The Wedding Feast

My Chinese work colleagues have been extremely kind and welcoming.  During my first week at the plant I was invited to go on a team-building event come the week-end.  The plan was that about 12 people were going to meet on Saturday morning, pile into a bus, and go to on an island in Taihu lake where the plum blossoms were just starting to bloom.  More on plum blossoms later.

Alex was kind enough to pick me up at the apartment on Saturday morning.  (Alex, of course, is Chinese.  If your surprised by the name then READ THIS.)  As we drove to the meeting spot, he told me that before going to the island, we were going to stop off at a nearby town to go to Jessie's wedding.  Surprised, I told him I could stay home if this was turning into a more private thing.  He said that it was OK...that Jessie knew that I was coming too. 

Jessie, by the way, is another colleague from work.  Like everyone, she is gracious and considerate and forgiving of the stupid mistakes an outsider makes.  Like most, she is young...probably not yet 30.  (I don't mean to sound crude, but it's difficult for me to judge the age of the Chinese.  A local friend told me they have the same problem with Westerners.  He said we look older when we are young and younger when we are older.)

When I got to the meeting place, Sherry took me aside and said that Jessie had asked her to pass on a message.  Essentially, Jessie apologized in advance because her home town was small and didn't get many Western visitors.   She was worried that I might be uncomfortable because people might stare at me and talk about me.  She said little children might act rudely, the reason being that many of them had never seen a non-Chinese face.

Now, this is what I mean by gracious.  Here is a lady that has plenty of things to worry about with her wedding - the food, the dress, who's going to keep uncle Bernie from drinking too much.  But still she took the time to worry that a guest might be uncomfortable? 

The bus trip took about an hour or so.  On the way they explained how the wedding thing is done in China.  In the U.S. we have a ceremony followed by a reception.   They do the same thing...but the ceremony part is relatively short and the party part lasts for about 3 days so that friends and family can drop in sometime during the period.  I was told it would be more of a wedding feast than a wedding ceremony.  And it was.

The wedding feast was, I believe, in Jessie's parents house.  They had cleared out the furniture from the ground floor and brought in as many tables as possible.  The bridal party had the biggest table in what I'd guess was the living room.  There were a few other tables in that room, and more tables in the adjoining rooms.

The photo at top is the table of the bridal party.  (Double-click on it to see an enlarged view.)  Jessie is at the top, with her husband.  She is wearing a red dress because red is a auspicious color. (There...I used the word "auspicious".  I could have used the word "lucky" but "auspisious" sounds more complex and better suits the complicated culture of China.)  In the West, the color red has some sinister implications of danger or prohibition or bad things.  In China, and the orient in general, red seems to imply nothing but good.  On the news, if the stock market figures are shown in red then it means they went up.  At the train station, the train number shown in red is the train you want to take.

Our group took up two tables right next to the bridal party.  In China, seating position also has implications.  These were places for honored guests.

Once seated, plates of food began to arrive.  Lots of plates of food.  Traditional Chinese dining is family style.  Everyone takes portions from shared plates.  When the plates arrived, they were placed in the center of the table.  Then more plates arrived and they were stacked on top of the other plates.   Sherry told me that Chinese people are very talented when it comes to plate stacking.

The photo above shows some of what was served.  There are strawberries and peanuts and beans and fried greens.  In the front you can see some jelly fish.  In the back are some dumplings and some shrimp and some pork.  This photo was taken early in the feast.  At this point, there was still much more plate stacking to be done.

Like weddings all over the world, the Chinese wedding invites people to indulge a bit in vices as part of the celebration.  There was plenty of alcohol....what they called pijiu, huangjiu, and baijiu.  Pijiu is beer, normally the Chinese brand TsingTao.  (TsingTao is a lager that is pretty similar to Budweiser or any other American lager that uses a lot of rice in the making.)  Huangjiu, or yellow liquor, is a wine made from rice and other grains.  Huangjiu is similar to Japanese sake, at least until you put it in your mouth.  Baijiu, or white liquor, is essentially what you get if you distill the huangjiu.  It's a strong liquor with a strong taste to match.  

"And what do you do with the alcohol?" I hear you ask.  Let's turn to our friends at the US-China Business Council for a textbook explanation:

Toasting: Toasting is an indispensable component of the Chinese banquet and it begins when the principal host offers a welcoming toast. Toasts are typically short (2 to 4 minutes) and may consist of a simple welcome, a brief statement filled with platitudes, or a substantive comment on the visit. Chinese rarely hold their glass at shoulder length when toasting, it is considered respectful to try and toast your glass lower than other's glasses.

Alcohol Cautions: Several types of liquor are traditionally served at Chinese banquets (beer, wine, and baijiu (a potent liquor, of which the most famous brand is Maotai). Glasses are kept full during the meal to allow for toasting. Beer and wine may be sipped, but baijiu is traditionally downed at once like a western "shot" in toasts with the Chinese guests. The Chinese toast "gan bei" literally means "dry glass.

In the photo below, you can see a toast of "gan bei" in progress. You may notice that the ladies in the group are toasting with orange juice.  It seems that the vices are only intended for the men.  I don't know if this is just the case in business circles or if it is a general rule of Chinese culture. 

Also, if you look closely at the photo above you will find evidence of another vice.  On the corner of the table in the foreground, you see some red things piled up.  These are packs of cigarettes.  Before the food arrived, a lady came around and piled packs of cigarettes on every table.  Red packs, of course, in keeping with the lucky nature of that color.  At a point, all the men at the table were expected to take a cigarette and allow the bride to light it.  And it seemed to be part of the ritual that the women at the table should try to blow out the bride's lighter...the intent not to be to prevent the smoking, but to have some fun in making it as difficult as possible.

Just as Jessie had predicted, there came a point where I noticed little kids kept walking by and staring at me.  After a while, they started coming up in pairs and threes to look me over.  Finally, one got brave enough to ask me something.  The only words I could recognize were the expression for "foreigner".  I told him that I was from the US.  He wanted to touch me to make sure I was real.  To him, I was probably the ugliest thing he'd ever seen - pale as a dead man and completely bald.  (Chinese men, I must say, seem to have great genetics for hair.  Never gets thin or falls out as far as I can tell.)

After a while, more kids wanted to talk.  Some tried the little English they were already starting to learn in school.  Then parents started coming over with their kids and prodding them to practice English with me.  My impression was that the parents who lived in the village could not speak English much, if at all, But they were beaming like a searchlight with pride when their children proved their ability to communicate with a real foreigner.

I'm not sure how to tell when dinner is over.  It certainly isn't because the food is all gone.  In China, if the guests are able to eat all the food, then it means the host did the dishonor of serving too little.  But at some point, the feast was over.  People got up to mingle and plates began to clear.  The old men started to sneak away from their wives so they could get card games started.   It looked a lot like every Catholic wedding I'd ever been to....beer, cards, cigarettes, talking, laughing, kids running around and parents trying to ignore them.  The language may have been different, but the sights and sounds and smells were pretty much the same.

I got invited to play cards...what game, I have no idea...but these old guys wanted to teach me.  But by that time we had to get back on the bus to go to the plum blossom park.  More on that come.

Jessie's wedding feast is something I expect to remember until my dying day or until my brain no longer works.  It truly was an honor to be invited.  It was a gift to be made to feel so welcome and included.  I wish Jessie and her husband long and happy lives together.  And I truly thank them.