The Aesthetic at This California Ranch Wedding Was Maximalist, “Craigslist-Core,” and Steeped in Wabi-Sabi
Justine Jen-Jen Li and Alexander Djerassi both attended Princeton University, but they didn’t officially meet until they were living in San Francisco after college—and with the help of an algorithm. “As a product manager obsessed with efficiency, I enjoyed coming up with ways to apply those same metrics for success to places they don’t really belong, like my romantic life,” says Justine, who works at a software company and is also a multimedia artist, of how she and Alexander first became acquainted. “What began as an archaeological excavation of his social media profiles turned into a series of surveys designed to surface pain points and navigate retention issues throughout our courtship.”
For Alexander—an entrepreneur, amateur magician, and the former chief of staff to the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs at the U.S. State Department—Justine’s data-driven approach was both amusing and revealing. “Those surveys gave us confidence that despite straddling a multitude of differences, we ultimately had mutual product market fit,” she recalls.
After dating for almost two years, the couple got engaged while at home in Woodside during a moment of respite in the middle of a scary time in the Bay Area. “On September 9, 2021, the skies were orange from the CZU Complex Fires,” Justine remembers. An evacuation warning had been issued, and the air around them was stifling.
“I thought perhaps the fires had put Alexander in a particularly apocalyptic mood, but actually what happened was he had consulted my parents and Google to select a numerologically auspicious date,” Justine explains of why he forged ahead with the proposal on such an intense day. “The character nine (九 or jiu) in Chinese is a homonym for long (久 or jiu). So the date 9/9 is considered an auspicious date that wishes us longevity both in our marriage and lives, notwithstanding the havoc wreaked upon our communities by the fires.”
Alexander’s love for magic meant that he proposed with a classic sleight of hand trick: conjuring the ring—an unheated teal sapphire surrounded by a halo of diamonds—out of a red handkerchief.
“The planning process [that followed] was chaotic and excruciating,” Justine jokes. “Occasionally, it was what a masochist would call ‘fun.’ I approached it with the pure unadulterated neuroticism of an INTP going through a delayed quarter-life crisis. At times, it felt like we were planning Fyre Festival 2.0. All of my skills as a product manager went out the window. I prioritized everything—which actually meant nothing at all—made zero tradeoffs and changed scope constantly.”
As an ardent consumer of reality television for most of her life, it was always somewhat mystifying to Justine how intense brides could become during the course of planning what is essentially a party. “Now having been through this particular wringer myself, I have nothing but empathy, thoughts, and prayers for bridezillas everywhere,” she says. “The victim of our chaotic situation was wedding planner Alexis Eskenazi. She did a heroic job of keeping us calm and on track […].”
The couple decided at the outset that the wedding would be entirely outdoors, but sadly, because of travel restrictions, Justine had to assume pretty early on that much of her family from Taiwan and Shanghai would not be able to make the journey. To represent her entire maternal family, her cousin Yocheng took one month off work. “Thinking about the sacrifice he made still makes me quite emotional,” Justine says.
Because she knew how difficult it would be for family abroad to join in person, Justine put a lot of thought into her save the dates. “I wanted recipients to be able to experience our love from afar, through a physical object they could interact with,” she says. “What I ended up designing was an abstract Go board, printed on a double silk twill scarf, with chimeric Chinese zodiac animals hidden throughout a floral border. Go is an ancient Chinese strategy game, and the oldest continuously played board game in the world. In many ways, Alexander and I came to truly know each other through playing this game. Playing Go is how we became intimately acquainted with each others’ best and worst instincts, anxieties, and strengths.”
