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| Special thanks to Ms Relova, who allowed us to reprint this hilarious article here. |  How to
Crash a Chinese WeddingBy Lia Relova Website: www.webillusion.com/pila Email : princesslia@hotmail.com (featured in the Fall 1996 issue of Heritage Magazine) |
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This is the second time I've done it, and folks, you can do it too! It's quite a cultural experience. Nothing to it, really. Chinese weddings are, well, considerably easier to get into than, say, a Filipino wedding, where everyone knows everyone else. Someone's bound to know someone from your family from 25 generations back and there ain't no way you're getting by the lady in the sequenced dress (and matching shoes and in some instances, matching paypay) without her recognizing you from 10 miles away and kissing you on the cheek with that sniffing sound.... In a Chinese wedding, you simply walk into the restaurant (anything with the name 'something'-gardens tends to be popular), offer them a (thickly padded) red envelope, state whether you're guest of the bride or groom, and sign your name on a red cloth banner with a marker. (I'm getting tired of using "Amy Tan" and I'm sure her lawyers are too.) Sit at the table closest to the exit, for quick getaways. Wear thick clothing, though, the draft tends to be pretty strong. My Chinese boyfriend and I found ourselves at a table with six older men who, fortunately, were way too polite to ask us who the heck we were. So at this point we were surrounded by people who were complete strangers. They are looking at us and we are looking at them. This goes on for about an hour. (At a Filipino wedding, I'm talking up a storm and already calling everyone pare, comare, day, Tita and Tito, etc.) The table, though, is equipped with enough liquor which our tablemates continually fortify themselves with. If it's closer to the New Year (Chinese or otherwise) the bottles tend to be emptied a lot quicker. You could tell their progress by how red their faces gradually get. At one point, two of our tablemates got up and didn't return for 2 hours. We began to suspect that they may have gone for the wedding party crasher's patrol (Gee, didn't this happen at the last wedding too?) The rest of the communication we had for the night with our tablemates was in the form of continual toasts, many of which, we eventually figured out, were for no apparent reason. I also lost count on how many times we toasted to the duck on the table. [page 2] |
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