North Carolina girl Jackie and Hubeiren Jason, the newlyweds!
Got no sleep last Saturday night, thanks to an astrologer in Hebei Province.
This weekend, a group of us traveled an hour outside Beijing for the wedding of our friends, North Carolina girl Jackie and Hebei native Jason, and it was my first Chinese wedding.
The groom’s family held the wedding in the courtyard home they built for their son and his new wife. Most families in the village farm for a living, and this time of year, the roads out to the village are covered in bright yellow cobs of corn laid out to dry before being ground into flour. Tucked down one of the dirt-road lanes, Jackie’s new house is adjacent to her parents-in-law’s own home and the family’s pig farm. We were looking forward to staying Saturday night there and waking up for a morning ceremony followed by a banquet and celebrations.
Then came a last-minute call from the astrologist. He’d analyzed the couple’s names, their birthdates and the date of the wedding – October 10th, chosen because it’s one of the luckiest days of the year (double 10 = double perfection). Still, if the couple married after 9 a.m., he warned, it would be Inauspicious. That meant we’d have to start at 3:30 a.m. in order to get through everything in time. After the drive out, a welcome feast, toasts to the couple and some obligatory rounds of mahjong, it didn’t seem worth it to sleep at all. So in a sleep-deprived haze, we were treated to a jumble of wedding festivities that drew on tradition, superstition, Western influence and China’s unique modern society.
Tradition
Chinese weddings are packed with traditions – they’ve had thousands of years to develop, tweak and pass on different traditions, and there are countless variations between different regions and households. Here are some this family used:
- the bride goes into seclusion to mourn the loss of her family and friends once she joins her husband’s household. In this wedding, the bride was symbolically taken away from her fiancé and friends to stay at an aunt’s house several hours before, where she had her hair done and got dressed for the ceremony.
- the groom has to fetch the bride at her family’s house. Hours before the ceremony, the groom and a group of family and friends got in a fleet of Audis to go to the bride’s house, where he knocked on the door. The family refused to open, telling him to go away. After they gave him a hard time and he persisted, Jason put a hongbao (red envelopes stuffed with money) through a crack in the door and the family let him in.
- besides these wedding rituals, there were Chinese classics like fireworks overload, double happiness signs pasted up, many more hongbao, lavish banquets complete with baijiu- toasting hosts
Westernization
Weddings today, however, are often equal parts traditional Chinese and Western. Most Chinese people avoid anything religious or spiritual from Western-style weddings, but borrow liberally when it comes to everything else. For example:
- Jackie, like most Chinese brides today, carried a bouquet of flowers and wore a white Western-style wedding gown for the ceremony. Red is actually the traditional color for weddings (and everything else!) in China, while white is worn for mourning during funerals.
- the ceremony itself was basically a Western one minus all the Christian elements. The host said a few words about love and marriage, the bride and groom exchanged vows along the lines of “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health..,” said “I do,” kissed and exchanged rings. There were traditional Chinese elements added in though, such as the bride’s ritual offering of tea to her new parents.
Superstition
When it comes to an event as big as a wedding, it seems most people don’t want to tempt fate by ignoring certain key superstitions. Here’s a few I noticed throughout the event:
- the family astrologer must pick an auspicious date and time for the wedding. This one seems to be super important! Most Chinese people would never cop to being superstitious these days, but it seems none would dare get married on an unlucky day either. No wedding prep can move forward until the astrologer approves the date, and his/her word has enough sway to throw the whole thing into uncertainty, as it did this time.
- the bride ate eggs to foreshadow having healthy children, and spit candy out on either side of the door as she left the house for the ceremony (not sure what that represents).
- when the bride tried to take us over to see the family pigs after the ceremony, a relative came rushing up to stop her, saying it was inauspicious for the bride to walk out of the gate on the wedding day.
Modern Chinese-ification
There were also some great only-in-China moments, many resulting from awkward collisions of traditional Chinese culture with Western stuff:
- champagne is bourgeoisie – orange Fanta is the drink of choice for wedding toasts when baijiu is too potent for certain (Western) guests.
- as the bride entered the courtyard and prepared to walk the red carpet up to meet the groom, a crowd was waiting to make it rain sparkly confetti and pelt her with silly string. Maybe it’s inspired by the rice throwing tradition in the West, but that was definitely a new and very festive spin.
- Chinese couples don’t usually wear wedding rings, but the groom’s little sister was on the sidelines with a glittering faux-emerald costume ring for the groom to slip on the bride’s finger in the ceremony. Not sure if Jackie will want to wear that ring ever after, but I guess it’s a fun addition to the ceremony.
- as mentioned before, the ceremony is minus all religious components. That means standing in for the priest is an emcee who professionally hosts weddings. His role is expanded so that he is kind of like a wedding singer, DJ and priest all rolled into one. Sporting a seventies-inspired fringy haircut, retro jacket and stellar pipes while singing karaoke in the lead-up to the ceremony, he brought a truly contemporary Chinese flavor to the day. Blasting “My Heart Will Go On” loud enough to wake up the next village when the bride made her entrance was another nice touch!
Beijingology 