I’m fighting through so much jet lag that i cannot even tell if I am early or late, I am simply opposite having come from the US. It is good to be at the Institute for Provocation’s guest apartment, up on the 20th floor overlooking the 2nd ring road. This is a familiar spot from my stay in 2009 and a good place to reorient myself.
Chance took me to a wedding reception and video screening last night. It was a relatively informal event in a cafe/bar in the fashionable Nan luo gu xiang area and it was mostly for friends of the bride and groom. They had already held two ceremonies for their families, one in Northern China and one in Germany, so this was more a presentation of the documentation sort of affair than anything else.
I become very curios about it as I have recently read how wedding videos are a growth market here with professionally produced videos retelling episodes from the couple’s romance by re-enacting scenes, often mixing some of the real people with extras hired to make up the scenes. The video tonight however was a more homemade affair but no less interesting to the outside observer for that.
From what I could make out, the wedding was a traditional Chinese one with many different rituals needing to be performed: walking over a fire, carrying the bride, archery and of course speeches. What I found curious was the absence of a priest. There was a master of ceremonies who kept it moving along but no priest invested with the authority of God or official with the authority of the state as far as I could make out.
The video lasted about 40 minutes, during which food arrived, drinks flowed and special wedding cigarettes were smoked. The screening over and the film talked over in detail, the party geared up with a three piece band doing blues covers striking up. I found the jet lag creeping up upon me however and with eyes struggling to stay open it was time to bid the couple farewell and make my way back to the apartment.
I believe I was the only non-chinese person at the reception other than the groom himself. He quickly recognised me as the other laowai and remarked up this. This term laowai is kind of interesting as it is the Chinese word for foreigner and it seems to be quite often used with ambiguous intent. There is a simple introduction to it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laowai
As a visitor this is one of my labels, Westerner a slightly more specific other and British a further still. I suspect that most of the time I fall into the first two categories the final elaboration being somewhat a detail.
