Jacqueline Tang, 35, regional travel services co-ordinator, and Marco Lee, 32, client relations manager, were married on Wednesday
Marco risked it all for Jacqueline. On the strength of an evening spent watching fireworks at Alexandra Palace, he decided to swap countries, give up his flat and apply for a transfer within his company to Hong Kong, where he knew no one apart from two aunts. “I thought if I didn’t, I’d regret it forever so I decided to give it a go,” he explains.
He first met Jacqueline in 1999 when a female mutual friend from the Netherlands introduced them. “She thought that we should know each other as we are both Chinese,” says Jacqueline, who found Marco “very quiet. He did not say a single word when I tried to speak to him.”
“I think I fancied her from the first day I met her,” Marco recalls. “I thought Jacqueline was very bubbly.” Both were studying in London at the College of Law and when Jacqueline returned home to Hong Kong after the millennium they kept in touch.
They met for fireworks in November 2004, and by February 2005, soon after Chinese new year, Marco had made the transfer to Hong Kong, where he lived at first with his aunts.
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“I didn’t tell my parents that was why I was going to Hong Kong. I thought that if I did they might have tried to persuade me not to go,” he says.
“Marco is very courageous,” says Jacqueline, “He’s very brave, he uprooted everything.”
They began to date formally that April, after Marco joined Jacqueline on a trip with friends to Shanghai, where her uncle was then living.
“Afterwards, I told her how I felt and she felt the same way,” Marco says.
Things “progressed as normal”, he says, until last year, when Jacqueline fell seriously ill in Kyoto during a ten-day trip to Japan. Back in Hong Kong she consulted five doctors, and eventually last July had a four-and-a-half-hour operation. “I was really afraid of hospitals,” Jacqueline says. “We stayed in a private room so Marco could stay every night as I couldn’t sleep.”
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Marco decided then that they should marry. “I was so worried and just made me realise how much I needed her. The more time I spent with her, the more I thought I could spend the rest of my life with her.”
Jacqueline, he says, knows exactly what he is like. “I’m not really a very open kind of person but she can really understand me and I don’t have to tell her. That’s what I like.” He proposed on the 32nd floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Tokyo last October. “We had the skyline as a backdrop,” he explains. “We had a second trip to Japan to make up for the first. I thought we’d go back there just to close things off.”
“Marco is very caring, very considerate,” says Jacqueline. The pair organised their wedding almost entirely by e-mail from Hong Kong, bar a swift visit to the UK after Easter. On Wednesday they married in the Royal Crescent Hotel in Bath.
“Initially this was because I wanted to marry somewhere with Georgian or Regency architecture, which meant either Greenwich or Bath, but it was difficult to co-ordinate in London. And the people in Bath are so friendly,” says Jacqueline. She and Marco had a civil wedding at the Guildhall in Bath and then took a horsedrawn carriage back to their hotel for the reception. “The wedding was the best thing I’ve done in my life and the most special part was going through Bath in the horsedrawn carriage,” says Marco. “Everyone was waving and saying congratulations. I felt like the Queen.”
Today they fly to Mauritius for a honeymoon before returning home to Hong Kong.