My big fat Vietnamese wedding

A Vietnamese wedding is a beautiful and strange beast, suspended somewhere between the old traditions of country life and religion on the one hand and a modern, Hollywood-inspired extravaganza on the other. I was fortunate enough to get to experience it first-hand as one of the lead participants, the groom. Or at the very least, let’s call it a strong supporting role (the lead role is, of course, reserved for the parents).

Planning the wedding was an adventure in and of itself. It taught me more about Vietnam and its customs and traditions than I could have hoped to learn in the years I’d lived here before that. It was an adventure, to say the least.

When my wife and I first started talking about our wedding, I assumed that it would be our decision when exactly it would take place. Oh, how young and foolish I was.

One day, at my then-girlfriend’s parents’ house, my future mother-in-law sat us down to give us what I thought would be a stern talking to. Instead, she produced a small yellow book. My wife and her discussed the contents of the book briefly and then began talking about a note on which her mother had written several different dates and times. The conversation went on in Vietnamese, and while I’m able to follow basic sentences, understanding a complete conversation is far beyond my capacity.

At this point in my life, I didn’t yet know much about the Vietnamese calendar and that little book that seems to govern much of the lives of the more traditionally-minded folk, the Lịch vạn sự.

Finally, my fiancée turned to me and said, “The wedding will be on the 17th of October, in the afternoon.”

“Um…,” I muttered. “It will?”

“Yes, my mother went to the temple and discussed it with the fortunetellers there,” my fiancée elaborated. “They said this is an auspicious date.”

“Ok,” I said, understanding only a fraction of what was happening. “Is that on a weekend?”

“It’s a Thursday,” she replied, matter-of-factly, blowing my mind in the process.

Now, I should elaborate. In my home, a wedding is traditionally a weekend affair. Saturday and Sunday are days of rest and it’s when people are usually free to attend. Not to mention the fact that most weddings last deep into the night, which doesn’t lend itself to going to work the next day. In short, nobody would dream of scheduling a wedding on a weekday afternoon.

However, I’m nothing if not agreeable. “O…K…,” I stammered.

“Oh, and the An Hoi, the engagement party?” she went on to say. “That’s on the Monday before at 8AM.”

It was at this point that I began looking for hidden cameras in the room, since I was convinced that this was a prank. When no camera crew appeared laughing at gullible old me, I stared at my fiancée.

“8AM,” I said. “On a weekday?”

“It’s an auspicious time,” she replied sympathetically, knowing my hatred of waking up early.

“Um…,” I managed. “OK?”

It was clear to me very early on in the planning process that I wanted this to be a normal Vietnamese wedding, with me hitting the same strides a Vietnamese groom would. And while my family and friends knew that, they still couldn’t hide their surprise when I arrived in my Ao Dai. It was a beautiful piece, a deep red decorated with traditional depictions of dragons and flowers. It was also wildly uncomfortable and hot, as everyone could tell from the streams of sweat running down my face.

As my own apartment didn’t have enough room to prepare everything for the An Hoi ceremony, we set up a staging area in the hotel where my family and friends stayed. Tourists gawked and took pictures while I posed for the wedding photographer we had hired.

Said photographer was, if nothing else, very thorough. He made me stand with every conceivable combination of all the people that were present, using his hands and feet to give instructions for poses and looks I should make. After what felt like 1,000 pictures, we finally made our way to my bride’s home.

My parents and brothers, as tradition demands, took cyclos along with the gift-bearers that carried the 9 traditional An Hoi gifts. While it was only a short trip, it was the first time for them to be in Hanoi traffic in something other than a car. With the photographer present, nobody wanted to show their fear, but their eyes widened in short, desperate prayers.

At my future in-laws’ house, the whole family was gathered, dressed in their Sunday best. Even the house itself had gotten a fresh coat of paint for the occasion, and to my surprise, the entire interior of the house had been changed to accommodate all the guests, though they were still far too many for the number of chairs available. However, nobody seemed to mind having to stand.

When our master of ceremonies, a 60-something-year-old man with the singing voice of a young-ish Elvis Presley, began speaking in loud, energetic Vietnamese, my family members made that face that westerners always seem to make when confronted with the more elaborate aspects of Vietnamese culture: a vague, encouraging smile that seems to say “I may not understand a word of what you’re saying, but I’m enjoying the Vietnamese-ness of it all”. To their relief, a good friend then translated the words for their benefit, letting them participate in what was happening.

When I retrieved my bride from the room she was hiding in, dressed in a matching red ao dai, we were met with enthusiastic applause. As we poured tea for the gathered family and friends, it occurred to me not for the first and certainly not for the last time how different this kind of ceremony was from what I was used to. The protocol, the rules, the priorities still seemed strange to me in some ways. And at the same time, it gave me a new appreciation for this culture I was beginning to adopt.

I was still enjoying sweet dreams of chocolate and bun cha when my bride already started her day, with a hair and make-up appointment at 5AM sharp. After I finally woke up hours later, I had a different kind of appointment: The traditional bouncing of children on my (soon to be our) bed.

Now, if you don’t know, many Vietnamese people put much faith in tradition and folklore, and for a foreigner, these traditional beliefs and endeavors range from the curious to the downright bizarre. However, as I’ve stated previously, I’m nothing if not agreeable. So of course, I just nodded when my bride told me that her brother’s children would come to my apartment before the wedding to jump around on the bed. Because of course they would. At this point, nothing could phase me. It’s meant to help a newlywed couple to have children soon after the wedding. “I guess it can’t hurt,” I thought.

Dressed in a suit and with my family and friends in tow, I arrived back at my bride’s house a few hours later, just as the sky opened itself for one of Hanoi’s trademark short rain showers. I was quickly told that, just like in my home, rain on your wedding day is supposed to be lucky. I thought it was funny that at some point, generations ago, people in Austria and Vietnam both thought, “I guess we can’t really control the weather, so saying rain is unlucky would be kind of a dick move. Let’s just say it’s lucky and be done with it.” Agreed, ancestors, agreed.

The pre-wedding ceremony at my in-laws’ house was very similar to the An Hoi ceremony – with the exception of the clothes my bride and I were wearing, the classic suit and wedding dress combo. We poured tea, Vietnamese Elvis enthusiastically hyped everyone up and thousands of photos were taken.

The wedding ceremony itself took place in a large ballroom, large enough to accommodate about 400 people. On our way there (with a short stop at the Hanoi Opera House to take more pictures, of course), I reflected on the sheer scale of the event. In Austria, a wedding with 100 guests is an absolute extravaganza, a tale of grandeur and decadence that will be told for years to come. In Vietnam, it would be deemed a pretty miserable, small affair. When I told my parents that 300-400 guests were expected to come to our wedding, their jaws dropped to the floor. When I told them that my future brother-in-law’s wedding had had twice as many guests, their jaws broke the crust of the Earth.

As I stood at the entrance of the ballroom with my bride and her parents, welcoming people neither I nor my bride had ever met in our lives, I thought about one of the key differences between an Austrian and a Vietnamese wedding. As a Vietnamese friend had explained it to me quite aptly, “In Vietnam, you don’t have a wedding. Your parents are having a wedding for you.” And it’s true. The vast majority of the guests had been invited by my bride’s parents – work colleagues, old acquaintances and so forth. This would be unthinkable in Austria. The parents don’t really have much of a role to play in a traditional Austrian wedding, since it’s all about the couple itself. It’s also not common to invite people that are not close family members or current good friends. But it was just another thing to which I had to adapt, so I took it in stride.

The wedding feast was… over the top, to say the least. My father called it “something straight out of Hollywood”. We had music blaring at that volume at which Vietnamese events always seem to play it, where it just starts to hurt your ears a bit. We had dragon dancers performing with drums, delighting the kids and inspiring the foreigners in the audience to take more video than they’d ever taken before. We had a procession into the ballroom with all four parents waving to the crowd like they’d been studying Queen Elizabeth their whole lives. And of course, we had champagne on dry ice, a cake nobody ate, and drinks with every single table in the room. So overall, it was pretty standard as Vietnamese weddings go.

Oh yes, and we exchanged rings, I gave a little speech in mediocre Vietnamese, and we arrived in our new home more exhausted than we’d ever been before. So, pretty standard.

And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Our wedding took place in late 2019, so we were lucky. This was before Covid hit, and there were no travel restrictions keeping my family and friends from coming to the wedding. Just 3 months later, Vietnam closed its borders and I wasn’t able to meet anyone from my home again for 2 years.

In the years since, I have learned much more about Vietnamese culture, about Vietnamese family life, and Vietnamese values. Not to mention Vietnamese food. So, stay tuned for more thoughts that will hopefully not take another 2 years to be posted.