Taiwanese Wedding, featuring Principal Dragon!

A while ago, all of the Fulbrights got invited to the wedding of the son of the principal at San Min, the school where our main office is and where I work at English Village. I agreed to go, but I had kind of forgotten about it until this morning when Billy asked me if I was going to the wedding. I took a peek at my invitation and realized it was today! Ha. Good thing I didn't have anything else to do!

So this evening around dinnertime, six of us got mildly fancied up and went to Principal Lin's son's wedding. This is very different from going to a Western wedding. For one thing, wedding dress is less formal here. Suits and fancy dresses are not necessary. Also, usually if you attend a wedding in America, you are presumably a friend or relative of the bride or groom. The only encounter I had ever had with either of these parties before was the one time during orientation when we were leaving San Min and we ran into them taking some wedding pictures outside of the school. For another thing, in Taiwan the wedding pictures don't happen on the wedding day...the bride and groom spend lots of time before the wedding getting dressed up in all kinds of fancy outfits and taking lots and lots of pictures in different settings. Also, there is no gift registration to help you pick out some nice kitchen implements for the happy couple, because in Taiwan you just give them money in a nice red envelope. Not too complex, except you have to be careful about the amount you give to make sure that it is lucky. Even numbers are good, but you don't want a number including "4" because 4 in Chinese sounds like death. We gave $1200, which various Taiwanese people assured me is an appropriately lucky amount.

The event that we went today didn't include a ceremony, nor was there any dancing or anything. There were some speeches and a slideshow, but mainly there was eating. It took place in a giant hall full of tables, and you pretty much stay at your table the whole time. At some point, the bridal party comes around to all the tables and toasts everybody. They appeared to be using cranberry juice, which was probably wise given the number of tables.

The meal was 12ish courses, and featured a lot of things that I didn't know exactly what they were or how to eat them. I snagged a thing that looked kind of like a sweet potato chip, only to be informed by Shana as I bit into it that it was made of compressed fish roe. Let's be honest: it was gross. I was relieved when the desserty courses came, because they had far less questionable contents. Although there was the fruit soup that had weird white things in it (a kind of seaweed or fungi, I would guess) that supposedly would make me beautiful, as I was informed by the helpful man sitting next to me.

Dinner was a bit of an awkward time in general, especially because our table had six Americans and 2 Taiwanese couples who seemed fairly averse to talking to us. The Taiwanese couples didn't even really talk to each other. It was only the one guy who talked to us at all. So that was awkward, but the awkward highlight of the evening was when the principal of my school came over to our table.

To explain: I can't remember if I've said much about him before, but the principal of my school is a CRAZYPANTS. His English name is Dragon (he picked it himself!), and he is generally incoherent in English and not much better in Chinese. Even the other teachers at my school acknowledge that his Chinese isn't very clear. He came over to our table while one of the Taiwanese guys was gone, and *borrowed* his wine glass to toast all of us. Seeing our confusion at his original mixed-up toast, he clarified with "happy! nice!" and a thumbs-up. There were a couple of these toasts in a short period of time. Then he poured all of the wine left at our table into Dr. Phil's glass and made him drink. With our table out of wine, he disappeared momentarily and then reappeared with another bottle of wine, apparently snagged from a different table. More toasts all around. Did I mention that Dragon is looking pretty pink at this point? I ask him if the bride is a teacher at Yang Ming, because I thought I had heard someone say that. He said no, it's the groom who is a teacher at Yang Ming. Then he says that I can be the bride of Yang Ming. I'm a little confused by this. He clarifies, and it turns out that he means he thinks I will be the next person from Yang Ming to get married. Oooooookay. Then he goes on about my boyfriend, mispronouncing his name so thoroughly that I would never have known he was trying to say Gered if someone else didn't guess it. He reminds me that Gered is tall and slim, and pantomimes this. I'm doing the smile-and-nod thing here. It is basically a necessity in any conversation with my principal. He toasts me with a ganbei(lit. "dry cup"), which means I have to finish my glass of wine. Fortunately there isn't much in it. Then, he inexplicably asks me if I want to marry a Taiwanese man. Not the next question I would have expected. I tell him I wasn't planning on it. He asks me when I'm leaving Taiwan, and when I say June, he tells me that I should stay here, because I can get all the men. Super. With a lot more thumbs-up action, Dragon tells Dr. Phil that I am very good and that the students and the teachers all like me. "The boy teachers like you," he says to me, by way of clarification. He's still sitting in the other man's seat...why hasn't the other guy come back yet? Dragon has been at our table for a while at this point and everybody is feeling very awkward. To be honest, I am kind of enjoying myself, because it is a hilarious kind of awkward. There are some more toasts, and Dragon attempts to bond with Dr. Phil a little bit. Dr. Phil looks completely overwhelmed.

Several times during this extensive and sometimes painfully awkward conversation, it looks like Dragon is about to leave, but each time it turns out to be a false hope. Finally he comes over to me to put the final touches on what has been a long and hilarious conversation. He tells me once again how great I am, and how the other teachers all like me, and I assure him that I like them a lot as well. He tells me that the students all think I am the most beautiful, and does a little impression of them for my benefit. Another great part of this is that when he talks about me in Chinese, he gets my Chinese name wrong every time, calling me Bei li ka instead of Li bei ka. I feel that since he knows that my English name is Rebekah, it shouldn't be too hard to keep my Chinese name in order. Apparently this is untrue.

Finally, after a couple glasses of wine and an amazing amount of awkward, Dragon departed from our table, and the night was henceforth quite uneventful. The End.