No Church Wedding unless my Parents Meet the Groom First

After the Liu family’s approval of our relationship, Joshua and I began telling our friends in church that we were a couple. Most of them were shocked. My roommates could not fathom what I saw in him because “he is so dark.” Many of my roommates were also very prejudiced against his Hakka subculture and told me that Hakka daughters-in-law were expected to work hard. I was not sure why they thought hard work would be a problem, and my friends’ views of Hakka families certainly did not match up to what I had seen when visiting the Liu family.

I had to renew my visa toward the end of February, and the clerk noted that I had thirteen months left on my passport. He urged me to look into options for renewing my passport because he had dealt with other Americans who had had trouble if they waited until they had less than six months left. I thanked him for the tip and went to the American Institute in Taiwan, a quasi-governmental agency that issues US visas and helps US citizens with services under the auspices of the American consulate in Hong Kong. The people at AIT told me that they were only authorized to renew passports of US citizens holding permanent residence status in Taiwan. So I began my quest for a “blue book”, the Taiwanese equivalent of a “green card.” Since I did simultaneous interpretation of church conferences from the back of the audience or from a translation booth instead of standing beside the speaker on the pulpit, I did not qualify for a religious visa. I was not a real “minister.” The church publishing company was five employees short of qualifying to hire me as a foreign specialist and getting me a “blue book.” The only avenue left was for me to marry a Taiwanese citizen.

Liu Yuni and I met with the church elders about a church wedding as soon as possible. And their answer was a resounding, “No!” The elders reasoned that our family backgrounds were too different and that my parents had not yet met my prospective groom. They were sure that my parents would not approve of my marrying someone engaged in physical labor or a professional trade. They were convinced that my parents would forbid me to marry into a family where my in-laws had so little education. They told us that they could not stop us from having a court wedding, but if we wanted the church to bless our marriage, we needed approval from both sets of parents. And they thought that Liu Yuni should be finished with his mandatory tour of military duty before we even considered marriage. They told me to renew my passport over the summer when I went home for a visit. I told them that according to the people at AIT, I would need to stay in the US and pay taxes for a year before I would be eligible to do that. The elders did not believe that the workers at AIT properly represented the US government, and they were sure I would have no problems once I arrived in the US.

When we mentioned the church elders’ concerns to Mr. Liu, he agreed that he would feel better about the marriage if my parents got to meet his family and his son first. He also wanted to spend time with me discussing my views on supporting aging parents-in-law and on funeral rites and honoring dead ancestors. So Liu Yuni took a leave of absence from his last semester in school and signed up to immediately begin his military tour of duty. By mid-March, he was inducted to the army and sent to Ilan for three months of basic training. I called home several times about the situation. At first, my entire family was planning to come for an April wedding during my brother’s spring break from vet school. After the church’s opposition, they cancelled their plane reservations, and my mother decided to come in May for my twenty-fifth birthday and to meet her potential son-in-law.

Every weekend I would either take the train by myself to the military base in Ilan to visit Liu Yuni, or I would ride with the Liu family when they all went to see him. Mr. Liu kept me in the front of the truck on those rides, and we discussed the all-important issue of filial piety. I later learned that the extended family had told him stories about American families and how American children allowed elderly parents to die in poverty or even charged them for rent or elder care. Mr. Liu wanted to know about my parents’ relationships with my grandparents and my grandparents’ relationships with my great-grandparents. He was quite relieved to learn that my grandparents on both sides of the family had taken aging great-grandparents into their homes and cared for them for years without charging them rent or nursing fees. I was shocked that people would think such things about Americans. He asked me how much money I contributed to the support of my parents every month. I responded that they made so much money that they didn’t need or want my support. I also told him about Teacher Chin’s Chinese daughter-in-law lessons and that I understood the dynamics and structure of Chinese families.

So our conversation turned to funerals and worshipping ancestors. Mr. Liu had been very impressed as a young man at Chiang Kai-shek’s state funeral. Madame Chiang had not allowed the masses who crowded the route of Chiang Kai-shek’s funeral cortege to burn incense in worship of him because the family was Christian. Instead, she asked that everyone throw flowers, and she asked people of all faiths to pray for blessings on the country in Chiang’s memory. In my description of US funerals I had been to, I told Mr. Liu that there were prayers for the dead person’s soul, that people shared their memories of the person’s life, and that frequently the funeral ended with prayers for the rest of the person’s family. He was very interested in the funeral flowers. I told him that most people sent arrangements of flowers and that sometimes the mourners or family members would file past the casket and place flowers on it or throw flowers into the grave. I also told him that in many families, the family members would regularly place fresh flowers on the person’s grave. In the end, we arrived at an understanding. If I married into his family, my children and I would be exempt from burning incense to the Liu ancestors, but we would be expected to purchase and present large wreaths at funerals. During the funeral ceremonies, we would have to stand before the casket with our heads bowed in prayer for the entire Liu family after we had presented our wreaths. We would wear the traditional funeral attire and march in the funeral procession according to our rank in the family. We would not participate in the traditional tomb sweeping activities when everyone else was burning incense, but either before or after, we would go up to the tomb, pray to the Christian God for the Liu family, and place flowers on the family tomb.

With these crucial matters settled, Mr. Liu became a strong advocate of our marriage. The church leaders who personally knew Liu Yuni also agreed that we were well-matched in temperament. But we still had to convince the ones who could only see the outward differences in culture and social status. I told them that I wanted to marry someone with much darker skin than mine, so my children would be less likely to get painful sunburns. I told them that I looked at a person’s character and natural intelligence more than his or her level of education and social rank. The members of the Liu family are all very bright and of generally good character. I also told them that money came and went easily. I was not really worried about the family’s finances. Nor was I afraid of hard work. I was impressed with the industriousness of all the Lius, and I believed (correctly) that their financial setbacks were temporary. Nevertheless, I was again inundated with a flood of potential suitors that church matchmakers felt were more “suitable” prospects. Their attitudes made me pretty angry, but I figured the best thing was to wait for my mom’s visit, since I wouldn’t get anywhere without my own parents’ approval of the match.

Matchmaking Madness

As I became more and more Chinese in my language, demeanor, and bearing, my Chinese friends began to worry that I would not find a suitable American husband since I was wasting the “springtime of my life” in Taiwan. I was not terribly worried about marriage; at that point, I didn’t really care if I got married or not. I think the fact that I was not actively seeking a life-partner was like a red cape before a bull to the matchmaking instincts of many of the old grandmothers at church. They began, in earnest, to find me a mate.

Not long into my second year, General Manager started to get a steady trickle of proposals on my behalf. Because no male members of my family were chaperoning me in Taiwan, General Manager stood in loco parentis in his own eyes and in the eyes of most of my Chinese friends. I know he screened out many of the prospects without even telling me about them; nevertheless, he began calling me into his office at least once a month to present me with a photo and biographical sketch of another “top matrimonial catch.”

Even though Teacher had begun teaching us about the Chinese view of marriage and the importance of finding a mate who was from a similar socio-economic and educational background to our own families, it didn’t mean that I was ready to believe it for myself. But nobody asked me what I was looking for in a husband; instead, the matchmaking grannies invited my co-workers at the publishing company to dinner or lunch and pumped them for information about me and my family. They learned that I had graduated with honors from a prestigious American university. They learned that my father in America was academic vice-president of a large private university in Seattle. They learned that my mother had graduated from Harvard. They learned that my maternal grandfather had been prominent in state government and that my paternal grandfather was rich. These were all crucial items to them in deciding which boys’ photos to parade before me. Chinese culture loves and reveres scholars; their ideal man has done no labor, has a pasty white complexion with soft hands, and wears glasses. But in a more American tradition, I was hoping for a tanned hunk. So month after month I turned up my nose at pictures of the scrawny, pimply-faced scions of rich Taiwanese families.

In the beginning, they presented me with pictures of people I was acquainted with from college student outings with the student center the previous year. In addition to being scrawny, pasty-white, and pimple-faced, most of the boys they chose for me were totally helpless at doing practical things. They all got good grades, but they had no clue about life outside of their books. I tried to explain to General Manager that it would be very hard for me to be married to someone I didn’t respect, and I expected anyone I would marry to be at least as able as I was to change a light bulb, hammer a nail, go hiking, or travel without his mother. Most of all, I wanted someone who had actually held a job before. Many disappointed mothers and grandmothers put away the pictures of their sons and grandsons. The matchmaking contingent decided that I needed an older man.

Now things got even worse. I was presented with pictures of men as old as forty-five when I was only twenty-two or three. Finally, General Manager found a person I knew well and worked with and started marriage negotiations with him. He was a nice guy; I think we could have done well together, and all my friends at the publishing company were hearing the sounds of wedding bells, when the talks abruptly stopped. The guy was swiftly engaged to someone else at his mother’s insistence because she did not want white blood in the family. That experience on top of everything else totally turned me off to the matchmaking experience. I tried to get my friends to stop, but their efforts kept increasing in intensity.

Finally, I wrote a story based on the Chinese idiom “四面楚歌” (surrounded on all sides by the enemy singing songs of your homeland). The idiom refers to a story from Chinese history, in which a famous general surrendered and committed suicide because of a ploy used by the attacking army. The attackers learned songs from prisoners of war captured in the defending general’s homeland. During their siege, they sang popular songs of his homeland in his own dialect every night around their campfires. He thought that he had lost his support base and that he and his small band were hopelessly out-numbered. In my story, the hero (of the same name as the hero in Chinese history) walks the streets of Taipei with a small dog named Lai-fu, but every alley he turns into is filled with matchmakers singing about the wonderful marriage prospects they have picked out for him. Eventually, the hero is surrounded in a doorway by hundreds of thousands of matchmakers who will not let him go until he marries one of their suggestions. He commits suicide to escape.

I had my friends at the publishing company edit my story for me. They quickly put the word out that all the matchmaking efforts were making me suicidal. It wasn’t quite the message I had in mind, but it did the trick. Even General Manager agreed that American women are different, and they probably have the savvy and life-experience to pick their own husbands.

After my friends, co-workers, and the old ladies from church had stopped their “marry off Teresa campaign”, I showed my story to Teacher at school. She was completely horrified that I had desecrated Chinese history and that I would even put the words to paper that suicide might be better than an arranged marriage. She asked me what had happened to cause me to write on such a radical theme. I explained to her about the efforts to marry me off to rich, scrawny geeks and how finally the one person I thought would be okay had been rushed by his mother into a hasty marriage with a nice, Chinese girl. I told her that I really could not stand the emotional roller coaster. Teacher sympathized with me, but she said that my bad experience did not mean the whole system was as bad as I had portrayed it to be. She also gave me a very good piece of advice to assist me in my quest for a Chinese husband: marry a man who loves and respects his mother but who has his own ideas and is not entirely ruled by her. I protested that I was NOT in a quest for a Chinese husband. Teacher serenely replied that it was too late. I had already been ruined for any but the best husbands, who were by definition Chinese.

Chinese Daughter-in-Law Training

Teresa, Susanna, Beatrice, Miss Yan, and Melanie

at Beatrice's Wedding to a Chinese Businessman

The longer we spent with Teacher, the more she worked to make us proper Chinese daughters-in-law. When Beatrice announced her engagement to a Taiwanese businessman and Miss Yan told Teacher she would be going back to Thailand to get married, our Chinese daughter-in-law training went into high gear. Most of every class was spent discussing families and marriage.

The first theme was that arranged marriages were good because they were not based on hormones. Teacher went to great lengths to demonstrate that the Western fixation on romance does not lead to a stable family life. She was very anti-divorce, especially when there are children involved. (This may have been due in part to her experience growing up in her aunt’s home.) She said that in an arranged marriage, the parents used rational thought, life experience, and deep knowledge of their children to find spouses and households who were true matches for their children’s temperaments. Even though there was no love at the beginning, because the matches were well-thought out, the relationships blossomed and deepened over time, making them more stable. One of Teacher’s favorite maxims was, “Love in a relationship must be nurtured.” She exhorted us to get beyond our hormones when picking a mate by looking for someone who had similar background and interests, and then she told us that we needed to work for our entire life at nurturing our marriage. I have to say that after listening to this speech at least once a week for more than a year, my thinking about marriage changed.

In addition to the “pick your mate well, so you do not need a divorce” speech, Teacher taught us about how to live in a multi-generational household. The first rule of a Chinese family is to know your position. If you are the eldest, you have more say in what the family does, but you also have more responsibility to make things go right. As a Chinese daughter-in-law, you gain your position from your husband’s birth order. If you marry an eldest son, your words will carry much weight with your in-laws, but you will also be expected to help with all the younger siblings. If you marry a second or third son (but not the youngest), your position will depend more on how competent your husband is at his work. If you marry the youngest son, resign yourself to not having any say in the running of the family, but you can also be assured that no one will expect you to bear much responsibility for anyone but your own children.

In the past, women in Chinese families gained status by the number of sons they bore. This still holds true to some extent, but younger generations, who have studied biology, now know that this is not the woman’s responsibility, so the onus of not bearing sons is waning to some extent. Because traditional Chinese worship their ancestors through the paternal line, a man needs a son to feed his ghost and to carry on the family line. If the first wife does not produce a son, it is still not uncommon for the man to try with someone else. Since Sun Yat-Sen’s revolution and the abolition of polygamy, this means that some Chinese men divorce their wives for failing to give them a son.

In addition to bearing sons, women in Chinese families gain status by their sufferings for the family. The Chinese have a saying that a woman is “pressure-cooked into a mother-in-law.” It refers to the process that when a woman marries into the family, the other women haze her until she learns her place. The hazing stops when she bears a son and / or makes a significant contribution to the family’s fortunes. As long as her mother-in-law is alive, this hazing can start up again at any time. If a woman has borne a son, but fails to contribute anything more to the general well-being of the family, the hazing will start again to train her to be a good matriarch. A woman without a son, who nevertheless has been loyal to and suffered for her husband’s family, is frequently accorded much honor, and her words hold much weight. The Chinese are a very practical society, and they honor good results. The hazing is for the most part verbal, although I know one woman who married into a very rich Chinese family in the Philippines in 1984. She ate and worked with the servants until she had given birth to a son. Then she was allowed to eat with her mother-in-law and other sisters-in-law. Once she was in that circle, her worth to the family was gauged by how well she trained her son and supported her husband in his business. The men of the family always ate at a separate table from the women.

Many multi-generational families engage in one business. Joshua’s third maternal uncle had five sons who all worked in his business making banisters. When they married, the daughters-in-law quit their outside jobs and worked with their husbands in the family business. The whole family lived together in one household until all five sons were married and had children. At their height, there were twenty-one people in three generations under one roof. The daughters-in-law rotated cooking and cleaning chores by the week. Joshua’s uncle controlled all the money and gave each of his progeny an allowance based on their needs. My father-in-law felt this was foolish in modern society because Joshua’s cousins never learned how to manage money when they were young. After the fifth son had children and the father had retired, they all split into five small households. The parents would rotate eating with each son’s household for a week. Some sons have done well managing on their own; others have had trouble adjusting to bearing so much responsibility.

The final point our teacher made about Chinese marriage is that the woman joins the man’s family, leaving her own. Whatever you were in your birth family no longer exists; if you “marry a dog, you follow a dog, marry a chicken, you follow a chicken.” Daughters are called “money-losing items” because parents raise them to contribute to someone else’s business. When a daughter marries, her parents throw a bowl of water after the car driving her away to show that she has been washed from the family. Her first priority is now her husband’s family. The married daughter who cares for her own parents over her in-laws is asking for more hazing until she learns her place. When traditional Chinese women expressed their loyalty to their husbands they would say: “I am your family member in life and your household’s ghost in death.”

The Greatest Event in Life

Soon we had finished the book of moral tales and moved into Teacher’s favorite intermediate book: Chinese Customs and Traditions. The lessons in this book were essays on different aspects of Chinese life and culture. They covered topics like Chinese New Year, Tomb-sweeping Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Eating, Kung-fu, Houses, Friendships, Filial Piety, Funerals, Temple Festivals, Family Relationships, and of course, “The Greatest Event in Life: Marriage”. Teacher promised us that by the time we finished this book, our thinking and concepts would be partially Chinese. We spent at least nine months going through all the lessons. One of the lessons that took us the longest to finish to Teacher’s satisfaction was the unit on marriage. I have translated it here in its entirety. The pictures show the text and illustrations.

The Greatest Event in Life

Chinese people call marriage the greatest event in life. Because the Chinese have such a strong concept of family ties, they believe that ruling one’s family is the basis of a stable society and a peaceful world. The ancient Chinese continually told their scholars that if they wanted to govern the country, they must first rule their homes well. For this reason, the Chinese do not merely consider a marriage to be the union between a man and a woman, but also they see marriage as the foundation of society. It is a solemn matter that cannot be accomplished lightly.

In traditional Chinese marriage, one did not choose one’s own partner; instead, the heads of the households made the decisions, and marriages were accomplished through the introductions of a matchmaker. According to ancient records, there were six steps to a marriage. The first step was called “presenting betrothal gifts.” In this step, the man’s family presented the woman’s family with a small gift (a wild goose) to express their wish to negotiate a marriage. The second step was called “asking the names.” In this step, the man’s family asked for a clear accounting of the woman’s names and relations, so that they could cast the horoscopes. The third step was “divining the luck”. In this step the man’s family divined the good or bad fortune of the marriage and then brought gifts to the woman’s family to report the good news. The fourth step was “presenting betrothal gifts”, and this was the same as an engagement. Of course, in this stage, a larger gift was given. The fifth step was called “selecting the date,” and in this stage the most auspicious day for the wedding was determined, and the consent of the woman’s family was sought for that date. The sixth step was called “escorting the bride,” and that was the wedding ceremony. These six steps are called the “six rites.”

Nowadays the rites are much simpler. People choose their own spouses, but they still ask for their parents’ permission. Then they set the wedding date and send invitations to their friends and relatives, inviting them to the wedding ceremony and the wedding feast. Now the most popular wedding ceremonies are simple and elegant. Some people are married in churches, and others get married in civil ceremonies at court; still others are married in group weddings.

Old style weddings had another step called “joking in the bridal chamber.” Within the first three days after the wedding, anyone—male, female, old, and young—was allowed to make jokes with the bride and bridegroom. The goal of this custom was to allow the bride and groom, who had never met before the wedding, to get to know each other in a light, relaxed atmosphere. This custom still exists today in a limited fashion.

The textbook essay is wrong in saying that the six rites are no longer used. While the first gift is no longer a wild goose and the matchmakers are usually elderly friends or relatives, the six rites live on today, especially among working class, farming, and illiterate social groups. There are regional variations and rituals for each step, but I would say that the six rites continue to be used even today among many of my Chinese relatives and friends. The last wedding we attended that used these customs was on April 26, 2007, in New York City among friends from a group of Chinese expatriates from Fuzhou. Last month, a cousin of the 2007 groom went through the same six steps for his own wedding just before Chinese New Year. The going bride price in the Fuzhou restaurant-owning community is $36,000 (US dollars). I am used to the idea of bride prices and trousseaus now, but when the time came for my Chinese wedding I would not allow my father to ask for money from Joshua’s family. The depths of my little American soul were horrified at the idea of being bought or sold. Eventually, I sat in on some negotiations concerning marriages for my husband’s siblings because I was the eldest daughter-in-law. Then, I began to understand more of the traditional Chinese concepts of marriage, and I was better able to understand what my teacher had been talking about.