Hengshui - the wedding

In case I didn't mention it, our purpose for traveling to Hengshui was to reunite Bryan with his family and attend his cousin's wedding. For this part of our trip we got treated like everybody's pet tourists.

The morning of the wedding we four got whisked off to Bryan's uncle's home in Hengshui, a real live Chinese apartment. The apartment was fairly spartan, tidy, and there were white doilies covering all of the electronics (a feng shui thing, I think.) While Bryan and his cousin (the Engineer) went off to get us breakfast the Uncle puttered around his apartment and made us at home. It felt more than a little awkward, because Engineer and Bryan were the only ones who spoke both Mandarin and English, so we were left mumbling at the Uncle, only able to thank him with a "xiexie" every now and then, when he brought us fresh fruit.

Breakfast, when it came, was cans of hazelnut (soy?) milk and hot, flattened meat-in-a-bread-pocket disks. The bread pockets were also filled with cilantro and fresh green onions, so it was very tasty. (Food, it was to turn out, was hardly sparse as the day progressed.)

After we ate, we were ushered over to the bride's home, a sixth floor apartment in a twenty story building. The entrance to the alley out front was crowded with an assortment of relatives, mostly men standing and smoking. The alley itself had a haze of smoke hanging over it, the cause of which we would soon discover. While we waited by the car with Granddad and Uncle some younger relatives bounced out of the apartment's courtyard, to be followed by a riotous cacophony of firecrackers going off.



Granddad pulled us aside and explained various things to Bryan and the rest of us, though Bryan of course had to translate for the rest of us. In Chinese tradition the groom's family meets in the home of the bride's family and then the bride is carried away in a covered bower, traditionally festooned with flowers. It isn't lucky for the bride to be alone in the bower, so a boy child would accompany her and Granddad had played that role when he was a little 'un. Nowadays, no bower, but a black car with a red and gold license plate cover and wreathes of red roses on it.



Granddad had all four of the visitors pose in front of the wedding car for a picture. Then he chased everybody out of the frame except for me and Brennan, so he got an all-American photo of the Chinese wedding mobile. Hilarious. Also amusing, was the fact that while he was explaining the bride's part in the ceremony, Granddad always pointed at me. Which, for those of you that know me, is very funny.

Granddad led us into the building and up the stairs, we followed a line of sand, confetti and glitter had been trailed on the stairs, all the way up to the bride's apartment. The glitter and sand is for good luck, as are most wedding symbolic acts, and to bring wealth and prosperity into the home.

As soon as we entered we were given peanuts and candy and places to sit on the sofa (which was covered in Mickey and Minnie Mouse motif). None of these things could be refused, since they were all offered with typical fierce Chinese courtesy. The couch was positively crawling with doilies, so we kept knocking them askew. We were given red roses to pin to ourselves, to indicate our celebration, I reckon.



I'll talk about baby fashion and food tomorrow.