A big fat Vietnamese wedding is something all Western visitors to Vietnam should try to get themselves invited to. A big fat Vietnamese wedding is generally composed of an intimate traditional ceremony in the homes of the bride and groom in the morning and an ear-splitting semi-Western reception, for 500 guests or more, in the evening.
For today, let's look at the traditional do in the morning.
As far as wedding ceremonies go, the sky is basically the limit in today’s Vietnam.
A lot of old-fashioned marriage rituals which Vietnamese Communism put an stop to – either because they were ideologically suspect or just a waste of money – have been revived over the past 30-odd years, as the government has given people the liberty to dabble in ancient traditions once again. While simple, civil ceremonies in the Communist mode were all that was acceptable during the decade and a half after the war, since the late 80’s the Vietnamese have started taking real pleasure in the wedding customs of old all over again.
And a fair number of heavily cashed-up middle-class Vietnamese have started showing off their new-found wealth by observing all the traditional marriage rites they can think of, as loudly and as lavishly as they can. So nowadays it would be possible for a Vietnamese couple to go through an “introduction ceremony” and an “engagement ceremony” and for there to be some sort of “marriage planning ceremony” before the Big Day, which itself might be made up of numerous ceremonies in numerous different locations.
To understand the basic gist of an introduction ceremony, take the Vietnamese name for this event: the "lễ xem mặt". This means literally the ceremony of “looking at the face”. It involves the groom’s family paying a visit to the bride’s home several months before the actual wedding, handing over gifts and letting the couple check each other out a bit. (The checking-out bit is something that might have seemed like a very big moment in the days when Vietnamese marriages were strictly of the arranged variety and men who checked out women without going through the correct channels got beaten up by their male relatives. Nowadays though checking out is something Vietnamese boys and girls obviously do every day of the year, both in the flesh and in a range of social media.)
Or take the traditional engagement ceremony, literally the “lễ ăn hỏi”: the eating-and-asking procedure. As Joe Ruelle has pointed out, the eating bit of the procedure usually takes a lot longer than the asking bit – and the cleaning up bit afterwards takes longer than both put together. Formally speaking, the lễ ăn hỏi centres around the groom making a formal request for the hand of the bride – not by asking the bride, but by asking her parents and their advisers. Their response is a foregone conclusion, as is the wedding date, which the two families then pretend to deliberate on – for two minutes. After which, the feasting begins. And after that the festival of Spray and Wipe.
But the funnest event in the overall wedding calendar is what happens on the morning of the wedding.
Essentially, what happens is this: the groom, the groom’s immediate family and half a dozen of his more presentable bachelor friends go and pick up the bride (“đón dâu”). That is, they perform the ceremony of picking up the bride (“lễ đón dâu”).
This means gathering at the groom’s house at some stage between 5 and 6.30 in the morning, so if you get invited to play the part of a groomsman, make sure you knock yourself out by 10pm the night before.
At the groom’s house in the early morning, everyone basically stands around watching the groom and his relatives arranging ceremonial wedding presents. These take the form of big, red-laquered tins containing various foodstuffs which are then draped in red velvet and transported to the “pick-up truck” (“xe đón dâu”) by the groomsmen.
A motorcade containing the groom, his family, the big red tins and their carriers, the six groomsmen, drive across town to the bride’s house. Or out into the countryside if the bride is a country girl. In the wedding season – the eighth month of the lunar calendar, when there are hundreds of weddings happening every weekend in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City – this leads to traffic jams. Which some authentic Vietnamese are supposed to actually enjoy being a part of.
The pick-up truck parks at a discrete distance from the bride’s family home and the groom’s party arranges itself in a straight line, which then starts to move. At the gate of the bride’s house, the groomsmen, dressed in black and white, are met by an equal number of bridesmaids, who are dressed in fantastically coloured traditional dresses (áo dài).
Then something very beautiful happens.
Half a dozen unmarried men line up opposite half a dozen unmarried women whom they’ve probably never met before and pretend for 5 minutes that they’re not checking each other out. Then they hand over the red tins with the ceremonial gifts.
The art of the Vietnamese groomsman is to hand over the red tin in a way that will make the bridesmaid opposite him give him a cute smile, instead of looking anxiously at the cameraman. The groom stands at the end of the line supervising this heart-breaking activity. Thusly:
(As you can see, in the country they sometimes beam the bridesmaids down from Planet Elvis for the event.)
The bridesmaids then move off to deliver the red tins to the place where the next round of ceremonials will take place – the guest room of the bride’s family home.
The presence of bridesmaids and groomsmen is now, strictly speaking, surplus to requirements. So if that's the reason you're taking part in proceedings, you can now just take a seat at a table in the courtyard with your fellow helpers. Don’t be frightened to park yourself in the doorway of the guest room and observe the actual wedding ceremony, though. Privacy is not a basic requirement of the Great Events of Vietnamese life. Nor is silence - during the ceremony that's about to start, there will probably be quite a few kids running round squealing, as well as the racket of preparations going on in the kitchen at the back of the house.
What you will observe, if you get yourself into a handy position outside the guest room, is roughly as follows.
The ancestors of the bride’s clan will be staring down from the family altar. If the family is Buddhist, then next to the photos of the ancestors there will be a statue of Buddha looking fat and hilarious. Unless the family has a troubled historical relationship to Vietnamese communism, there will also be a photo of Uncle Hồ doing the classic Uncle Hồ face - enigmatic but faintly pleased.
Instead of a celebrant, a representative of the groom’s family does the official duties during this part of proceedings; the character in question is for preference old and wise and he ought to have a large brood of grandchildren whose existence will spontaneously inspire mass child-birth in the years following today’s happy event. (It's always a he.)
You'll notice that something is missing though. That’s right – the bride. In a moment, you’ll see why: because she has to be brought into the scene in the right way.
Two traditional Vietnamese foodstuffs, betel and areca, will be presented on a tray by the groom’s clan, then placed on the family altar by the bride’s clan. Incense will be lit. In the olden days, this mini-procedure made up a ceremony of its own. It’s rough meaning is that the family of the bride accepts that the bride is about to enter the groom’s family and so won’t be part of their family in the full sense any more. The betel and areca are signs of good will: in the olden days, offering areca (a nut) wrapped in betel (a vine-leaf) was the standard way Vietnamese welcomed a stranger into the home.
The representative of the bride’s family then officially invites the groom’s clan into the house. The representative of the groom’s family formally introduces everyone from his clan. The contents of the red tins are unveiled. Nowadays, they are symbols of the agricultural bounties that in the olden days the groom’s clan would literally have handed over to the bride’s clan.
Apart from (1) betel and areca, there will be (2) rice wine and tea, (3) sticky rice with chicken or possibly roast pig, (4) fruit, plus, somewhat strangely, (5) cake and (6) some ceremonial silk áo dài.
The groom now receives permission to go and fetch the bride from the back room where she’s been waiting the whole time. Red being the traditional colour of marriage and festivity, the bride now appears looking magnificent in a red áo dài.
Everyone is now in position. As is humanly to be expected, everyone stands around eyeballing the main members of the other team:
Bride and groom offer everyone drinks. Then they kneel in front of the family altar. Sublime words are uttered.
Traditionally, the bride’s mother decks her daughter out in various family jewels, then gives her some parting words of advice. Nowadays, brides get decked out with jewelry belonging to both families.
The representative of the groom’s clan makes another short speech.
And that’s the box and dice, out the door the newly-weds go.
If the bride’s family home is in the country, then this will probably be the end of the road. Her family will put on a feast which gradually swells to include everyone from the general neighbourhood, as well as everyone from the city whom the groom has brought along. The bride, the groom and their closest relatives will sit down in the guest room and start feasting on the contents of the red tins, while the groomsmen, the rest of the groom’s clan and the bridesmaids sit down to eat with all the other guests under an enormous canvas canopy.
During a Vietnamese country wedding, Vietnamese country folk will stare at you as if you're from planet Elvis. Children will come and say funny stuff about your nose (“Chú tây mũi to phải không?” – “Uncle from the West has a big one, doesn’t he?”). A Vietnamese country “wit” will pull a clear plastic bottle from under the table and offer you some “Vietnamese whisky” (50% proof rice wine, distilled by himself). When you raise your glass to drink, your eyes will start to sting. Everyone will laugh. Those who have already been drinking the “Vietnamese whisky” will cough a lot.
However, if bride and groom are both city folk, or both from the same village, the ceremony at the bride’s home is only the first stage of the overall picking-up ceremony; now the return leg begins. The motorcade winds its way back to the groom’s family home, this time with the newlyweds taking the lead in a white Toyota.
Back at the groom’s family home, most of the ceremonials that took place at the bride’s place are repeated.
Then, with double the number of people you set out with three hours earlier, there will be a killer feast.
The bride has been successfully picked up.
It’s still only 9.30 in the morning, but a pick-up is a pick-up – the beer and rice wine starts to flow.
Like their country cousins, urban Vietnamese will start to eat and drink in the inimitable way that Vietnamese know how to do this, using their fingers, turfing scraps over their shoulders, making the merriment spill copiously out into the street. The bride might even change into a t-shirt and shorts for the feast. That's right, the intimate ceremonials on the morning of the wedding have considerably less of the self-consciousness that spoils the reception later in the day.
Plus the whole thing’s happening where the bride and groom have probably lived all their lives up to now. Shifty Westerners, take note: family homes are the places where the really deep stuff happens in Vietnam and the fact that the actual wedding formalities happen there, as well as the funnest parties, is the best indication of that.
Tomorrow the formalities will start all over again. The newlyweds will make a ceremonial trip back to the bride’s family home for another inter-family eyeballing. But you don’t need to worry about that, because you’ll be in bed trying to recover from what happened to you today. Or, if you were one of the groomsmen, dreaming of a way of getting beamed up to the place where the bridesmaids came from:
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