Kanako at the engagement ceremony.
By Bill Marcus
I’m sure someday I’ll look back at yesterday’s events with nostalgic fascination, but while living and eating through them, I could only stress.
The morning began with the engagement party. Modern tradition combines engagement and wedding ceremonies. At breakfast, my friend Baul told me he had been up since 5 am. Jet lagged, I was up since 2:30. He looked exhausted. I felt it.
At the ceremony the pair sat in handsomely upholstered chairs on a stage flanked by a “matchmaker” and representatives of their family. Directed by an emcee, they exchanged rings. The event, which took place in a small room of a hotel near Bangkok’s main river was followed by the distribution to all those in attendance of gelatinous balls.
She is Japanese. He is Thai of Chinese descent, with a heavy ethnic emphasis on the Chinese. Hence, all the ceremonies Wednesday were Thai-Chinese. They’ll do it again In Japan, but, I’m told that will be for the cameras.
She is beautiful, nice, charming and intelligent. They met in the fall of 2002 when we were all students at Fudan University in Shanghai. He was 22 at the time. Now he is 33. She is 31.
The couple communicates mostly in Chinese (80%) but also in Japanese (15%) and Thai (5%), Baul said. Kanako has been here in Bangkok for a year working as Baul’s assistant. He literally works seven days a week. This has been going on for some years so it is helpful that she is by his side in the office and at the shop since otherwise they would never see each other.
Baul tells me Thai and Japanese are a good match. A relative confirmed this after the engagement party. The Thai like the Japanese since during the war they didn’t kill too many here — just marched through on their way to Burma, the man said.
Baul says he and his wife (he was still calling her “my girlfriend” the day before the wedding) connect well with their respective in-laws because modern Asian cultures in both countries are very similar.
Baul, of course, is a nickname. His real name is Veraphon Ngamjarassrivichai. I don’t think she’ll be taking it, though there’s certainly enough room in it for more than one person. All five Ngamjarassrivichai siblings sound hauntingly similar when they speak English, which they can do in limited samples. But when Mr. Ngamjarassrivichai, who speaks no English, tried to connect with me in Chinese my responses engendered a blank look. He would try again a couple of times more throughout the day, with each encounter leaving me more and more anxious.
After the morning engagement party, which was precision timed to a script prepared by a fortune teller, the men folk, yours truly included, dispatched to the hotel’s 19th floor (there must have been something about that number since the wedding was held on the 19th). We were followed close by a gang of female family and friends. Walking down a long hallway, Baul, his uncle beside him, ten pink envelopes in the uncle’s pocket, each with a one hundred baht bill in it, bribed their way past three “gates” — small chains held by the bride’s family and/or friends. Having reached the door (at a cost of about US$20) Baul was admitted to the room which represented the bride’s family home.
There he was ceremonially granted permission to marry by the bride’s very modern Japanese mom and dad (a lovely guy who, thankfully, spoke English and Chinese, and, next to whom I was seated later that evening at the “Japan” table at the wedding banquet — it was the only time of the day when I wasn’t totally isolated). More pictures were taken. The families then went to Baul’s family’s house for a tea ceremony. I went shopping.
I was later told by the bride’s father that the tea ceremony, unlike a Japanese tea ceremony, included more deferential scraping, bowing as well as the traditional offering of tea by the couple to his parents.
Bangkok’s notorious traffic delayed the start of the Chinese-Thai wedding ceremony and banquet. But I was able to arrive early since the Banyan Tree hotel on Sathorn where the banquet was held was just a short walk up the street from the YWCA where I am staying. (The earlier ceremonies were at a another hotel, across town. After the morning’s events I checked out there and returned here to the Y where the manager greeted me with a big “Welcome Home.” I love this place!)
The evening was a blur of what seemed like endless photographs. As a reporter I’ve covered many major figures, including the President, but I can’t remember as much continual media coverage as exists at a typical Chinese wedding. It was exhausting for me and I wasn’t even the one getting married! There was also ceaseless bowing, coupled with continuous smiling, handshaking, and thanking. Baul and Kanako never sat down, or, even, ate, as far as I could see. Everything was painfully for show and/or for the cameras.
I was the only non-Asian guest out of some 300. At the engagement party where reference was made to a famous Japanese romance movie in which a Japanese soldier falls in love with a Thai girl (this coupling, of course, is the reverse) all the speeches, were in Thai. A translator repeated everything in Chinese. I had a fighting chance to catch, maybe, a word or two — but in reality, I couldn’t decipher a whit. Instead, I relied on a friend of Kanako, another 2002 Fudan Chinese language student from Japan, who sat next to me and haltingly explained in her best English what was going on.
In addition to the isolation and the jet lag my digestive system was still spasmodic from eating rich sour cream last Monday at Gershon’s and a full bowl of New England Clam Chowder the Saturday night before (I have learned my lesson and will NEVER do that again!). A pharmacist here sold me some peppermint oil and digestive herbs which, as of dinner last night, seemed to be helping. (In between the ceremonies, when I went shopping, I also went back to the pharmacy and actually read the directions so now, after taking the meds for two days already, I know how to take them.)
I could tell my linguistic isolation was troubling for others who responded with varying degrees of solicitation. Each of Baul’s siblings, save the oldest one who I had never met, approached me to ask if I remembered meeting them (I hadn’t, in part, because it had been so long and they had grown so much.) Baul’s mother didn’t remember us meeting, even though I recall her chastising me some years ago for paying too much for a shirt and for not taking better case of a vase I bought to give her as a gift on one visit when she invited me out for a meal. The oldest brother (all the siblings spoke functional English) explained the family business of silk manufacturing had recently expanded to include an investment in a Laotian coffee plantation. The first harvest is expected this November. Would I like to either help sell the coffee in the U.S. or write about it? I tried to defer politely, but thankfully, weddings are the type of social occasion that give everyone ample time to be distracted, so after a period I was able to escape any commitment.
Everyone I met who didn’t manufacture something seemed to be in the export or importing industry. Hence, they spoke more than one language. Kanako’s dad brings olive oil from Italy and metal from China into Japan. Kanako’s two friends from Fudan, one of whom was from China, are also importers. The relative who gave me the history lesson had worked in Houston, Texas for Pennzoil, which has since been bought by Shell.
Luckily, I only passed out at the table only twice. The fist time it was the water mixed with whiskey. The last time, toward the evening’s end, I was simply overwhelmed with exhaustion. When I opened my eyes Mr. Tamura, Kanako’s English-speaking dad, was gone, and it was nearly 10 o’clock, which meant the party was over. Trying to make my way out another smiling relative pushed his English-speaking 20-something son in front of me. The boy was in his 6th year at a college in Dallas. I was nearing the end of my rope (having just woken up) but after some small talk I navigated the reception line (how many times can you be thanked for coming and congratulate the same people over and over again and have the same picture taken?) and made my way out the door, and down the block back here to YWCA.
photos
UPDATE: NOV 20, 2015
