It was Mumford & Sons, or maybe Of Monsters and Men. Some English-language indie band was playing. As I approached the glass double doors of the fancy hotel overlooking Hangzhou’s famous West Lake, I noticed lots of pink and white balloons festooning the frontage.
“This can’t be the right place, seems more like an opening scene from MTV’s My Super Sweet 16,” I thought.
I was wrong. This really was the place, the place where two Chinese friends of mine would be getting married for the third time in two months.
With the groom from the North and the bride from the South, and the two of them residing in the halfway house of Hangzhou, they had to cater to three distinct sets of guests. Before getting dolled up in their respective white chiffon-pie dress (her) and snappy suit (him), the happy couple had already pledged eternal love (and respect to their parents) in their hometowns. The Southern ceremony (traditions die hard down there), a series of rites in honor of the bride’s ancestors, spanned across the night before, during and immediately after the wedding ceremony.
Both parties had also prostrated themselves in front of the bride’s father – the groom having only met him that same day – kowtowing three times before doing the same for other relatives in order of Confucian seniority.
Now, here they were again, dressed up like store mannequins in front of a large crowd of friends, colleagues, relatives and a handful of foreigners, including yours truly. After all the expense and effort they had gone through to get married – two ceremonies, formally registering as a married couple and moving into their new apartment – no wonder they tried to keep the last event, at the Hangzhou hotel, as simple as possible, at least by Chinese standards.
It still looked lavish to me. The last time I had attended a wedding was when I was young enough to be the flower girl, and, unfamiliar with Chinese wedding protocol, I was at a loss before the event even began. First of all, what to wear? In China, literally everything, particularly color, is laden with symbolic meaning. I was dubious until the last minute if my choice of a bright yellow dress was appropriate, given that the word huang – yellow – is a euphemism for pornographic material in China.
Yellow was also the shade favored by the emperors, and commoners were forbidden from overusing it. It is also one of China’s two designated funerary colors, along with white – but bright, lemon yellow is, apparently, acceptable, particularly if offset with some red accents.
Then came assembling the obligatory hongbao – red envelope – stuffed with lucky money. How much was appropriate? The best advice I heard was: “Remember that the Chinese only give hongbao anticipating one back in the future.
Sentiment is subordinate to cold numbers.” This didn’t seem particularly romantic, so I buried myself in scholarship on the art of gift-giving in Chinese culture. Eventually, I colluded with some other foreign guests, and we settled on an amount with lots of 8’s, as, sticking to China’s luckiest number, there was no way, we felt, we could go wrong.
Appropriately dressed and equipped with an especially lucky hongbao, we entered the whiteand- pink bedecked ballroom that looked like there had been an explosion at a preteen birthday party or a school dance. Pinkness, sweetness and cuteness was everywhere, from mauve macarons to delicately frosted cakes (one bearing a flag emblazoned with the legend “Happy Birthday!”) And neon slices of pink dragon fruit. The (maraschino) cherry on the top of this saccharine sundae was a box of cherry tomatoes, presented, as is conventional in China, among other fruit and, while tomatoes and birthday cake might not seem a winning combo, their presence helped offset the sugar rush we were all feeling by the end of the day.
Standing in the middle of the room, the bride and groom looked a bit lost among the throng of guests that mobbed them with good wishes.
Preparing for a wedding as a guest had seemed stressful enough, but now, seeing how busy the newlyweds were, I understood who was really sweating. During the ceremony, the groom kowtowed once more to his new father-in-law, after exchanging rings in front of a five-meter-wide LCD screen playing footage of falling rose petals (pink, of course) lazily whirling around white Greek columns, they both once again expressed their gratitude towards the guests, before their parents did the same. Whatever happened to “it’s your day, enjoy it”?
After a belly-busting banquet of pickled mushrooms, smoked duck tongues, oysters, glass noodles, juicy legs of lamb, caramelized duck with berry sauce, and soup dumplings, the toasts began.
Soon, everyone was locked into a drinking contest, which had its own etiquette (the bride and groom had to drink with each guest, at each table, in order of pre-eminence).
In China, the social contract of marriage takes center stage at weddings, outstripping the food, the clothing and the romantic narrative favored in Western ceremonies. However, the younger generation is also aspiring to have their (pink, birthday) cake and eat it, too, weaving soppier solemnities into the kowtowing and Confucianism.
This is romance with Chinese characteristics.