Nanjing Wedding

You may want to take deep breath before you read the next sentence….

I got married this weekend. Actually, it was a mock wedding at Zhongyuan, a garden that my friend Yimin and I visited in Nanjing on Saturday. The garden included a teahouse with four young women playing classical Chinese instruments. After the performance, a man came out and explained that they would now have a traditional wedding ceremony. I think he was supposed to be the bride’s father. He threw three red balls to men in the audience, and one of them fell to me.

The bride—one of the women who had been performing a few moments before—was led onstage wearing an elaborately patterned Chinese dress and an embroidered veil that covered her face and neck. We three potential grooms were then ushered onto the stage, and the host read some words in Chinese affixed to white labels on the red balls. My inability to understand Chinese greatly impairs my ability to narrate this story, but my cluelessness is, in the end, the outstanding feature of the tale. Naturally, the text eliminated my two competitors, and I was left alone, the lucky groom. The other musicians led me off stage and dressed me in a Chinese gown and hat, forcing me to remove my Washington Nationals cap in the process.

I was the only foreigner present, so the audience found my selection to be quite a hoot. The host was making some wisecracks at my expense, but I couldn’t understand them—I just heard everyone laughing. Yimin told me later that he’d made a joke to the effect that he hoped I wouldn’t try take off my pants as the women dressed me in the Chinese gown.

Once I was properly attired, the wedding began. To his credit and my salvation, my new father-in-law could speak enough English to give me cues at each stage of the ceremony. My bride and I held onto opposite ends of a red cord and bowed to the four cardinal directions. Then we walked around in a circle together, still clinging to our cord. The ceremony concluded with me lifting the veil from the bride’s face. Fortunately, she didn’t scream in horror at the sight of me, but, despite that auspicious sign and the bride’s beauty and musical talent, I didn’t think it would work out. The cultural and linguistic differences were simply too great, so I got an immediate annulment. In closing, the host asked me to address the audience, and I made an absurd statement—the only kind that my Chinese skills will allow:

“Xiexie. Wo jiao Weilian. Wo shi meiguoren. Wo hui shuo yidiandian hanyu. Wo xihuan kan shu.” (Thank you. My name is William. I am American. I can speak a little Chinese. I like to read books.)

The crowd roared in approval, and the musicians stripped me of my Chinese garb. What little dignity I posses had already been gone for quite some time.