Modern marriage culture in China

This NY Times article "For Many Chinese Men, No Deed Means No Dates" was published a few weeks ago and I found it to be a pretty interesting read.

Han Han, one of China’s most widely read bloggers, frequently assails the government policies that he and many economists say have contributed to rapidly rising prices.

In an interview, he said one consequence of the single-minded focus on real estate, or on earning the money to make mortgage payments and repay family loans, is that young people have little time for anything else. “We’ve created a generation of young people whose sole ambition is to have a piece of property under their name,” he said.

I disagree with the people that intimate this is some new trend that has the culture turning against love-based marriages. I think the Chinese are above all a practical people, and this is just an extension of that. Yes, there is plenty of art and literature in Chinese culture about true love, but they engaged in arranged marriages just as much as anyone else, back in the day.

Also, quotes like "'A lot of girls, encouraged by their parents, see marriage as a way of instantly changing their status without the hard work,' he said bitterly." Um, can anyone say, every rags-to-riches fairy tale princess story ever, pretty much? Where girls move up in life and have princes fall in love with them just by being beautiful and kind and forgiving and meek and all that?

So basically, yes, it's sad for the men who do actually feel stuck with no dating prospects because they either can't or don't want to buy property, and it is a bit weirdly single-minded of women who use this as a barrier to dating someone, but honestly, I just can't get too worked up about given the history of patriarchal culture. Even if it's not entirely right, I do sort of rejoice in women getting some more power here.

Chinese wedding portraits

Awhile back, I was sent this Jezebel post on Foreign Policy photo essay "Beautiful Me!", about the business of wedding portraits in China.

Chinese wedding photography is a parade of excess and ambition, an elaborate and expensive rite of passage, and often more prized than the ceremony itself.
...
The whole production can cost from $450 to more than $15,000, a huge expense in a country where the average per capita income is roughly $3,000 (about $10,000 in Beijing). But it's increasingly seen as a must-have for China's image-conscious middle class, now some 430-million strong.
...
For those who can afford them, these tokens are a constant reminder that they've made it in modern China, and an affirmation of who they aspire to be.

"At popular wedding photo locations, such as this beach on Hainan Island, couples line up every several yards to pose for their romantic photographic keepsakes."

It's an interesting piece, but as with many controversial items on the internet (WSJ's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" essay, anyone?), the comments start getting repetitive pretty quickly. People going back and forth judging the couples who do this, judging the author for judging these couples, making accusations of the pot calling the kettle black given the state of the American wedding industry as a whole (not just limited to photography), etc.

On the one hand, if you've ever opened an American wedding magazine at all, then yes, the following statements are a bit rich:

In China, unlike in the West, wedding photographs are often as important as the ceremony itself…Both bride and groom are caked with make-up; for any accidental blemishes, there's always Photoshop. The aspiration is not to document a real event, but to look perfect.

As Robin's Brides magazine by the numbers posts show, the American WIC begs to differ. You also have to keep in mind that most modern Chinese wedding celebrations consist of just throwing a big banquet dinner, no elaborate dinner/dancing/decorated venue kind of reception.

But, I do think there's slightly more to this than than just "WIC-induced fever spreads wherever there's an increase in the middle class." I think there's an element of modern Chinese culture that just cares about having a perfect image of things, rather than substance. My parents live in a town where the Asian population is pretty high, and sometimes they'll talk about how they've been to some of the other houses that look magnificent and enormous from the outside but only have plastic furniture inside. Or are empty.

Or, my mom will tell me after her trips back about how Shanghai has been developing so rapidly, where there is now a whole block of skyscrapers used to be just a field when she went to school there, but everything looks surprisingly old and worn for being so new. She says the Chinese can build and develop, sure, but they don't really bother with upkeep of existing structures, and she predicts that all the shiny new arenas they put together for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will get gross unbelievably quickly.

Shrug. I don't really have a conclusion here. When I first saw that photo-essay, I indulged in a bit "oh man that's crazy!" but ultimately, just as with American wedding excess, my position is that if this what people really think they want, so it goes. Just don't expect me to help bail anyone out if they go into debt pursuing it.

Chinese family naming system

So, I just addressed the last of the save-the-date postcards this weekend. I went to my parents' place for Chinese New Year dinner and tried to pry a few more relatives' addresses out of them. I think about wedding guests in a very relational way, with associated responsibilities. For example, if it's through my dad's side that I am related to this person and are therefore inviting them, I expect my dad to help with procuring the necessary information.

We did the same thing in the first round with getting addresses for Dan's side of the guest list, but my parents have been less forthcoming. I think they're a bit of the attitude, "if you can't reach someone via email, why bother with mailing addresses, just use the phone." They played it off as giving me an opportunity to reach out to my cousins for their parents' addresses. Luckily, these cousins came through for me, and very quickly at that, too, so I looked up the last few kinship terms on this helpful chart and wrote them out in my likely worse than a Chinese kindergardener's writing. It's the thought that counts, yeah?

I'd mentioned briefly in the last post about the save-the-date postcards about how I had to look up then which were the right terms to use for different family members, based on how I'm related to them. This chart I found this time around, though, better visually describes the precision to which you can name a relationship in the Confucian system.

Really gives you a sense for a non-Western culture in which your relationship to other people and your relative ages are more important than your individuality, since at family gatherings, you wouldn't really address anyone outside of your own generation with their given names. Instead, you'd use the appropriate kinship term (after a hushed conference with your parents, generally) and respectfully greet everyone. "Hello, 3rd uncle older than my father, 3rd uncle's wife. Hello, 2nd aunt older than my father, 2nd aunt's husband."

It's a complicated system, but it mostly makes sense since it's all based around the principles of increasing respect with increasing age (and a bit of, more important to distinguish males than females, which sometimes sets my mom off on how Confusion culture is patriarchal, which I'm really amused by because she mostly lives a feminist life but doesn't usually go off on feminist rants). It makes more sense to me than the Western system with all the "once removed" or first/second/etc. business. I can mostly remember the Chinese kinship terms now, though it's nice to be to easily look them up now too (yay Internet!) but I can never remember the right designations in the Western system.

Anyway, just wanted to share a bit of Chinese culture there, since in general people seem to find it interesting that I often have no idea what my relatives' real full names are (in English or in Chinese), because I only know them by their numbered designation.

Highlights from conversations with my parents tonight

Me: So, do you want to invite any of your friends?
Mom: No. Too much hassle*.

Me: So, do you want to invite any of your friends?
Dad: No. Too much hassle*.
Me: What about your friend _____ that Mom mentioned?
Dad: Give me the date and I'll call her and see if she and her husband can come. If they can't then there's no point in inviting them.
Me: That doesn't make any sense, that's what RSVPing is for!
Dad: By the way, I can't guarantee anyone except for myself, your uncles like to make last minute changes often.

later
Mom: Oh yeah, that's the Chinese way of doing things. The invitation itself is just a formality.

*Just to be clear, I think the desire to avoid hassle bit of these conversations is more our family's general introverted/anti-social tendency rather than general Chinese culture.

Popups and papercuts

Probably too much work, but a popup card would be fun, I think. The rest of this black & white wedding photo shoot was a little too stark for me.

(from Style Me Pretty)

This invitation printed on kraft paper with line drawings feels much more comfortable:

(via Oh So Beautiful Paper)

It would be cool to figure out a way to design this kind of invitation so that it would just require being printed on 8.5" x 11" paper, front and back, and then just cut out and assemble together. Maybe two slits on the main section for the extra folding sections to slip into?

This one would also be too complicated, but I love the look of it and that you'd be able to mail it flat but it'd almost be a 3-D work of art when unpacked. I think Dan would object to this on the grounds that it's a bit presumptuous to send out something that would take up so much space when displayed, which is probably fair.

(via Oh So Beautiful Paper) 

More infeasible complexity: papercuts!

(via Oh So Beautiful Paper)

To simplify this one, perhaps I could get my mom to buy some papercut design in bulk in China? That would likely be on red paper, too.

Or perhaps buying papercut invites off of Etsy, like these:

(Papeles Picados in aymujer's Etsy shop, $175 for 25--probably beyond budget)

It probably would be pretty easy to get papercuts of the 'shuang- xi^' character, but if not, it would be nice to include them somewhere in the design, like so:

(by We Heart Paper, via Oh So Beautiful Paper)

Why is this symbol important? Quick Chinese culture lesson! (from Chinese Wedding Invitations)

The symbol of "Double Happiness" is something that cannot be missed during a Chinese wedding- whether it may be a traditional one or among those which have a more contemporary set-up.

It is usually printed on the invitation with the use of golden hot stamps. The symbol of Double Happiness is a declaration that the bride-to-be and the groom-to-be will be united. The symbol, which is composed of two standard Chinese characters used to signify "happiness", means that the couple and their families will now be "together".

Each of the characters that denote happiness is written as "hsi" or "xi" in Mandarin. In the case of the Double Happiness sign, the two "XI" characters signify the happiness of the newlywed couple that are about to spend their lives together. Pronounced as "shuang-xi", the sign generally stands for marital happiness. Note that the Double Happiness sign is not used in regular Mandarin writing, but is only observed for marital union invitations and declarations.