The Wedding

I went to a wedding last weekend.

I’m not sure if it was a traditional wedding, if there really is such a thing among these billion grains of loose sand. I do know it took place in the bride’s hometown, outside. In the summer. A Hubei summer, no less. The mosquitoes were on the hunt, as were the flies and an old man chugged by, puffing on a cigarette between deep coughs, shirtless. Caked in enough layers of sweat to protect him from sunburns.

They bused us all there from Wuhan and back. Besides Wuhan, I had been to Beijing. Had friends flee there after a semester of Wuhan’s mosquitoes, rain and gladiatorial contests for available bus seats. But this place was of a different sort altogether. Like every city in China, there was development. A new home here, a new store there, but the way in which these people acted towards each other was so familiar. They talked to each other. They didn’t leave their communication for the computer or limit it to superficial concerns. They spoke. They knew each other, knew each other in the heat, in the winter cold, through the losses of grandparents and children, through the highs, the lows and those moments in life where we just coast on by, content with things the way they are.

When we got there, the neighbor woman was sitting outside hunched over her work. Black clumps in alignment like a legion of pre-molded clay soldiers. I later found out it was coal; she sat out here in the heat, this bony, weathered woman, right outside her house with its tilled floor and no insulation, sat here and scooped up the black stuff with her bare hands and shaped it into balls and set each to dry in the heat. This she spent the morning doing. Then she took her hands and used them to wash clothes, to thread cotton. She used them the entire day.

The groom was a foreigner. I had a chance to speak with him. Turns out he was a teacher back home, a French teacher of all things. Came here when things there got a little too…much. I can understand that. Boy, can I. He taught English and French here, and I found out that he and his wife were in the process of immigrating to America. The CR-1 visa. She had her interview two weeks after the wedding.

“And after that?” I asked him over cigarettes and bai jiu.

“We go back, I guess.”

“You guess? What do you intend to do there?”

He grew quiet. “I don’t really know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? You can be a teacher, can’t you?”

He conceded that yes, he could. He could also go do his Master’s, but that too posed a problem. “I do my Master’s, then what? I’m still in that position I was in when I had to come here.”

“Position?” I pointed out his beautiful wife to him. “If you had not ‘had’ to come here, look what you would have missed out on.”

“Yeah, I’m just worried. I’m going to have to look out for her.”

“So what are you really worried about then?”

“I…you just worry that you’re not good enough, you worry about what comes next. That sort of stuff.” He put out his cigarette. “I just don’t know.”

“Look at your wife.” He did. “You think about what will come next, but you didn’t think she would come next and she did. So think about that.”

I put out my cigarette.

We had lunch and then right before dinner, the bride, the groom and her parents took the stage. The bride read from a paper, long flowing sentences with the groom giving short, concise interpretations for the few foreigners in attendance. The groom did not have many people in attendance. None of his family was there. No one from America. Just the few foreign friends he’d made here.

After they spoke, it was time for others. Uncles. Aunts. Friends. They all came on to the stage and spoke. A boy was among them and as he spoke, his friends came up and drew out their faces in grotesque contortions over the objections of parents, none of whom actually did anything to stop them.

The time came for the rings. The bride and groom bowed to each other. Then to her parents. They took turns hugging, the parents in tears. In their embrace, the father said something to the groom. I heard it. Heard his voice mixed with an anticipation all twenty-eight of his daughter’s years in the making. “Zhùfú nǐ,” he said. “Zhùfú nǐ.

“Zhùfú nǐ.”

Then her brother spoke.

“JiÄ›,” he began and turned away. He had to stop several times and when it was over they hugged.

Then her father spoke.

He read from a scroll of read paper and kept his composure until the end. The audience applauded and she bowed to them and the audience applauded some more. What did they say? I don’t know. I don’t think I should know. Perhaps it was something of such a make that to even do a surface translation would be to disfigure it and so rob it of all the beauty, of that which makes such a speech uniquely its own. The audience heard, they understood, but even they cannot know. It is between family, and as well, it will stay that way.

Dinner was short. The new couple came and toasted each other and before we knew it, it was time to get back on the bus and return to Wuhan. They saw us off. On my way out, I saw the new couple standing there in the road, together watching us leave.

I wondered, does he ever think about the women he kissed and slept with prior to his wife? Those were just kisses, that was just sex.

Does he know the enormity of the duty he now has? Does it frighten him? It must. Yes, it must.

And yet, I believe they will be okay. They shrunk at edge of the road until they left my sight, but I think of them still. I think of them and all those who have found love, all those who have chosen the same path to walk. All the ones who stand before the rest of their lives and to them I have one thing to offer the words of her father, of the man who brought her up all her life to see her off to another man, another country. A new life.

Zhùfú nǐ.