Date Has Been Set For Ghost Wedding

The date has been set - 10th October. Having never attended a 'ghost' wedding before, I'm not really sure how the process works. Will there first need to be a 'ghost' divorce?

In all seriousness, the tragedy that occurred at East Coast Park on Monday night, has left two young children without a father - a teenage daughter and a 12-year-old son.

The man who drowned, was a Chinese national aged 35-years, and is know just as "Mr Yang". According to his girlfriend, it was his intention for both he and Miss Dang Thi Tho to drown together. Miss Dang is a 25-year-old from Vietnam.

Miss Dang had refused to live with Mr Yang, because he was still married, but Mr Yang's wife would not agree to a divorce. Subsequently, Mr Yang believed that the only way to escape the situation and be sure that the two could be together, was for them both to die.

However, when Mr Yang attempted the 'murder / suicide', Miss Dang struggled fiercely before losing conciousness. She was the rescued by passers-by. Mr Dang could not be revived and died at the scene.

Now this is where the tragedy takes a very strange turn.

Miss Dang works as a hairdresser in Vietnam. After the events of Monday night, she said that she does not want to marry anyone else and insists that she will still marry Mr Yang once she returns to Vietnam. She is determined that the wedding will go ahead regardless of whether or not her parents are supportive.

"Regardless of whether he's alive or dead, I want to always be with him."

The wedding date has tentatively been pegged for 10th Oct because that is the date when the couple first met in 2007, when Miss Dang was visiting Singapore.

She said that it was Mr Yang's intention to emigrate to Vietnam and set up a joint business with her. Since the affair started, Miss Dang has visited Singapore every few months, and believed that the relationship was based on the mutual attraction, and the fact that Mr Yang praised Vietnamese women for being loyal.

While the couple were apart, they racked up international phone bills to the tune of around S$1,000 a month, even though Mr Yang only earned around S$2,000 a month working in the renovation industry.

It was Miss Dang's birthday last month, and because Mr Yang had no money, his wish was to sell his blood so he could have enough to buy a gift for his beloved. That was when he first suggested that he would offer his life for her instead.

Not long after this, Mr Yang fought with his wife and told her that he and his girlfriend would die together. Miss Dang did not believe that he was actually serious about this.

Since the ordeal on Monday night, Miss Dang has had trouble sleeping due to being haunted by constant dreams of the pair together. In the dreams, Mr Yang is too weak to lift his partner, which is something he used to do regularly when he was still alive.

Miss Dang became aware that Mr Yang was married, when he came clean about one month after the affair began. After the drowning incident, she spoke to his wife on the phone.

Miss Dang said that "his wife didn't scold me. She said it was her husband's fault. She said she would only have agreed to a divorce if he bought her a house, but he couldn't afford it. I did think of ending the relationship but we were so in love we couldn't bear to do it."

It is Miss Dang's intention to take Mr Yang's ashes with her to Vietnam, and erect and alter together with pictures of them together. She said that even if she is not allowed to keep his ashes, she will still go ahead with the wedding ceremony, because she believes that she is the only one that Mr Yang loved.