Chinese Weddings

So today one of our most important vendors walked into my office and handed me an invitation to his son's wedding (to be held in less than 2 weeks). The vendor doesn't speak a lick of English, and I've never even met his son, or anyone else in his family, but weddings are always fun, right? It's a traditional Chinese wedding, but I was only invited to the banquet (thank goodness!), and not to the other activities throughout the day (the morning game rituals, the pictures, the tea ceremony, or the actual wedding ceremony itself).

The actual invitation itself was very interesting - it was a gold envelope with a nice invitation inside (printed in both English and Chinese). The interesting part was the additional small red envelope that contained a HK$10 note. I asked my colleague why the invitation included money, and he said that in anticipation of the financial gift that I will be giving to the bridge and groom, it is tradition for them to give a little something back to me in appreciation of my gift. Awww, how thoughtful!

I also asked him (and another friend of mine who knows these sorts of things) what is an appropriate amount of money to give, and they both said that for my colleague it would be appropriate to give around HK$500, and for me it would be appropriate to give HK$1200. Why is more expected of me? Well because I'm the boss of this office, and because I get paid more, that means I'm expected to give more. The envelope I will present to the bride and groom must be red, and it's a good idea to give red currency notes (the HK$100 bill is red, and the HK1,000 bill is orangish/reddish). Red is considered to be good luck and a strong color than can drive away evil spirits.

I'm also told that there will be a mahjong game held before the wedding reception, but unfortunately I don't know how to play, so I will not be participating (if only I'd paid more attention when my mom was playing all those years!). So yeah, I'm sure I'll have an interesting post to display after the wedding ceremony.

In other news - my fellow Bostonian friend living in HK just got engaged - so I'll have another wedding to attend next year somewhere in Asia. Congrats Laura & Paul!