A CONTEMPORARY CHINESE WEDDING

The wedding ceremony that I attended this morning could be considered as a contemporary one with a fusion of old and new practices. Of course there was the groom setting off from his home to fetch his bride from her abode (in this case it was Flamingo Hotel as the girl is from Sungai Petani) and the brother of the bride opening the door of the wedding car for his new brother-in-law. One of the practices of modern Chinese is to find shortcuts or alternatives to certain customs given that they were pressed for time and the distance of the bride and groom's family homes. The one modification to custom that I noted was that instead of really going back to the girl's home after the third day of marriage, the couple came down from the bride's room in the hotel and walked around the wedding car (in a clockwise direction) for three times and then went back up to the hotel room. They stayed there for a while before starting their journey to the groom's home. At the groom's home, instead of using firecrackers to welcome the newlyweds, one of the relatives popped opened a canister of coloured confetti which is another modification. This time it is due to legal constraints instead. Also another modern feature of weddings is the use of multimedia devices to record the happy occasion. Note the number of people recording the event using either cameras, videocams or their handphones above and in the slide show below.

SLIDE SHOW: THE WEDDING OF MR AND MRS YEW SOON LEE