A Chinese Wedding

This summer, we are finally getting a chance to see my wife’s family in China. We were originally scheduled to visit in February 2020, but needless to say COVID ruined those plans. This time, our trip has coincided perfectly with my wife’s sister’s wedding, so we have been doing that for the past few days.

A Chinese wedding is not a simple affair, even by modern Western standards of expensive and overcomplicated weddings. The amount of preparation that goes into the event is enormous. Months in advance, both families organize events together and separately. There are outfits, haircuts, house decorations, car decorations, copious amounts of fireworks, and of course, lots of alcohol.

I didn’t do very much myself in terms of preparation, I simply helped put up some decorations around the house, and some other small things. My wife did more, but as we arrived just a week before the wedding day, we only did a little compared to my wife’s parents.

On the first day of the multi-day affair, my wife and her parents got up at 5:00 in the morning and went to a restaurant near their house to start preparations for the wedding meal. I wasn’t quite so helpful, but I was there at 9 in the morning after spending an hour learning how to tie a bow-tie.

I wore the same outfit that I wore to my brother’s wedding a couple of years ago, a shirt, bow-tie, and vest with pants to match. I was a tad overdressed compared to many people, who showed up in T-shirts, shorts, and sandals. My main job on the wedding day was to offer a special wedding cigarette to each wedding guest as they arrived. Needless to say, I was not too heartbroken when many people kindly refused my offer. Of over a hundred guests, I think I gave out ten cigarettes in two hours.

The kitchen was not big enough to serve everyone, so we waited for a long time to eat after the first half of guests had finished their meal. I tried lots of food not typically found back home, such as eel and turtle. As with all important meals, all the men had to drink alcohol, and I was no exception. Chinese alcohol is basically gasoline as far as I can tell, but I survived.

In China, a wedding is a bit more than a marriage of two people. Many Chinese people will tell you that a marriage is a joining of two families. The second day was my wife’s sister’s husband’s family’s turn to host, and there was a lot of ceremony to accomplish.

Early in the morning, the groom and many men from his family showed up to the hosue to make a big racket and coax his bride to come with him. I believe the idea behind this pretend play is that the woman should want to stay with her parents, and only come with the groom after much heckling.

Next, we all got in cars and drove to the groom’s parents’ house. But we couldn’t drive straight there, as that would be return path for them, and taking such a path would symbolize reversing cours on the marriage, since it would be a direct reversal of the course on the road. Therefore we took a roundabout way which took longer.

After visiting briefly at the house for photos (did I mention that the bride and groom are wearing specialy red outfits, and that the bride had to be carried from her house to the car, then to the groom’s parents house? Her feet of course cannot touch the ground in between the two), we made it to the restaurant, where there were not enough seats for everyone.

We watched a nice little wedding ceremony which symbolized the joining of the two families. It was not a religious ceremony at all, but rather hosted by a Master of Ceremonies who then did some karaoke at the end.

After lunch, rest, and then dinner there, the wedding was done for me, though I believe that there were more things to do for the newlywed couple. In any case, I was more than ready to not eat anything and most importantly not drink anything for a day or two afterwards. I was pretty close to being sick on the second day, but I made it through.

Overall it was interesting, but I’m glad that I didn’t have a Chinese wedding when I got married, and I’m also glad that my wife only has one sibling. This was hopefully my first and last full Chinese wedding.