After a few weeks to recover, I'm happy to announce that I have married my Shanghainese boyfriend of the past three years. I think our experience might be a little different from what some of the other saloon members have had, so I'd like to share how we decided to approach the different cultural expectations.
Right after we were engaged, I made a couple posts regarding the role of hong bao in a wedding. My experience, from talking to my Chinese co-workers, was that most people hated weddings and they tended to be money collection events where everyone was miserable and loathed the financial burden of it all. People would dread getting wedding invitations because the market price (in Shanghai at least) seemed to run about 1000rmb a wedding, depending on your relationship to the person- and this was for people who were only making a few thousand a month. My former manager told me if she could've chosen, she wouldn't have had a wedding at all but her parents forced her to and it was exhausting and miserable. Wow! Sign me up for one of them!
Different families seem to handle this differently, but my experience in Shanghai- and with the family I'm marrying into- the parents use their children's weddings as a way to get back the money they've had to give in hongbao to everyone else in the family. The people actually getting married don't see any of it- the parents handle everything, and all their debts are settled- through their children- who would then give out lots of money until their kids one day got married so they could get it back. I had a pretty strong aversion to my wedding being a money-making event for anyone. My husband had an even stronger stance: no hongbao. He wanted to totally separate from the system entirely so when his friends were married he could give them something meaningful instead of a huge amount of money that would need to be repaid to the jiao. But this still left the problem of his parents who were very eager to get their money back...
Apparently between my husband's cousin getting married and having a baby over the previous two years, his parents had given her family around 15,000RMB. His mother makes 3k a month. There was a lot of pressure to give the "going amount" and if you gave less, it would be a huge loss of face. There needed to be a compromise. His family would give hongbao- that would go straight to his parents and we'd have no interaction with it- and everyone else would be threatened that any hongbao they tried to give us would not be accepted. And it seemed to work.
From the moment we were engaged to the actual wedding, we had gone from wanting a totally traditional Chinese wedding to a standard western wedding. We both just really wanted our guests to have a good time, not feel burdened financially by the event, and to keep things small enough that we would easily be able to interact with everyone who came. Our goal number of guests: 30. Arguments my husband had to endure with his parents: you're not inviting all your co-workers! we'll lose so much face! Yeah, your wife isn't Chinese, but you are! Chinese people need to follow the tradition! Most of your family members are Buddhist (news to us..) and can't go to a church! (Can someone who knows more about Buddhism than me tell me if that is remotely valid?)
Yes, we were married in a church. Here was our compromise: Simple 20 min ceremony in a church with an American pastor. I wore a red, two piece outfit that was a hybrid fitted tangzhuang, qipao with a full skirt. My bridesmaids wore qipaos with red trim. My husband wore a zhongshanzhuang with a red handkerchief and his groomsmen wore suits with red ties. Afterwards, we had a small lunch with 3 tables in a nice Chinese restaurant.
The day of the wedding was the first blue-sky, sunny day in Shanghai in about six weeks. As we waited in the church for people to arrive, some very passionate woman started doing interpretive dancing in front of the church and I guess was doing her best to convert all the guests? The audio person didn't have any music for me to walk down the aisle, and they didn't decorate the church until 15 mins before the service. Actually- it was okay. Things were quirky, but it was small, we were surrounded by friends and family, and it was just what we wanted. My father was able to walk me down the aisle and two of my friends from the US were able to come over and join in the ceremony.
We were on the go for a long time, and didn't get to spend much of our time off work alone together. We'd originally planned on sleeping at his parents apartment the night after the wedding (they'd decked everything out in red) but because my husband travels for business we were able to cash in some of his points for a nice hotel away from everyone for an evening. My father (a man who doesn't even like to eat Chinese food in the US) even had a good time and learned how to use a chaling (that toy with two sticks and a string that has a plastic piece that rides on the string and can whistle when you get it going fast enough) in the park one morning with my father-in-law.
We're still trying to pay back my husband's father for some of the costs to try to separate ourselves from the hongbao system entirely. By keeping the wedding small, even in downtown Shanghai we were able to keep all of the costs well under 10k, so we'd rather absorb it than get wrapped into this familydebt tradition.