The Wedding of Ji Young and Sung Hee

Best wedding photo ever!!!

Who, you may ask, are Ji Young and Sung Hee? I don't really know. All I can tell you is that I was given the opportunity to bear witness to their nuptials this past weekend and it was a pretty neat experience. And no, I am actually not a wedding crasher. My friend Amanda is dating a guy named Mark who teaches an adult English class at a business school on weekends. Two students who met in his class got married this past Sunday; naturally, the entire class was invited. I was having coffee with Amanda on Sunday morning when she spontaneously asked me if I'd like to join her and Mark at the wedding that afternoon. I was uncomfortable at first because I had never met the bride or groom but Mark confirmed that it was fine with the couple if I tagged along. The thing I had to accept very quickly so that I could just get on with it is that weddings in Korea are an entirely different animal compared to weddings in Western countries. They are extremely fast, nowhere near as solemn, and largely uniform in nature. Typically, the bride and groom invite nearly everyone they know even marginally, and due to the nature of Korean wedding hall culture, it is no big deal for randoms like me to end up in attendance. But I'm getting ahead of myself.




First of all, wedding halls. The vast majority of Korean couples get married in wedding halls, which are scattered all over the country and are a massive industry in Korea. Some of them are built to look like castles straight out of Disneyland. Nearly every wedding follows the same formula: a Western-style ceremony in one room, followed by photos with the bride and groom and guests, followed by food in a giant buffet or banquet hall, and finally the paebaek, or Korean traditional ceremony. The thing about wedding halls is that they are huge and everyone uses them, so on any given weekend there are several weddings being held in one hall throughout the day. Rooms are booked for very particular periods of time and have to be available for each successive wedding, which is part of the reason why ceremonies are so fast and why there isn't really any kind of wedding reception. As Mark put it, the halls are essentially "wedding factories," churning out one wedding after another at high speed.

Example of a wedding hall taken from Kimchi Icecream.

The bride and groom are not given gifts at the wedding. Instead, when guests arrive, they put cash in an envelope at the front of the hall to give to the couple as a donation to start their new life. This cash is also meant to cover some of the costs of the wedding hall, including the meals for the guests. The ceremony itself is rather odd to a Westerner, in that it looks familiar on the surface but really couldn't be more different. Superficially, you have the groom in a tux, bride in a white dress, standing at what looks like an altar saying their vows. The ceremony really doesn't have any religious meaning to it, though, even with the significant number of Christians in Korea, and guests are not obligated to sit through the entire ceremony or even try to be quiet throughout. All of the doors to the wedding room were open, guests walked in and out at leisure, cell phones were ringing and conversations were held at regular volume at the same time that the couple was being united in matrimony. After the bride and groom made it official, some random dude sang a song to them and then Ji Young himself sang a song to his new wife. Meanwhile, it didn't seem to matter what the guests were doing. Some watched, some talked, some wandered. It was fascinating, since I could just imagine how people would react if guests acted this way at a wedding back home.

Sung Hee in her Western wedding dress...

...and later in her hanbok.

The primary difference here is that people go to weddings all the time. Like I said before, engaged couples invite pretty much everyone they've ever met to their wedding, due to both the social culture of Korea and the added financial boon (more guests, more cash). And the older and more esteemed a person is, the more people he or she knows who want them to attend their ceremonies or those of their family members. My former co-teacher told me that he goes to a wedding approximately every other weekend (!!!). The weddings are short and and don't eat up too much time in a person's day since guests can just make an appearance and cut out if they want. My co-teacher told me he actually sets aside a certain amount of money from each paycheck specifically as "wedding funds" to give when he is invited to a wedding because it happens so frequently.

The banquet hall

It was quite interesting to see the wedding hall culture in action. There were several weddings being held in the same hall on Sunday and the one I attended was just one of them. Signs with the names of various couples pointed guests to different areas of the wedding hall where their particular ceremony would be taking place. The giant banquet hall was used for all weddings, so when Mark, Amanda and I went to eat lunch, we sat and ate next to guests from any number of weddings in the building. People were extremely friendly toward us, as we were the only foreigners in the wedding hall that day, and Ji Young and Sung Hee's families were especially gracious. When it came time for the paebaek, they were excited for us to see a traditional Korean ceremony and allowed us to have essentially front-row seats.

The paebaek takes place in a special room in the hall that is decorated in a traditional Korean style and through which every newly married couple is rotated over the course of the afternoon. In fact, while Ji Young and Sung Hee were having their Western-style ceremony, some other couple was performing their Korean ceremony in the very next room. I managed to get a photo of both ceremonies occurring simultaneously.

Traditional, meet modern.

Bowing to the groom's mother.

In the paebaek, the participants wear traditional Korean clothing, called hanbok. The entire ceremony takes place around a table covered in tea and various foods like dates and chestnuts. Since no one can be expected to be familiar with all the ins and outs and details of this wedding ritual, there is a kind of "mistress of ceremonies" who directs the entire process, pointing people to where they need to stand or sit and helping the bride bow in her extremely restrictive hanbok. I found this ceremony to be interesting for several reasons, but I was especially struck by the involvement of the respective families of the bride and groom. First, the groom's mother was brought to the table and the bride and groom had to bow to her. Then each member of the couple grabbed either end of the bride's wedding apron and tried to catch a handful of chestnuts thrown by the groom's mom. Supposedly the chestnuts symbolize fertility; the more you catch, the more children you will have and the healthier they will be. Ji Young and Sung Hee only caught one chestnut. Hopefully they are anxious for a small family!

Preparing to catch the chestnuts!

Ji Young's father and uncles.

After the groom's mother, the various other members of the groom's family were brought to the table to be bowed to and offered tea poured by the couple. The same was then done for the bride's family members. Now when I say "various family members" I mean various. Parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins. It was fascinating how different the spirit of this ceremony was compared to the spirit of a Western wedding. Let's face it, in an American wedding, the focus is solely on the bride and groom, or at least it's supposed to be. It's an extension of the "me me me" mentality, but an extension we tend to view as totally acceptable because it's "their day." A little girl in the US is raised to dream about her wedding day. In the paebaek, however, the bride and groom are paying their respects to one another's families, every member of which is involved in the ritual. While the bride and groom are the only consistent participants, taking part in every individual step, they are frequently not the focus. They are bowing to the family, pouring tea for the family, watching as the family eats. It was just another reminder for me of how highly the family, and by extension the community and culture, are valued in Korea.

Sung Hee and Ji Young with the "mistress of ceremonies."

I have to say that Sunday ended up being one of the most random days I've had in my entire year in Korea. I woke up that morning expecting to leave Seoul in the afternoon and head back to my village for my final week of work, stopping only for a brief coffee break with Amanda. Somehow I ended up at the wedding of two Korean people whom I'd never met. Screw variety, spontaneity is the real spice of life. I never thought in a million years I'd get to take part in a Korean wedding and I was really pleased and honored that Ji Young and Sung Hee and their families allowed me to attend. Wishing nothing but the best of luck to the happy couple   :)