Since June 29th of this year I have had 3 weddings and still have one more on July 30th. Weddings in China are nothing like weddings in the United States, they are more like American wedding receptions with meals, toasts, speeches, and socializing. Some modern weddings have the bride and groom dressed up in the traditional western tuxedo and long flowing white dress, and then half way through they change clothes into traditional Chinese wedding attire, and some even change a third time into more casual clothes. Some weddings even have a convoy of five or more rented black Audi cars decorated with balloons and decorative paper. A Saturday morning wedding traditionally indicates it’s the first marriage for both the bride and groom, whereas an evening or Sunday wedding could signify that one or both of the two had been previously married. And of course, there are fireworks involved with traditional weddings. In some cases, the bride’s maids will sneak in and decorate the bride’s home with traditional Chinese wedding decorations. There are many many more rituals that the Chinese do, but I won’t go into it all. I just want to share what I experienced with my weddings.
First, we went to the wedding bureau to obtain our wedding license book, which we each carry somewhat like a passport. Then we had a dinner in Shanghai with Jia Jia’s mother’s family. At the dinner everyone came in bearing gifts, called a “hongbao” or “red envelope”. They were all stuffed with money, some with large sums of money while others had less. Friends of the family give at least 600 RMB (100 USD) while distant family gives around 1000 RMB (150 USD), and closer family members give 5,000 or more (+800 USD).
The picture here shows all the gifts we received from the Shanghai family dinner, the stacks are 10,000 RMB each, and in all we received a little over 80,000 RMB. The other wedding dinners were about the same and the one on the 30th Jia Jia said we should expect a little more. This really is the only form of gift the Chinese gives for weddings. No wrapped boxes, no online registry, no store registries, just a bunch of little red envelopes stuffed with cash.
During the dinner, Jia Jia and I had to go to each of the attendees and toast them, red wine only was allowed for toasts. Since I don’t drink and Jia Jia is pregnant, we just did a bunch of fake sipping. One uncle was getting mad because our wine glasses kept increasing with wine while everyone else was needing refills. Towards the end he was a little hostile and insistent that I get drunk, but I politely toasted him with my orange juice and said bottoms up. The most difficult part of the wedding dinner in Shanghai was being able to recall everyone’s names. It’s not as simple as aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa. the mother’s brother and father’s brother have different titles and depending on if they are older or younger the names also vary. Eventually, I was able to recall everyone’s name, but I still get Laopo and Waipo mixed up which makes Jia Jia mad, Laopo is “wife” and Waipo is “Grandma”. That mistake is much better than me confusing the two words Hun Li (wedding) and Li Hun (divorce). I asked a couple times that day what time we had to be at the divorce. I got some very ugly looks.
Some of you might have seen on Twitter I was perturbed with the mother-in-law, to say the least. The money in the photo ended up in her purse and she managed to leave the wedding with every last bill. I asked Jia Jia to get the money from her before she got into the taxi, but a little quarrel ensued with her mom laying claim to all the money. Apparently, since she arranged and paid for the dinner and invited her friends and family, she was entitled to all the money. The gifts that the friends and family members gave were just payback from other weddings. It seems, in her eyes, that the wedding couple is not to be the true recipient of the gifts, that it is a means for the elders to pay respect to the other elders. After a day and some lengthy discussion she agreed to hand it over, but only if we paid for the entire dinner, which as we were told was our responsibility. Strangely, the wedding dinner next weekend will be paid wholly by the father of the bride, who said is the parents responsibility. I’ve heard horror stories of other people’s mother-in-law but more or less chuckled, but now, now it’s a different story. Someday, hopefully, we will look back on that wedding night and get a good laugh from the misunderstanding, but until then I will proceed with caution.
The past few weeks have been pretty hectic preparing for a baby, locating a larger home farther away from the mother-in-law, arranging the fourth wedding, so we decided to take a weekend off from anything stress related. Jia Jia found a coupon online for two $100 USD massages reduced to $10 USD, and I used my soon to expire American Airline miles for a night at the Raffles next to the Forbidden City. That was one of the most relaxing weekends I have ever had. I’ll close this blog post with a photo and couple videos from that weekend. Enjoy…
Relaxing Day
Facial
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