Wedding is really not the appropriate word. Most of the weddings I have been to were wedding receptions only. The actual marrying of bride and groom took place at an earlier time and place away from my presence. Except the wedding of the people I actually knew. That was a marriage performance ceremony without reception. So technically, by Chinese standards, those people are not married.
The Chinese place very little emphasis on the part where you sign the papers and are married. These are mostly uneventful and unceremonious ceremonies. The Wife and I were sitting on dirty little chairs in a dirty little government office when we signed the papers. The reason she did not feel bad about that is because she knew she was going to have an expensive reception sooner or later. The reception is the part that counts. The reception is where the bride and groom dress up all fancy and everyone eats overpriced food and takes far too many pictures of everyone else. The reception is where the real money is spent. And made.
Where I come from, and in most of the civilized world, guests at weddings and/or wedding receptions bring gifts for the bride (and groom). This is an essential rite of passage in the young couple’s life. Without a wedding reception it would take years to accumulate enough appliances to fill the darkest cabinets in the deepest bowels of their kitchen. One can never be complete without boxes of crap hidden away somewhere that will never see the light of day.
The Chinese do it a little differently. There is very little need to fill cupboard space since no one has a real kitchen. With toasters in short supply it became necessary for the Chinese to find something else to give the recently wed. Since the Chinese are not an especially creative bunch, they choose to give the same gifts they give during the New Year, at select birthdays and when someone has a baby. They give red envelopes with cash. Anyone who knows me might assume that I like this custom. And I might if someone would actually give me some red envelopes. But a funny little detail about the intricacies of red envelope giving is that one usually only gives red envelopes to those who have themselves given red envelopes. The red envelopes I hand out to the Wife’s niece and nephews are from the Wife. And she makes sure everyone knows it. Since the amount of cash in any given red envelope on any given occasion is generally commensurate with the amount of cash the giver was recently given by the recipient, I would rather just keep what I have and let everyone else do the same. Giving you $20 so that you can give me $20 might be the Chinese thing to do, but I am not Chinese.
The envelopes are red because red is lucky and keeps away the evil spirits. Obviously. Some people use gold envelopes because gold is a precious metal and symbolizes wealth. But those people are doing it wrong. Red is the way to go. What use is wealth when you have all those evil spirits kicking it on your couch and eating all your dried tiny fishes. What I point out to the Wife entirely too often, and probably should not since this is her culture and these traditions go back thousands of years before my ancestors knew how to use a toilet, is that for all the time and energy billions of her people put into the superstitious practices that are supposed to make them wealthy and lucky, very few of them are wealthy and lucky.
I knew long before I married the Wife that she would want a wedding reception. Normally I would not take issue with this. What radiant bride does not deserve a special day to gather with those nearest and dearest to her heart and say, “Look at me, bitches.” But I also knew that Chinese wedding receptions are prohibitively expensive. People put themselves in debt to pay for their receptions. This may not mean much to Americans who put themselves in debt to buy a new CD player, but the concept of owing money to lenders and credit cards is new to the Chinese. These are people who still buy cars with big fat wads of cash after they have saved up for years.
Going cheap is not an option. You cannot Jew it down if you want to save face. Spending money on receptions, cars, clothes, houses, furniture, KTV machines, pretty much anything, is a competition. The more money you spend, the better you are. If they spent more money, you lose face. If you spent more money, you win.
Not being Chinese, I never had any interest in going into debt to pay for a reception. I made this perfectly clear to the Wife long before it was too late. Taking immediate family out to dinner is acceptable. Buying food that costs ten times more than a nice meal for one hundred people I will never see again is not. My complaint is not so much in spending too much money on a big party as it is the motives these people have for spending too much money. I let the Wife know that if she wanted to brag about how much money she spent she would have to do so with someone else’s money.
And that is what she did. She borrowed money from her family and made all the arrangements without me. It is not that I did not want to be involved, but I am not the best person to go to for advice on planning the perfect Chinese wedding reception. She asked me many questions about American customs, but none of them fit in with her plans. Some are simply too bizarre to even contemplate. Dancing at a wedding? A large cake? Crazy talk. Since there do not seem to be any ovens this side of Hawaii, a cake would be difficult. Putting some Duncan Hines mix into the toaster oven rarely works out. And dancing would probably just interfere with all that KTV.
The Wife wanted to walk down the aisle, something not done at all in her culture, but I pointed out several times that this was a reception, not a wedding. And we got married four months before the reception. And her father is not the youngest person in the world. A walk down an aisle might be unlucky. She also wanted to play some traditional reception game where the bride is blindfolded and has to touch a few men to guess which one is her husband. Until I told her that it reminded me of a game we used to play in college where the blindfolded girl has to pick her boyfriend without using her hands. And she wanted me to make a wedding mix CD. I did that one. No one can say I am not participatory.
The reception was at Smoking Jio’s, a “Tex-Mex” restaurant that has neither Texan nor Mexican food. I have no idea why she chose to do it there. One of their restaurants was the site of our first date, but not this one. She did not choose to do it there for me. The food at the reception was typical wedding reception food and not anything found on the Smoking Jio’s menu. They made a salad for me. This is usually what happens when we go to formal events and family dinners. I get a salad, as if the only two food groups are fish eyeballs and lettuce. Smoking Jio’s has pretty good simple salads while what they gave me at the reception was “fancy” and terribly subpar. Not that it mattered anyway. The Bride and I spent most of the reception wandering from table to table and having our pictures taken. We both appreciated the irony of picking up something for dinner on our way home from the most expensive meal of our lives.
The Bride’s original guest list was 75. This quickly grew to 125. 150 people showed up. I knew about 15 of them. My guest list was considerably smaller. Only three of the people I sent invitations to live in the country. Only one of them showed up. Sending the invitations at the last minute may have played a part, but the Wife loves doing things at the last minute. In deciding who to invite, the Wife had to take several traditional factors into account. Obviously everyone she is related to would be invited, regardless of how seldom she sees them or if she can even recognize them in a crowd. Friends and acquaintances she has spoken to within the last ten years were invited. As were coworkers with whom she has a cordial relationship, and the people in charge of the hospital. Not inviting your bosses is unlucky, even if you would rather skin puppies alive than be in the same room as them. She also invited classmates from years ago and various old professors. When inviting acquaintances it is important to remember whether or not you were invited to their wedding and how much money you gave them in the red envelopes. If they are not married then you have to think about how much money they might possibly give. If you gave them under 2000元 then there is little point in inviting them since they will likely give you under 2000元. Any single people who will probably give under 2000元 should also be ignored.
My side was a little easier. I simply invited the three people I know in the country that the Bride also knows.
The traditional practice at wedding receptions is for guests to give their red envelopes to designated people sitting at a table near the entrance. These people have one of the most important jobs of the day. They count the money in each envelope, write down in a ledger who gave exactly what and keep a running total. By the time the last guest arrives they should know how much money the bride (and groom) received.
At least this is how it is supposed to work. The Bride assigned a few trusted coworkers to this task. They failed miserably. When the dust settled and all of the guests had gone, only a few names were written in the ledger and none of the loot was properly counted. So after what seemed like an eternity (but was only three hours) of posing for pictures for people I will never see again, we spent the next hour with two of the Bride’s sisters and her oldest niece counting envelopes and cash. The procedure was surprisingly efficient and everyone except me knew exactly what to do and how to do it, but it was not too terribly romantic and made me see the entire affair as a business transaction, which in many ways it was.
After all of the names had been written down and all of the money had been counted and recounted, we had a grand total of 249,000元. Not exactly petty change. This made the Bride very happy. She reminded me that I had been against spending too much money as I thought that her prediction of making a profit would come to naught. Since this was her wedding reception and I am toying with a little experiment of not being an asshole, I neglected to point out just how much this little show cost to produce. The meal itself was 138,000元. This was a total surprise to everyone. Apparently a set price was never agreed upon beforehand. They simply served the food and handed the bride a bill at the end. This seems to be the way things are done. Everyone just assumes that there will be enough red envelope money to cover the bill. I think this is a very dangerous policy.
Everyone (in this country) who was invited was given a box of wedding cookies. This is a tradition that I am completely against. I have nothing against cookies per se, even though these are not what I would consider cookies, but wedding cookies are far more expensive than they really need to be. As with everything else wedding related it is important to overpay in order to brag about overpaying. Each box of wedding cookies cost 300元. That is over US$1,000 for tiny, dry, stale “cookies”.
The Bride also had to have three dresses at the reception. The bride is supposed to change at certain times and wear various lucky colors as stipulated by superstition. The dresses cost 4,000元 each; a reasonable price for a nice formal dress, but a bit much for something she will likely never wear again. I wore a custom tailored suit I had made in Thailand, but I am not including that in the price tag because I told the Wife that any of the profit would be entirely hers since I was not about to pay for anything. And tailored suits from Thailand, as with most things Thai, are the exact opposite of expensive. Though their weddings are probably ridiculously expensive, too.
Our wedding rings cost 20,000元. I delayed getting rings as long as I could, especially since the Wife will not wear any ring at work and rarely wears it anywhere else, but having a reception without wearing wedding rings is unlucky. Maybe this should not be included in the price of the reception since we will have them long after it is a vague memory, but I am including them because we probably would have never gotten them had we not had the reception.
The Bride had 135 invitations printed at 200元 each. There was also 5,000元 worth of specially overpriced wedding candy and 5,000元 for balloons, toys and prizes.
249,000 - 138,000 - 37,500 - 12,000 - 20,000 - 27,000 - 5,000 - 5,000 = total profit, not including the Bride’s hair and make up (which could have easily cost 10,000元 to 20,000元) and renting the PA equipment for people to make speeches. There are probably other expenses that I know nothing about.
Where I come from one is not supposed to make a profit from one’s wedding, nor is it considered appropriate to publicly list an itemized bill. But around here everyone loves to brag about how much they spent on everything. The Wife does not have the faintest idea what my salary is (not that it is anything to brag about) because she would tell anyone and everyone who asked. And they all ask. I think it is no one’s business. Here it is considered very lucky to make a profit at one’s wedding and absolutely appropriate to spend beyond one’s means to make it happen. We most certainly spent beyond our means. That makes us lucky. But she did not make a profit. That makes us unlucky.
Obviously she did not pick the luckiest invitations.
I cannot identify anyone else.
(L to R) the Bride, unknown, unknown, the Groom, unknown.
One of the pictures in the background is indeed Louis Armstrong.
Photographs taken by someone.
