ding dong the bells

Hey did I mention that I went to a wedding recently? Jennifer, her friend Eric, and I drove down to Taizhong for the wedding of Jennifer's xuedi, younger-brother-in-study. They graduated from the same university years and years apart—I don’t think they overlapped at all. A girl we know who works with puppets brought him to the bar one day a long time ago, and they quickly established their close relationship. Now he sits at the bar and says, xuejie (older-sister-in-study), can I have another beer? And when they’re in Taizhong at the same time (Jennifer’s grandmother lives there), they visit. Weddings are generally wide-ranging affairs and not exactly restrictive—a few weeks ago I happened to walk into the bar just as Jennifer’s xuedi was leaving. We gave the effusive greetings appropriate to people who like each other in principle but are not about to go out of their way, and as he was walking out the door he turned around and said, “I’m getting married in November! You should come! It’ll be fun. You can drive down with xuejie.” I thought it would be fun to go on a little road trip (if one and a half hours can be called a road trip) and see Jennifer’s grandmother, who in some very strange way reminds me of my paternal grandfather, something I have not yet told her about. The way she speaks and the general bearing, but especially the way she laughs, at everything but especially at bad things. So on Sunday a week ago Jennifer and Eric and I spent the afternoon eating hot pot and wandering around Taizhong, and then headed to the hotel where the wedding was being held. Half the people I know were going to weddings that day: that weekend had a series of auspicious days in the lunar calendar. Although as Tai-ke Joe says, “These days any weekend day is an auspicious day.”

They had the principal of the school at which the groom’s father worked, and other notables with very very short speeches. Upon microphoned prodding from the groom, his friends gave embarrassed toasts, a classmate to the effect that they hoped that they would all soon be toasting one another at one another’s’ weddings; and strangely off-key toasts, a childhood friend to the effect that although everyone had suspected that the toaster was the groom’s secret male lover, here was the groom getting married after all, and a college roommate to the general effect, among other things, that he’d heard them having sex in college. The statement that impressed me most was that all of their friends soon learned that when they were together, the couple would turn off their cell phones. That is how devoted they were to one another. (And if you think that is nothing, you should have seen how the male part of one of the couples we were seated with took a cell phone call in the middle of the dinner and proceeded to talk, loudly, quietly, and with much laughter, for about half an hour while his date sat next to him picking at her food. Usually nobody talks to each other at these things unless they are already acquainted, and people are grouped not according to prearranged plans but according to category: groom’s classmates, groom’s coworkers, miscellaneous. The male part of the other couple we were seated with introduced himself—he was a coworker of the groom’s father—before spending the entire meal correcting his four-year-old daughter’s table manners, in English, while her mother sat next to her picking at her food.) There were no speeches, and no speech, from the bride’s side; although she looked pretty lively. Eric and Jennifer spent the whole time insulting the wine (which is what you get for going to weddings with people who run bars).

We were in three adjacent huge dining rooms with unbelievably scaled ceiling moldings and chandeliers. Different parts of the meal were punctuated by things like waiters carrying torches in a synchronized-swimming type arrangement around the room before finally introducing the lead chef, who put the lobster dish on the marriage party’s table to the backdrop of mini, indoor fireworks. The bride and groom left twice so that the bride could, as is customary, appear in three different outfits (although in this case all of them were somewhere between white and pink; usually there’s at least one red, the traditional color of celebration, presumably to offset the by now standard white, which was the traditional color of mourning before people started wearing flounce). The wedding was about 60 tables of 10—unless you are personally implicated in the events, weddings here consist entirely of eating. There are rituals that the bride and groom and their families go through to formalize the marriages, but for the assembled masses the wedding is completely ceremony-free. They have managed to hang on to the kitsch, though.