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Meddy’s family (including her aunts and uncles) immigrated from Indonesia/China to California together. However, due to a “family curse”, all the men in the family left, one by one. First the husbands go back to Indonesia/China, then Meddy’s boy cousins go to a faraway state for college (where they stay after they graduate, hardly ever calling home). Meddy feels pressure to keep up the image that “a girl is a blessing” and to sacrifice her desires for all that her mother has sacrificed, so she goes to a nearby college (UCLA) to study photography.
At UCLA, Meddy falls in love with Nathan. She puts off bringing him home to meet her mother and aunts because she doesn’t want him to be overwhelmed by them. Right before college graduation, Nathan announces that he landed his dream job in New York. Meddy feels torn: she wants to start a life with him, but she doesn’t want to leave her family. She’s afraid that if she tells him the truth, then he’ll sacrifice his career for her. So she breaks up with him, saying that she’s “lost feelings” for him”.
Four years later (when she’s 26 years old), Meddy still has very much not gotten over Nathan (and Nathan secretly still hasn’t gotten over her). Both have tried dating other people, but no one compares to each other. Nathan has become a successful businessman, and Meddy has joined the new family wedding service business.
Company motto: “Don’t leave your big day to chance, leave it to the Chans!”
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Big Aunt = Baker (makes cake)
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Second Aunt = Hair/makeup stylist
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Ma = Florist
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Fourth Aunt = Singer
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Meddy = Photographer
Meddy’s mom is growing tired of Meddy not dating anyone (since she wants grand-babies after all), so she creates a dating app profile and pretends to be her. She sets up a date with Ah Guan, who seemed ok to her due to the language barrier preventing her from picking up on the innuendos in their conversation.
For example:
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Meddy’s mom said that yesterday, her body wasn’t as delicious, but it’s better now. “In Indonesian, the phrase ‘tidak enak badan’ means ‘not feeling well’, but its literal translation is ‘body not delicious'’” (65).
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Ah Guan says she’s thirsty, to which she replies that she’s had a lot to drink and is “wet” now.
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Ah Guan sends her an eggplant emoji, to which she asks how he knew eggplant was her favorite. He replies saying that he has a big one for her.
There are other instance of things getting lost in translation. For example:
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Big Aunt says in Chinese, “I’m just here to buy soy sauce”, which is an idiom to mind your own business.
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When Meddy tells her mom that she catfished Ah Guan, Ma says the correct term is “goldfish”: “I’m sure is call goldfish. Because pretend got gold, but actually just a fish” (111).
Meddy goes along on the blind date, during which she drinks a lot to get through. At the end, she feels tipsy, so Ah Guan takes her car keys and offers to drive her home. When Meddy realizes that he’s not actually taking her home and that he’s taking her to a secluded area, Meddy orders him to stop driving. When he doesn’t listen to her, she tases him in the neck in self-defense and he crashes the car into a building.
When Meddy regains consciousness, she thinks Ah Guan is dead. But because her phone is dead and they’re in a secluded area (where who knows how long it would be before someone drives by who can help), Meddy moves his body to the trunk and drives home (since her car is luckily still drivable).
Meddy tells her mom (and aunts, who live down the street) about the situation. They don’t think that going to the police is the right move, since Meddy looks suspicious. So they put him inside a cooler and plan to deal with him after they work at the big wedding the next day that’s between two billionaire clients.
However, things go wrong:
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Big Aunt’s helper arrives early and takes the cooler that Ah Guan is into the hotel, thinking that it had desserts in it.
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It turns out that Ah Guan wasn’t actually dead when they had put him in the cooler (as seen by the ripped flour bags in his struggle to escape), but he is now.
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Meddy and her fam don’t want to risk people opening the cooler, so they bring the cooler to their hotel room.
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Meddy gets accused of stealing the $2 million tea ceremony gifts, so Meddy calls her mom to warn her that hotel security is about to search their room.
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Meddy’s mom and her aunts steal a tuxedo from the laundry room and dress Ah Guan in it. They then get the rest of the groomsmen drunk/high, and in the chaos, they put Ah Guan in the groom’s suite. So Ah Guan blends in as just a “passed out” groomsmen.
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Because the groom is a jerk, he has no friends and thus hired actors to be his groomsmen. Because none of these actors knew each other before, they don’t know that Ah Guan doesn’t belong. So they carry him to the altar, where it’s discovered before the vows are said that there’s a literal dead body on the altar.
Nathan is the hotel manager, and when he suggests to the island sheriff to move the body inside to preserve it (due to the incoming storm), the sheriff thinks that Nathan is guilty and arrests him.
Meddy admits to Nathan that she was the one who killed Ah Guan, to which Nathan said that he already knows. (He put two-and-two together since he saw Meddy’s family suspiciously rolling a cooler around for a big chunk of the day.) He tells Meddy that if she confesses to the sheriff, he will adamantly “confess” as well to invalidate her confession. He knows that the sheriff can’t build an actual case to convict him, so the only real threat is Nathan’s reputation getting dirtied (which will make investors not want to do business with him in the future). However, he’s willing to do whatever it takes to protect Meddy.
It turns out that the bride’s maid of honor (Maureen) is secretly gay and in love with the bride. She wanted to stop the wedding, so she conspired with Ah Guan (Ma’s lily supplier) to steal the tea ceremony gifts. Maureen had the intention of later returning the jewelry to the bride after the wedding was called off (although Ah Guan probably planned to keep everything for himself). Maureen’s feelings for the bride get revealed, and the bride’s feelings for Maureen also get revealed, so they get married instead.
Meddy and everyone give this story to the sheriff: Ah Guan was acting alone to steal the tea ceremony gifts. When he was close to being caught, he panicked and hid the jewelry in Maureen’s room and then hid inside a cooler. However, he got locked inside it and died.
The sheriff wants to present a closed case to the mainland police after the storm clears, so he accepts the story (especially when Maureen offers to help with the paperwork).
At the end, Meddy leaves the family business to run her own photography business, although she sends a lot of clients to the Chan business (and vice versa). And Nathan proposes to her! Meddy’s mom also clarified that the “family curse” may not be a curse after all:
“We call it curse at first because yes, of course we are sad that our husbands all leave us. But after few years we realize actually, is not a curse. It is family blessing. Because your papa leave me, I become even more close to your aunties. And they become more close to each other too, because they have no husband, no son. And you, they see you as their daughter. It’s like you grow up with four mothers. That is blessing, Meddy. We are very blessed, we have close family” (185).