Graduating from medical school takes a lot of hard work. Falling in love while doing it takes a lot of luck (and a little work too).
Dr. Liu was in his third year of medical school at UCLA, and Dr. Park was just beginning his first year of ophthalmology training there. Dr. Liu had done an ophthalmology rotation there just four months before. And yet, it was Hing who brought them together.
“She looked really cute in her photos and said something in her profile about wanting someone to hang out with her friends,” said Dr Park, 32. “I thought she must be someone who has a lot of friends who are important to her.”
Dr. Liu, 28, was impressed by his spirit. “One of his prompts was ‘My love language is…'” she said. “He wrote ‘Nutella’.”
Their first date was on November 2, 2019, at Elysee Bakery & Cafe, near UCLA, on one of Dr. Park.
She then texted Dr. Liu to let her know she had a great time. She resisted the urge to text him right away, instead waiting a few hours. “I feel like we were both a little too accommodating,” he said. “We don’t want to scare each other.”
Then luck intervened two weeks later: “After our first appointment, we started doing rotations at the same hospital, while I was doing an internal medicine rotation,” said Dr. Liu. “Occasionally we met each other in the hospital cafeteria.” They also texted about once a day.
Their second date was on November 11 at Élephante, a rooftop restaurant overlooking the beach in Santa Monica. “We were both open to seeing where things would take us,” Dr. Liu said.
“That’s where we learned more about each other,” added Dr. Park. Both liked what they learned. So they went out again the following week, this time to see a comedy show at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles. From now on, weekly dates were mostly what their schedule allowed.
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In January 2020, Dr. Park asked Dr. Liu to be his girlfriend. In July 2020, the two unofficially moved in together. “I started hanging out with him then because he lived very close to the hospital where I was rotating,” Dr. Liu said.
Seven months later, in March 2021, things took a particularly lucky turn. Dr. Park hoped to return to Rochester, New York, his hometown, to work in his father’s practice. Just then, Dr. Liu “suited” for her chair at the University of Rochester. “It really felt like fate,” Dr. Liu said.
In July 2021, the two officially moved into their new apartment in the Sawtelle neighborhood of Los Angeles. Almost a year later, Dr. Park proposed a month before they left for Rochester.
Dr. Liu is a dermatologist at the University of Rochester. He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis and an MD from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She grew up in a suburb outside of Los Angeles as the daughter of Chinese immigrants.
Dr. Park is an ophthalmologist specializing in glaucoma at Cornerstone Eye Associates, which was founded by his father, Dr. Steve Park. Dr. Park holds a BS in biological sciences from Cornell and an MD from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. His parents immigrated from Korea.
The couple tied the knot on February 4 at the Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles in Beverly Hills (during Grammys weekend) in front of 123 guests. Ryan Kingsman, who was ordained by the USA Marriage Ministries, officiated.
One thing the couple didn’t expect was the record-breaking rainfall on their wedding day. But “he actually added to that romantic atmosphere in his own way,” Dr. Liu said. “One of our guests even said they wanted it to rain for their future wedding.”