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A Dongxiang Wedding Feast  by Babo Smith
L ate yesterday evening I got back from a trip up to the mountains,
where I got to see a minority-culture wedding among the
Dongxiang people. Once again, I was amazed at how different life was up there than in my city. Who needs to go to the moon when you can get on a bus going up the mountain? Standards of living are vastly different, culture is different, apparent values are different. It's like a whole other world. When I came back down the mountain, I seriously felt like I was stepping into something alien.

The wedding was very different from what I'm used to. In America, weddings are usually a celebration of the bride and groom, and their love for each other. Here, not so much. The reason why I think this is, is that the only thing their customs had the bride and groom do together was ride off together at the end.

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A Dongxiang couple on their wedding day.

I got there the night before, when they were having a feast for the bride's friends. The interesting thing is that none of her friends were there for the ceremony the next day. I think this is because the ceremony consisted of a single prayer about one minute long by a Muslim religious leader. Otherwise, everything was exactly the same as the night before, down to the selection of dishes for the wedding feast.

The night before the wedding was a happy time. Everybody laughed and drank tea and ate and ate and ate and ate. The bride was serving food, and was running all night filling people's teacups and carrying plates of food. The groom wasn't even there.

On the wedding day, the bride was all dressed up, kept in a room more or less by herself and she didn't eat. Whereas the night before she had been obviously excited about all that was happening, on the wedding day you could see apprehension in every line of her body. I think the groom felt about the same way, because he hardly touched his food. There was a "table of honor" that all the old men were sitting at, and he sat at the low, overflow table.

The real thing that people were celebrating at this wedding was community. This kind of makes sense when I think about it: this couple was marrying because of community. I don't think they knew each other very well, but it was time for them to mature, and get married, and start a family, and contribute to the general well-being of society, so they found somebody suitable and got married.

I am an Asian-Muslim-wedding newbie, and so the first night I had not yet learned the very valuable skill of looking like you're eating when you're actually not. You can't just stop eating, because that casts aspersions on your hosts, and so I ate and ate. The food was served in courses, so I had no idea the first night how much food was coming, and of course the answer was "more than you expect".

Things started off with tea and munching pumpkin seeds and dried plums, and such. The first course was deep-fried bread in lots of shapes and sizes. There were five or six major varieties. Some in ropes, some in cookie shapes, some cut into fancy shapes such as cabbage leaves and things. For second and third courses, they served stir-fried vegetable dishes: green bean and mushroom, respectively. I enjoyed them both thoroughly. The fourth course was my favorite: it was a beautiful roast beef, sliced and served in a broth. Oh - so good! It's rare to be able to get a large nice chunk of beef in this country, and this was perfectly cooked. It reminded me of home, actually. The fifth course was some kind of dough-plus-vegetable combination in a soup.

After the fifth course, things started getting serious. The sixth course was a whole fish, cooked to perfection in a slightly sweet sauce. Light, flaky fish, that pulled off the bones easily, so that if you were clever with your chopsticks, you wouldn't have to be fishing them out of your mouth. Next, they had shǒu zhuā yáng ròu (手抓羊肉) a.k.a. “Hand-Grab Lamb,” which is a food this minority is famous for. It consists of big shanks of stewed lamb. They're big shanks, so you need to eat it with your hands, which is fairly uncommon in this country. After the shǒu zhuā yáng ròu, they had some other food, which was followed by the ninth, and final course: a sweet rice porridge for desert. When the food was finished, everybody left immediately.

Cultures are interesting things. Somewhat, I was shocked at some of the attitudes towards marriage that I saw there - the apparent lack of love between the bride and groom being the main one. However, I can't really say that I think they're doomed to a loveless marriage - I think they just have to perform the actions of love, and the feelings will follow. We Americans are all about finding "somebody we love", and yet once we find them, about half of us end up not being able to live around each other later. Is lifelong love something that is possible, but extremely rare? It seems hopeless, until I look around me, and realize that I know an incredible, statistic-defying number of people who have loved long, and loved with all their hearts. And I think the reason why is that they are not relying on their own ability to love. That’s when they are able to love without thinking of whether they're being loved properly themselves.