Weddings & Celebrations: Masa Gong and Matt Murphy

It’s an old cliché, but it often rings true: Love finds you when you least expect it.

At 35, Masa Gong, a bikram yoga teacher on Montague Street and Carroll Gardens resident of more than seven years, had written off finding the man of her dreams. She rejoined eHarmony, she said, simply to have fun.

“I hadn’t dated for five years. I had finally reached that place where I was fine with being single,” she said, sitting on a stoop across from one hot summer day. “I was actually ok with it—y’know, la di da.”

But fate had other plans. Not long after she began actively dating did Matt Murphy, 42, a teacher from New Jersey, reach out to her online.

“He cracked some jokes over e-mail that I thought were really funny,” she said. The pair decided to meet for coffee at Arturo’s in the West Village.

Though she was sure she’d been too chatty and too energetic during their first exchange, an invitation for a second date came and the two met for dinner at Bubby’s in DUMBO.

“By the third date, I knew I was in,” she said, laughing. And by the fifth date, the couple was laying their cards on the table, asking: What are your views on marriage, children, religion? —

—“But it didn’t feel like you were getting the third degree,” finished the groom.

In the meantime, Murphy regularly drove an hour in from central New Jersey for their dates in Brooklyn. “I didn’t even think about [the drive],” he recalled. “Nothing was too far to get to her.”

And as the air grew chillier, he hatched a plan to propose over the holidays.

“It was nothing fancy,” demurred Murphy, who is Irish American to Gong's Chinese American. “Nothing posted to YouTube for the entire world to see or with choreography. I knew I wanted to propose either on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.  It worked out that Christmas Day would be the better day."

After spending several hours with Gong’s relatives in Chinatown, the pair returned to her apartment in Carroll Gardens, where she promptly fell asleep on the couch.

“And she’s out cold for several hours,” remembered Murphy.  “And I’m thinking, God, she has no idea. So she wakes up and immediately goes into the kitchen to clean something." 

In the meantime, Murphy went into the bedroom, turned the lights off, lit a candle, placed a pillow on the floor for his knee to rest on and enclosed a Tiffany ring box inside of another green box and a bag.

“My heart is pounding at this point,” he said. “And she’s talking to me from the kitchen and I’m responding ‘yeah yeah yeah’ and I have no idea what she’s talking about.”

Next thing he knew, Gong had migrated her cleaning spree from the kitchen to the bedroom and was quickly undoing all of his hard work.

“I heard her saying things like, ‘What’s this candle lit for? Why’s my pillow on the floor? I thought we were done doing gifts?’ And I thought to myself, ‘She’s going to throw out the bag with the ring in it!'”

Swooping into the bedroom, Murphy snatched up the gift bag and removed the Tiffany box inside, at which point Gong began crying.

“I got down on one knee,” he said. “Without the pillow! And told her that I wanted to marry her. And then she looked down at her sweatpants and t-shirt and said, ‘Look at what I’m wearing!’"

The couple bursted out laughing.

“I don’t know what happened,” admitted Gong, who told Carroll Gardens Patch that she had little recollection of that first moment. “So I said 'Do it again! Do it again!'”

So he asked her to marry him again.  “And luckily she said yes,” said Murphy.

The couple chose to honor both of their cultural backgrounds with a formal Chinese banquet at the Golden Unicorn in Chinatown Friday night, and a Western ceremony at Bubby's in Dumbo on Saturday, June 30, which would celebrate all things Brooklyn—where much of their courtship took place.

“In fact the names of the tables are our favorite streets in Brooklyn!—President Street, Smith Street, Montague Street, Court Street, Clinton Street, Atlantic Avenue and more,” said Gong.

Likewise the couple hired local talent such as celebrant Karen Kirkley Mussa, Michelle McSwain, and DJ Eddie Robinson—who works for NPR and WNYC—and is also from Carroll Gardens.

“It’s bittersweet because our wedding is such a celebration of Brooklyn. Our cake toppers—one is of the Brooklyn Yankees, the other is the Brooklyn Dodger logo,” Gong explained. “But we are moving to Jersey City, so that we can be with each other more often." And presumably so Matt doesn't have to commute as far as he has been.

The couple said they are regulars at , , , , , , , , . "In fact, we chose our afterparty to be at Buschenschank and our 'Survivor's Brunch' at St. Clair," said Gong. 

Ruminating on their shared bond, the bride was both practical and philosophical.

“We are both teachers; I think on a macro level we connected because of that idea of helping and wanting to be of service,” she said. “And we both have huge families—he has four brothers and sisters, I have five—so we enjoy lower key, quiet, sort of mellow activities. And he’s got a bottomless heart,” she continued, “He brings that emotional IQ back into my life and reminds me of what is important.”

A week before his wedding, Murphy was effusive about his bride to be.

“It’s not just one thing for me,” said Murphy. “She’s like a hurricane that comes into a room. There’s all of this energy—and it’s all positive energy. It’s warmth. Then there’s her sense of humor… She just makes things so much better for me. That’s all [the groom looked away and paused, getting choked up]. She makes everything better.”

Unexpectedly better.