting motorcycles. The open market: I was sickened by the insanitary-looking open market. It was always crowded with shoppers and was located inside the filthiest alley right next to my home. I felt like I had no place of refuge or order in Taiwan.
Neither did I have any internal sanctuary. I was constantly weary. First, I was physically exhausted due to increased amount of housework. I was responsible of taking care of many people in the household: my alcoholic father-in-law and his many girlfriends who came to our home daily and ate with us; brother-in-law and his family, three of whom had joined us since the year of 1999; and my own nuclear family of four. Another brother-in-law and his family of five came every month and stayed with us for two-three days. I was never granted a day of privacy nor personal space. I felt totally exposed, out of control.
Second, I was emotionally shattered due to my flirtatious, worldly husband. Third, I was mentally beaten because I was busy picking up survival skills in a foreign land—Chinese language, memorizing names, recognizing streets, etc. Fourth, I was socially deprived because I was disconnected from my lifetime friends and family in America and the dismal number of friends I had at the time in Taiwan. Back then, online interactions were a novice idea, so emailing or online chatting was an unfathomable alternative. Fifth, I did not have any say in financial matters. Everything was either owned by my father-in-law or my husband. I simply had no rights, even though I was constantly busy doing things at home to make everyone else’s life happier and healthier.
Under such condition, it was virtually impossible for me to feel any sense of happiness living in Taiwan. I felt unfulfilled in every aspect of my life—my unprotected privacy, my indeterminate marriage, my deprived sociality, my abject finance. They were all incorrigible by me. The more I struggled to settle down in Taiwan, the more acutely felt I the sense of uprootedness, disrespect, and powerlessness in a patriarchal Taiwanese culture. The nights when my husband was out late, which usually lasted until the next day morning, what I did to console my broken heart and exhausted body was to quietly sing along the Korean songs being played on my CD player, feeling bitterly lonely and weeping stealthily in the Japanese Tatami situated in the darkest corner of our living room.
Eventually, my husband would succeed in sapping me of all levels of human emotions. Albeit I frequently saw my husband come home drunk in the morning, I no longer felt sadness. In fact, I was thrilled to not have him around, because his presence was nothing less than pure torture. Neither did my kids asked for their dad because they seldom felt loved by their father. In fact, on one occasion, my three-year-old son kicked him out of the bed when his father tried to embrace him. In due course, we, as a couple, stopped communicating with one another, other than for practical matters. While he was engrossed in having the “time-of-his-life,” I was deliberately practicing indifference towards him, in order to numb the pain, sorrow, and resentment I was intensely feeling inside. In time, however, many years of such practice turned into a real indifference. Indeed, I was cognitively existing but emotionally dead in Taiwan.
Not surprisingly, during the six years I lived in Taiwan, I spent more time with my in-laws than I did with my husband. Little by little, such existence of mine diminished even the self-worth of who I was as a human being. I did not have any friends, place to go, or a sense of belonging. Sadly, my identity as once a proud and capable woman in the U.S.—the very quality which my husband fell in love with—was no longer traceable in me. My cup was empty and I had no more to share with anyone. Home was hell; I no longer loved my husband; and I planned a divorce in the future. That is how I wrote it in my journal and confessed it to God in my prayers. I started to dream of fleeing to the U.S. Little did I know then that God had a plan to save me, lift me up high from my self-dug inferno in Taiwan.
My divine intervention occurred in June of 2003. A call from my mother in Los Angeles proved to be a life-turning point in my life. She, in tears, exhorted me to leave Taiwan. I was amazed at how mothers know best about their daughter’s situation. I sobbed for hours with her on the phone, thanking her. She sobbed even louder than me. I continued to sob for days, even fainting inside a public toilet on one occasion due to a sudden outflow of emotions rushing upward from my chest, leaving me gasping for air. On my knees and in tears, I thanked God profusely for releasing me from my heavy burden through my intuitive, loving mother.
I was all smiles and rejoiced in my soon-to-be-free-status in America once again. I had absolutely no more feelings left for neither my husband nor his family. I had paid my dues, and I was being released to a land of freedom, and I knew then that I would never come back to Taiwan again, since I was taking both of my kids with me to Los Angeles. I had no reason to come back, and I did not want to remember anything that had happened to me in Taiwan.
On June of 2003, I left Taiwan with my nine-year-old daughter and my three-year-old son to pursue my education and teaching career in the U.S. I knew that nothing could be worse than the six years I had spent in Taiwan, so I was not afraid of anything. I was determined to succeed, and it is suffice to say that “success” indeed was the perfect word for what God has allowed me to achieve in Los Angeles. Thanks to my supportive mom, dad, and my sister, I had won numerous scholarly honors, presented at numerous academic platforms, wrote copious amount of and have published a couple of scholarly articles, and taught at both college and high school levels.
My husband felt pressured as he realized that I had no intension of coming back to him. Summer of 2005, he came to the states to visit me and the kids. He was contrite in spirit, visibly brokenhearted in fear of losing me and the kids for good. I could see that he regretted all that he had done in the past and for what he was about to lose as a result—his children and his wife. He secretly cried non-stop every night as he watched the kids and I fast asleep in our beds (as told by him later).
Six months have passed since his visit. On December 25th, 2005, after being married to my husband for nearly fifteen years, I finally got to see him in his white baptismal robe. He indeed underwent baptism that day, washing away all his sins of the past in the sacred water. In his testimony afterwards, he admitted that the reason why he decided to be baptized was because of the sacrifice and example I had shown him and his family. “But most of all” he said, “I decided to accept and live the gospel because my wife fasted and prayed for me for the past two years. Her weekly fasting thoroughly moved me. I couldn’t deny that my wife loved me.”
Love? Is that why I fasted for him every week for two years since 2003, the year I left him? No, not exactly! How could I love a man who has hurt me so much? Although his baptism was a miraculous answer to my earnest fasting and prayers of two years, honestly, my heart had long been fossilized to feel any romantic feelings towards my husband. My love for my husband was more on a humanistic term: universal love for mankind, love for the Lord, and my love for the gospel. Needless to say, his baptism was one of the happiest days of my life. I did shed a lot of tears of joy, but as a devout Christian who had succeeded in finding a lost sheep, not as a wife.
Shocked by how hardened my heart was towards him, my husband started to do things that would eventually convince me of his sincerity in the gospel. Seeing how overwhelmed I was raising two kids on my own and going to school fulltime, he volunteered to raise the two kids on his own since the year 2005. I also allowed this to happen because the school district where my kids were bound to attend in Los Angeles was one of the worst in the nation.
Once he had the kids to himself in Taiwan, he started to build amazing bonds with the kids by living by the gospel standards. Gradually, my children started to love their father more than me. Above all, what really impressed me was the fact that he continued to stay active in the church without my influence, accepting and magnifying all his church callings by his own volition.
My husband’s complete makeover in the gospel not only impressed me, but everyone around him. People watched this man in bewilderment, including his own parents. But I did not feel any love for him as a husband yet. In fact, I was often approached by many intellectual men in my career, traits absent in my husband. Satan certainly attempted to stray me away from my husband, but he had no power over me because I was fasting and praying every week. I started to plead with God to bring back my old, affectionate feelings towards my husband, so I can think about going back to him.
Although it took us longer than we would have liked, our nightly prayers as a family to be whole again was answered on January 2006. We were sealed in the Taipei Temple as an eternal couple and a family with the kids. But it still took us another three years before we actually started to live together as a whole family due to contractual obligations I had with the school I was employed at.
On August 5th, 2009, I was finally able to come back to my husband and to my children. All those painful years are now behind me. It has been five years since my husband’s baptism. He has undergone a complete transformation of the heart, body, and mind. His heart now rejoices in the gospel; his body has been miraculously rejuvenated by keeping the word of wisdom; and his mind has been cleared of all spiritual free-radicals—all negative proclivities of his former self.
He now treats me like a queen. He tells me that he loves me every day and night. He spends quantity and quality time with the children. He works diligently and God has blessed him abundantly so that he can sufficiently provide for his family. He helps me out with housework. He takes me out every week to a nice restaurant. He is kind and generous to all the people around him. Most of all, he is faithful to God’s commandments and church callings. What more could I possibly want in a husband?
Christ has said: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear…He that feareth is not made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18). This verse assures me that the Lord is pleased with the fact that I did not “fear in love” when I chose to marry and love my husband. It also asserts me that it was all worth it—my fearless decision to give up material comforts in America in order to convert my husband into the gospel in Taiwan. Though I am far from being perfect, I have endeavored to practice “perfect love [that] casteth out fear.” As a result, my husband and I are now “made perfect in love.” In fact, I am so happy now that I find it almost surreal that bad things had actually happened in early years of my marriage.
Just as everyone else, there were plenty of seemingly insurmountable trials in my twenty years of marriage, but I now understand why we are given such challenges. The Lord wants us to be like him, and he has challenged us: “Therefore I would that ye should be perfect even as I, or your Father who is in heaven is perfect” (3 Nephi 12:48).” He sends us such invitation so that we, like Him, may gain the eternal glory just as he has gained his through his atoning sacrifice. The scriptures confirm of his glory in the latter days: “Then shall he be crowned with the crown of his glory, to sit on the throne of his power to reign forever and ever” (D&C 76:108). Jesus Christ showed the way so that we can obtain our own individual glory in our own small ways in our everyday lives by learning to “sacrifice,” the fearless love that makes us perfect.
It is funny how what seemed back then a long-suffering, painful sacrifice now seems it was once-in-a-lifetime, special opportunity for me to invest in something eternally invaluable. How strange that our perspectives should change so drastically over time? As our perspectives change, our past experiences are modified in our memory cells: their meanings change. I now know that the trials of my past were God’s way of prodding me just a little so that I may be induced to reaching my full potential: my self-actualization through education; my salvation through fasting and prayers; and my eternal glory and happiness through temple marriage and sealing.
None of the adverse situations in my life was useless. It all, at the end, enriched my life and made me a happier person. I, therefore, shy away from framing my past experiences as something sacrificial. Rather, it was an investment on my part to transform even the most dehumanizing experience into something most glorious. I testify that the secret to the law of sacrifice is that it ultimately leads us to our own self-actualization, salvation, glory, and eternal happiness.
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