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The Chinese wedding! How we wish all of you could experience this kind of wedding – ha! First we would like to say that most everything about a Chinese wedding is completely opposite that of America.

The root of most of those differences lies in this simple truth: in the west a wedding is meant to be beautiful and to bring honor to the bride (regardless of it being secular or religious); a Chinese wedding is a large party whose laughs are many times made at the expense of the bride, groom, or immediate family.

An example of such a laugh is when they took the the grooms parents aside, dressed them in silly hats, put clown make-up all over their face and forced them to give toasts to all of the camera-wielding attendants.

Our friend Rose explained to us how one of the games she and her husband had to play at her wedding forced them to blow flour into each others faces to find some “gift” in the bowl, for the purpose (and to her disappointment) of making her hair and wedding dress completely white.

The focal point of most weddings is the food. No wedding would be complete unless every table was so full of food that dishes were literally piled on top of each other. We ate every imaginable Chinese food except for those which we really enjoy eating – fish on a platter, spicy meat, spicy noodles, spicy this, spicy that, and our favorite – turtle soup with an actual turtle floating inside.

We had this before last year which made it a little easier to stomach seeing a turtle seemingly swimming around in the soup you just poured in your bowl (don’t worry, he was dead). To be honest, the soup isn’t too bad and the turtle shell, although squishy when cooked, isn’t horrible. Surprisingly all the food smells very good – if you could only stop smelling all of the cigarette smoke and the jet fuel they call “white wine” being inhaled or consumed by everybody around you.

And now to the icing on the cake – the performances. First, let me back up by saying that when we had our wedding in Dallas we invited a guest from India who was married to one of Tiff’s dad’s co-workers. She had never seen an American wedding, was quite anxious to go and we were more than happy to have her there.

Here we were in a similar situation – invited to a wedding for a couple whom we had never met (Tiff works with the groom’s mother) – and instead of being asked to sit, eat and enjoy, we were asked to perform! I doubt our guest from India would have been so eager to join our nuptials if she knew she had to perform in front of a large crowd of Americans. We politely declined any sort of performance – we frankly didn’t have enough time to get one together – but Josh was duped into making a “toast” anyway.

With a few memorized Chinese lines and the confidence of a three-legged lion he did his duty on behalf of the four foreigners attending the wedding, wishing them 100 years of marriage and telling the bride that he hopes she gets pregnant soon. Really, that’s what they told him to say. Thankfully Josh didn’t have to follow the next few acts, one of which you can see in the video below. At this point any and all attendants can sing karaoke or dance as entertainment until everybody is either sufficiently drunk or pressed to leave.

We were the latter of the two, thankfully – save the jet fuel for the airplanes! Kyle had a class which he had to teach later today so we left, but not before saying goodbye and thank you to the groom’s parents who had to be fetched from a room where they were recovering from their many toasts which had left them a bit…well…tipsy.

All things considered we do actually enjoy the entertainment that is a Chinese wedding, but we long to again attend a wedding where we can look at each other as we leave and be reminded of the beauty and sanctity of marriage.  This man didn’t help much: