Wedding Water-Torture
Spare Me The Fake-Cake Wedding
by Tan Dawn Wei
Weddings used to be fun affairs. You get to dress up, gossip with the girls and check out the boys. And you also get to unleash elaborately conceived sabotage plans on the happy couple - hopefully without wrecking the hotel bridal suite and getting billed for the damage.
But after giving away more hongbao than I want to remember, weddings have become a bigger drag than any bride's trailing, carpet-dusting train. The problem isn't that I've been to too many weddings. I've just been going to too many of the same weddings.
Anyone who's been to at least five Chinese wedding dinners has earned herself enough stripes to be an authority on What Goes On At A Chinese Wedding Dinner. Hotel wedding coordinators have honed it into a science. Even friends who have helped execute many of these dos readily pass around their trusty notes with a blow-by-blow description of what to do when, where and how.
That's the problem: Weddings have become become nothing more than just a big, elaborate show that not many of us actually enjoy watching. Spare us the cheesy dry-ice effect, half-hearted yam sengs, styrofoam-cake 'cutting' (please, everyone knows it's just knife to the slit) and DIY slide shows done to pop ditties from boybands that no longer exist.
We don't need a picture of ourselves at our table with the toothy couple either. Save your stamps and don't send it over. And what's the point of popping a champagne bottle and making a big display out of pouring it down a glass pyramid when none of us will actually get to drink it? And where's the cake you just cut? How come we don't get to eat that too?
Another pointless exercise at Chinese wedding dinners: multiple gown changes. Hate to break this to you, oh beautiful brides. But honestly, no one's keeping score and no one cares. Besides, being absent from your own wedding for half the night to change into your assorted costumes - that's not the trait of a good host.
Couples should get it into their heads that a cookie-cutter wedding that proceeds like clockwork and follows the rule book down to the letter doesn't a memorable event make. Nobody remembers the run-of-the-mill hotel banquets and standard menus of cold dish/shark's fin soup/roast chicken/steamed fish/braised mushrooms/fried rice/red bean soup. But everybody remembers that one unusual wedding that dared to be different.
The wedding banquet conventions of today may have come from a long tradition that dates back 50 years or more, but that doesn't mean you can't throw tradition out the window. Customs like the tea ceremony have great significance and should be preserved and practised, but meaningless routines like fake-cake cutting and champagne-pouring do nothing to make a wedding momentous or heartfelt.
While we're being egged on by the people who govern this country to be more creative and entrepreneurial, we should apply a little imagination to our nuptial dinners.
I know I'll want mine to be festive, personal, surprising and, most importantly, fun. Oh, and champagne and real cake for everyone.
by Tan Dawn Wei
Weddings used to be fun affairs. You get to dress up, gossip with the girls and check out the boys. And you also get to unleash elaborately conceived sabotage plans on the happy couple - hopefully without wrecking the hotel bridal suite and getting billed for the damage.
But after giving away more hongbao than I want to remember, weddings have become a bigger drag than any bride's trailing, carpet-dusting train. The problem isn't that I've been to too many weddings. I've just been going to too many of the same weddings.
Anyone who's been to at least five Chinese wedding dinners has earned herself enough stripes to be an authority on What Goes On At A Chinese Wedding Dinner. Hotel wedding coordinators have honed it into a science. Even friends who have helped execute many of these dos readily pass around their trusty notes with a blow-by-blow description of what to do when, where and how.
That's the problem: Weddings have become become nothing more than just a big, elaborate show that not many of us actually enjoy watching. Spare us the cheesy dry-ice effect, half-hearted yam sengs, styrofoam-cake 'cutting' (please, everyone knows it's just knife to the slit) and DIY slide shows done to pop ditties from boybands that no longer exist.
We don't need a picture of ourselves at our table with the toothy couple either. Save your stamps and don't send it over. And what's the point of popping a champagne bottle and making a big display out of pouring it down a glass pyramid when none of us will actually get to drink it? And where's the cake you just cut? How come we don't get to eat that too?
Another pointless exercise at Chinese wedding dinners: multiple gown changes. Hate to break this to you, oh beautiful brides. But honestly, no one's keeping score and no one cares. Besides, being absent from your own wedding for half the night to change into your assorted costumes - that's not the trait of a good host.Couples should get it into their heads that a cookie-cutter wedding that proceeds like clockwork and follows the rule book down to the letter doesn't a memorable event make. Nobody remembers the run-of-the-mill hotel banquets and standard menus of cold dish/shark's fin soup/roast chicken/steamed fish/braised mushrooms/fried rice/red bean soup. But everybody remembers that one unusual wedding that dared to be different.
The wedding banquet conventions of today may have come from a long tradition that dates back 50 years or more, but that doesn't mean you can't throw tradition out the window. Customs like the tea ceremony have great significance and should be preserved and practised, but meaningless routines like fake-cake cutting and champagne-pouring do nothing to make a wedding momentous or heartfelt.
While we're being egged on by the people who govern this country to be more creative and entrepreneurial, we should apply a little imagination to our nuptial dinners.
I know I'll want mine to be festive, personal, surprising and, most importantly, fun. Oh, and champagne and real cake for everyone.
posted by Sleeplesserf at 4:04 AM
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