[Some of this text is borrowed or paraphrased from Erich Huang * ]
Our ceremony will be held at the Huang Residence * located at 4841 Moriah Hill Road in Durham, NC. Situated in a pine wood almost exactly between Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the house was built in 1972 while my family lived in Chapel Hill.
I remember standing at the top of the driveway holding onto my Pre-Skool toy school bus, watching the construction workers raise the balloon-style wood framing. The sun beat brightly down on the little clearing in the woods, making the site's mass of new lumber glow a bright yellow-orange. The road leading to the house used to be called Route 7, a hidden country dirt road great for
sledding in winter and covered with large tangles of wild blackberry
bushes and queen-anne's lace in the summer. Times changed, of course, and area is now less isolated.
Nearby Duke University * , is where my father is a tenured Oncologist-Hematologist and my brother is a Oncological Surgeon. The home of Krzyzewskiville, Cameron Indoor Stadium, the Duke Blue Devils, many sportswriters call it the "Gothic Wonderland". My brother and I were born there, somewhere inside the Davison Building.
On the other side down "Tobacco Road" is Chapel Hill, home of UNC and the dastardly Tar Heels * . No one is exactly sure where that term comes from, but many think it's related to the unwillingness of North Carolina's Revolutionary War soldiers to yield to Cornwallis's British Redcoats. Another story dates to the Civil War when North Carolinian soldiers suggested to Virginian troops who had retreated in a recent battle that they would use tar, one of the state's natural resources to help the Virginians stick around. The university has kept a lot of its old southern charm, with sprawling giant magnolia trees and wide porches with slender columns.
-E
