A Wedding Or A Kidnapping?

The Daughter is planning her wedding. I wanted it to be HER wedding. So, I did the unthinkable. I decided NOT to invite MY friends and family. The Husband did the same. Amidst Covid19 conditions, this also seemed the right thing to do.

One of the decisions we had to make was whether or not the groom should come to our house to fetch our daughter. The young couple had decided to dispense with the obstacles and the bribes. It would be a simple tea ceremony at home and the bride would leave with the groom. The Daughter did not want this added step. I commented that it would seem too much like an elopement if this step were done away with too.

That night, our family watched a video on Youtube of a wedding in Zanska: a remote mountain village where winter lasts all of 9 months. Opportunities open to girls are reduced to only 2: get married or become a nun. If you get married, you don't get to choose whom you marry. Your parents choose for you, and often, they know nothing about the temperament and the calibre of the man they have chosen for their daughter. In the lead up to the wedding, girls worry about whether their future husband will hit them, or will be a drunkard, or a useless layabout.

I was horrified.

The marriage deal is struck over a jug of barley beer. A date is set. The groom gathers up a dozen of his best mates, and comes in a posse over the wintry slopes to KIDNAP his bride. The tradition here is to kidnap a bride. I can just imagine how terrified I would be to be carried off on a horse by a party of a dozen men, to a family you have never met.

The groom rides over snowy hills with his posse. Before they can kidnap the bride, they have to clear obstacles, give bribes and meet the challenges set by the bride's friends and family.

That sounds familiar, right?

The Daughter mused, "Now, I understand why Chinese weddings have the groom come with his pals to gatecrash the bride's home, clear obstacles, give bribes and meet the challenges set by the bride's friends and family. It is a diluted version of Kidnap the Bride."

It startled me. 

For a while already, I have been in open rebellion towards all the Confucian crap where men can do everything, and women must obey men, and men's mothers. Chong Pang Market and the toxic masculinity that emanates from that milieu, had me asking fascinating ethnographic questions about how women are viewed in one milieu (the men who work at Chong Pang Market) VS another (the men I grew up with). As long as these remained abstract research questions, I stayed fascinated.

One day, it became all too personal. I was no longer fascinated. I became personally invested, and in no time I made a clear decision. I much prefer the female empowerment I grew up with, than the protected bondage of the men who grew up subconsciously imbibing the worst of the Confucian crap: where men are empowered and women are used/exploited.

After watching the documentary, I made up my mind and told The Daughter, "In the interest of standing up for women's empowerment, you will get to church on your own. The Boyfriend should not come to the house to fetch you. The Boyfriend will make it to church on his own. That will symbolise the full equality that I hope will characterise your marriage. There will be nothing at your wedding that even remotely resembles a KIDNAPPING."

With that, we will all be able to catch an extra 2 hours of sleep on the wedding day! Yay!