Chinese Weddings
Mar. 20th, 2009 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hells_half_acreI was going to do a post about death, but then found this picture and figured I would repost my explanation of the wedding. Enjoy!
The wedding started at 10am and lasted until 10pm…this is what happens when you blend traditions.
The first dress of the day (a white fluffy one - Western (foreign) traditional) was worn by the bride at her parents' place – where they posed for pictures, and did a little tea/soup ceremony that I do not know the meaning of.
Interesting to note: nobody except the bride and groom and their families dress up for weddings. Gabe in his shirt and tie was very much the odd fellow out (on top of being a foreigner) and my sleeveless fancy shirt caused quite a bit of chatter.
Before the tea/soup ceremony, the groom had to bribe his way to the bride. It started at the door of the apartment, where the other girls wouldn’t let him through unless he presented them with flowers, small change, or sang songs (his "best men" could helped him). Any subsequent door between the front door and the room the bride was in was also shut and he had to repeat the process at each one. He handed out red packets (which are also commonly received at New Years)...I got one, and there was 100 RMB in it! Gabe says that the groom must be fairly well off to give out that much. Gabe saved his for his girlfriend, I put mine in my wallet and wondered if there were any other Chinese weddings that I could crash while I was in the country…
After the tea/soup ceremony, we had lunch, and then exited the building. Firecrackers and fireworks were set off in the bride and groom’s path as though they were the Chinese equivalent of rose-petals. We were divided up into cars and took off to the second location – in this case it was the Bride and Groom’s apartment, but normally it would have been the groom’s parents' place (the groom’s parents in this case were from Qinghai province – so a little far to go).
This is when I met a Chinese guy who is actually afraid of fireworks. Poor guy. He’s the boyfriend of the groom’s sister, I believe…in anycase, he was a cute guy, and when they set off the fireworks in front of the bride and groom's place (before they entered), they caught him by surprise and he nearly jumped out of his skin – then gallantly pulled me out of the way even though we were already really far from where they were setting them off, and they were only firecrackers.
The tea/soup ceremony was repeated with the groom’s parents, and more pictures were taking (also, we met up with the second flower girl). Paula talked to the groom’s mother (through a translator) for a bit about how Mao had sent her to the Northwest when she was 21 to be a teacher and whatnot…it was very interesting.
Then we left to go to the reception hall for the Western-tradition portion of the evening…more fireworks were set off in our path, once again causing our poor friend to run for cover and repeatedly tell me about how much he doesn’t like fireworks. Poor guy, he was born in the wrong country.
We waited around the reception hall making jokes and playing Rummy while the hall was set up. One of the dudes setting it up told us that he was exhausted, because he had been up until 5am the night before drinking with his friends (he wasn’t a guest at the wedding, but from the company hired to help or something…anyway, it was neat that there didn’t seem to be any social/work rules about who he could and couldn’t talk to about how hungover and tired he was.)
Finally things got started and people started to show up. There’s a weird contradiction in China, where it’s a show of prestige or whatever to have foreigners for dinner or at your wedding or whathaveyou, but there’s also a slight xenophobia. So, what you get is three foreigners at a wedding table and everyone else who is supposed to sit at that table trying to argue with the host to get seated someplace else. Gabe’s muttered “and this is LISA’s wedding…” seemed to indicate that if this was anyone else’s wedding no one would have sat down at all. As it turns out, we did get a few other people at our table, who mostly kept to themselves. Part of the problem is that they expect that if they sit with us, they will be expected to speak English – they never take into account the remote possibility that we either won’t demand it of them, or that we actually speak Chinese (as Gabe does).
It’s also sometimes hard to get service in restaurants because of this problem – you can see/hear the staff argue over who is going to serve you. It makes for some hilarious moments though when they finally come over and Gabe busts out his Chinese skills…oh, the looks on their faces.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, dress number two was for walking down the isle. Chinese weddings are weird, because they are narrated by an MC like some sort of sporting event. I didn’t understand a word, of course, but it was very odd.
The other problem with being foreigners at a formal dinner or wedding is that for some reason people see foreigners and assume we are there for their entertainment. Luckily, I was in the bathroom when the MC came to our table and asked if I could sing. Gabe’s response was “She didn’t come to China to sing at a wedding!” and he graciously took the bullet for me and sang a very cheesy rendition of that “If a picture paints a thousand words…” song.
Dress three was changed into part way through the wedding, when some other event involving tea took place and then the Western bubbly toast was done. While dress #2 had been a sleek white dress in Western style, dress #3 was a traditional dress in Han dynasty style. Unfortunately it was probably only worn for about a half an hour, before the bride took off again to change.
The final dress was, I suppose, the “going away” dress. It was pulled out for the very end of the wedding, when the bride and groom went to each table and toasted everyone (also, the bride had to apparently light the cigarette of any man who smoked). Dress #4 was a nice gold one.
By this time, it was about 9:30pm…everyone left and we all piled into a bus and were driven back to the hotel.
The wedding started at 10am and lasted until 10pm…this is what happens when you blend traditions.
The first dress of the day (a white fluffy one - Western (foreign) traditional) was worn by the bride at her parents' place – where they posed for pictures, and did a little tea/soup ceremony that I do not know the meaning of.
Interesting to note: nobody except the bride and groom and their families dress up for weddings. Gabe in his shirt and tie was very much the odd fellow out (on top of being a foreigner) and my sleeveless fancy shirt caused quite a bit of chatter.
Before the tea/soup ceremony, the groom had to bribe his way to the bride. It started at the door of the apartment, where the other girls wouldn’t let him through unless he presented them with flowers, small change, or sang songs (his "best men" could helped him). Any subsequent door between the front door and the room the bride was in was also shut and he had to repeat the process at each one. He handed out red packets (which are also commonly received at New Years)...I got one, and there was 100 RMB in it! Gabe says that the groom must be fairly well off to give out that much. Gabe saved his for his girlfriend, I put mine in my wallet and wondered if there were any other Chinese weddings that I could crash while I was in the country…
After the tea/soup ceremony, we had lunch, and then exited the building. Firecrackers and fireworks were set off in the bride and groom’s path as though they were the Chinese equivalent of rose-petals. We were divided up into cars and took off to the second location – in this case it was the Bride and Groom’s apartment, but normally it would have been the groom’s parents' place (the groom’s parents in this case were from Qinghai province – so a little far to go).
This is when I met a Chinese guy who is actually afraid of fireworks. Poor guy. He’s the boyfriend of the groom’s sister, I believe…in anycase, he was a cute guy, and when they set off the fireworks in front of the bride and groom's place (before they entered), they caught him by surprise and he nearly jumped out of his skin – then gallantly pulled me out of the way even though we were already really far from where they were setting them off, and they were only firecrackers.
The tea/soup ceremony was repeated with the groom’s parents, and more pictures were taking (also, we met up with the second flower girl). Paula talked to the groom’s mother (through a translator) for a bit about how Mao had sent her to the Northwest when she was 21 to be a teacher and whatnot…it was very interesting.
Then we left to go to the reception hall for the Western-tradition portion of the evening…more fireworks were set off in our path, once again causing our poor friend to run for cover and repeatedly tell me about how much he doesn’t like fireworks. Poor guy, he was born in the wrong country.
We waited around the reception hall making jokes and playing Rummy while the hall was set up. One of the dudes setting it up told us that he was exhausted, because he had been up until 5am the night before drinking with his friends (he wasn’t a guest at the wedding, but from the company hired to help or something…anyway, it was neat that there didn’t seem to be any social/work rules about who he could and couldn’t talk to about how hungover and tired he was.)
Finally things got started and people started to show up. There’s a weird contradiction in China, where it’s a show of prestige or whatever to have foreigners for dinner or at your wedding or whathaveyou, but there’s also a slight xenophobia. So, what you get is three foreigners at a wedding table and everyone else who is supposed to sit at that table trying to argue with the host to get seated someplace else. Gabe’s muttered “and this is LISA’s wedding…” seemed to indicate that if this was anyone else’s wedding no one would have sat down at all. As it turns out, we did get a few other people at our table, who mostly kept to themselves. Part of the problem is that they expect that if they sit with us, they will be expected to speak English – they never take into account the remote possibility that we either won’t demand it of them, or that we actually speak Chinese (as Gabe does).
It’s also sometimes hard to get service in restaurants because of this problem – you can see/hear the staff argue over who is going to serve you. It makes for some hilarious moments though when they finally come over and Gabe busts out his Chinese skills…oh, the looks on their faces.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, dress number two was for walking down the isle. Chinese weddings are weird, because they are narrated by an MC like some sort of sporting event. I didn’t understand a word, of course, but it was very odd.
The other problem with being foreigners at a formal dinner or wedding is that for some reason people see foreigners and assume we are there for their entertainment. Luckily, I was in the bathroom when the MC came to our table and asked if I could sing. Gabe’s response was “She didn’t come to China to sing at a wedding!” and he graciously took the bullet for me and sang a very cheesy rendition of that “If a picture paints a thousand words…” song.
Dress three was changed into part way through the wedding, when some other event involving tea took place and then the Western bubbly toast was done. While dress #2 had been a sleek white dress in Western style, dress #3 was a traditional dress in Han dynasty style. Unfortunately it was probably only worn for about a half an hour, before the bride took off again to change.
The final dress was, I suppose, the “going away” dress. It was pulled out for the very end of the wedding, when the bride and groom went to each table and toasted everyone (also, the bride had to apparently light the cigarette of any man who smoked). Dress #4 was a nice gold one.
By this time, it was about 9:30pm…everyone left and we all piled into a bus and were driven back to the hotel.
