South Korean wedding provides a peek into love, marriage in another culture

Community blogger Clinton Stamatovich attended a South Korean friend’s wedding, which provided a glimpse into a culture where love, dating, marriage and tradition play different parts than they do in the United States.

South Korean marriage is relatively similar to the format of Western marriages, but with the underpinnings of the ever-present Confucianism still residual in everything from street etiquette to the judicial system. I was invited to an ex-coworker’s ceremony in December 2014 and experienced — or maybe just bore witness to — a South Korean speed wedding.

During my first year in South Korea, my co-teacher, whose English name was Ellie, was constantly worried about her marriage status. Not because she wanted to get married, but because her mother wanted her to. Ellie had studied and lived in California for some time and missed the traditional courting years of young South Korean men and women. She lived with her parents (which is very common in Korea, as to get your own apartment you must put down a deposit of anywhere from 5,000 USD to 20,000 USD), and so if she went out to dinner or drinks with me, by 10 p.m. her mother would call multiple times to make sure she was coming home. She was 33.

In that year, Ellie’s mother would set up blind dates (arranged dating is very common, resulting in arranged marriage) almost every weekend. Ellie dreaded it. She complained about it every Monday. I would joke that at least she was getting free dinners and movies out of the deal, so it wasn’t that raw.

An as important side note: It was very unusual that I made the invitation list for a coworker, as many times in academies and public schools, relationships between the South Korean and foreign teachers rarely evolve past hallway pleasantries. I had the privilege of having an extremely great group of coworkers my first year in Changwon (where the wedding was), who I became friends with, would frequently do extracurricular activities with and would accompany on trips to botanical gardens or traditional islands.

Korea has not recognized all options of union – it’s still exclusive to man and woman. At age 18, young men and women can marry with parents’ consent, but once 20, individuals are free to marry without restrictions. Homosexuality is viewed as negative in Korea, and often times my students will use the slur "gay" as a hostile insult toward another student. However, same-sex relationships are extremely ostentatious, with mothers and daughters holding hands well past the daughter ages into adulthood and everyone from middle school boys to businessmen walking down streets with arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders or hands placed in each other’s pockets.

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In the countryside of South Korea, there is purportedly a shortage of women, and mail order brides have become very popular for Korean men, who send for Vietnamese, Cambodian and Chinese women. These particular kinds of marriages are set up by marriage brokers. Unfortunately, a lot of these marriages, including those in which South Korean men and women are married to foreigners who aren’t of Asian descent, have a high rate of divorce. Many individuals are advised to visit The Ministry of Gender Equality in order to be educated on behavior, and to go over and collaborate on the reasons they wish to be wed.

In 2014, the South Korean government imposed new tests to be passed for South Korean and foreign couples to be married. The couples must prove they can support each other financially and illustrate communication with one another. Statistics from the Wall Street Journal show that 0.6 percent of 50 million people living in South Korea are foreigners married to South Korean citizens. Though the numbers are relatively small, South Korean society is largely homogenous and takes notice.

Traditionally, the wedding ceremony itself (called Honrye, or?? in Hangul) consists of the groom traveling to the bride’s home, with the groom’s family providing gifts for the bride’s family. The bride and groom wear traditional hanboks respectable for their genders. The woman’s hanbok is a long, wide-sleeved jacket and long skirt decorated with brightly colored ribbons. Sashes and boat-shaped shoes might also appear. The groom wears a similar outfit that’s less flashy and has an overcoat. Atop his head would be a small cylinder shaped hat secured by a strap.

Korea is also in the books for the Blessing Ceremony of the Unification Church (Holy Marriage Blessing Ceremony), which is a wedding on a stadium level including thousands of other couples that marry simultaneously — not too far off from the usher-me-in-usher-me-out style currently observed by the mainstream, where the couples are married 20 minutes apart instead of at the same time. Members (you don’t have to be a follower of the Unification Church to be wed this way) of the Blessing Ceremony are relinquished of a sinful history or lineage and accepted unto God through the process. Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the Unification church, was historically a proponent of interracial, interreligious and international politics and marriage and established the ceremony in 1961 in Seoul.

The process and his church became relatively popular for its blindness to other religions. Moon supervised over a Blessing Ceremony of 28,000 couples in Washington D. C. People travel from all over the world to be a part of the Unification Ceremony, with some being married through live video sessions remotely. In 1997, 30,000 couples wed this way in Washington. In 2000, 21,000 thousand wed, filling the Olympic Stadium in Seoul. One eerie aspect of the Unification marriage proceedings would be to look out from the stage and see thousands of identically dressed, similarly thinking couples, a sea of black and white. With Moon passed, his widow, Hak Ja-han, presides over the proceedings at 70 years old.

Today, spread throughout all larger cities are wedding halls that always happen to be used consecutively by other couples – as if, in your city, on any given day you’d like to be married, there are 12 other couples that need to be married, too. Every time I’ve been to a wedding in Korea, the entire parking lot was full, and there seemed to be five entire families’ worth of individuals waiting in lines while one family was finishing up their ceremony.

These wedding halls are rented and then pre-decorated identically to the previous couple — sometimes using the same bouquet. In my experience, the heat is cranked up to 30 degrees Celsius and the ceremony is unbearably crowded. For the particular wedding I attended, the theme was fairy tales. Disney, of course, not the gruesome, morbid tales that became disseminated via the Grimm Brothers and before.

I’m glad I had a written invitation with the actual address and a PICTURE of the wedding hall on it or else I may not have arrived at all (I was told an ex-coworker would contact me and pick me up from the bus station, but hey, you can only wait so long). The hall looked like something in between a cardboard castle and an Evangelist’s dwelling. As soon as I entered the doors, immediate chaos reared its head in the form of bustling Koreans darting in every direction – men in white gloves attempting to sort out groups of people into various halls, photographers taking photos of the wrong people and really worried, largely angry-looking elderly people talking over the commotion. A massive, 12 foot-tall door opened for a brief moment, revealing a couple on stage already. Everyone in the audience turned to see who could possibly be interrupting the ceremony, but honestly not really caring so much about the interruption, as they seemed to be more let down by the dumbfounded foreigner than the arrival of uncle Kim. I was then ushered by an unknown person up a set of stairs and into a room with a single bar that gave out fruit juice across from a small bench where the bride — the one I was looking for — was sitting and taking photos with other people being ushered in and out of the room.

I hadn’t seen Ellie in over a year, and I spewed out all the necessary dialogue while being pushed up to the couch and sitting down with her. I smiled and looked forward and maybe 40 pictures or so were taken. I asked her if she was excited, and she told me she wasn’t. Not really, she said.

One difference from not only the West, but many ideologies of marriage around the world, is that a Korean wedding is about the aspirations of the family and about the individual being married on a secondary level. That is to say, mom will be very happy, but the one being married may have more than enough reservations to result in divorce. Mom, along with the entirety of the rest of the family, must consent to one’s wishes to marry.

As a customary gift, the attendees give envelopes of money to the bride and groom. I was told to give 30,000 won (about 30 USD) and slipped it to Ellie like a drug deal.

I was hustled out of the room as quickly as I entered, in a fury of coats and cameras, briefly seeing my old director, other ex-coworkers and a few of my old students who looked like they’d gone through puberty since last I saw them.

Finally, in the crowd, standing at the back, the lights dimmed and spotlights in neon colors zig-zagged around the room, illuminating stone-faced elders, bored children, and Ellie’s very, very happy mother, who sat on stage the entire ceremony with and indestructible smile the whole while.

The crowd was split down the middle with a fashion show catwalk. The respective parents were on either side in hanbok, sitting level with the groom. By way of concealed projectionist, the entire wall behind the groom and priest displayed alternating images of Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella, I presume, with flashes of pumpkin-shaped carriages.

The man officiating the marriage stood on stage with the groom and they cracked wise, making a few jokes to one another, and the lights changed to icy blue as a spotlight focused to the right of the room, where Ellie stood on a balcony. A song in the key of "My Heart Will Go On" started in, and the balcony slowly lowered as everyone in the crowd narrowed eyes on the bride (though no one stopped talking the entire time and maintained busy conversations with their neighbors).

They couple stood facing each other for a short time as the officiator spoke in tongues. No kiss. The couple was ushered (women rushed in from the sidelines to manipulate the bride’s dress throughout the whole process) to this side of the stage for photos, then to that side for photos, then in front of their respective parents, where the bride and groom prepared a kind of pledge. Photos. A woman appeared from the right stage and set up a podium where she, very embarrassingly to me, sang solo another Celine Dion jig to the newlyweds who stared back into her eyes, speechless.

Shortly after the crowd cheered in elation, the couple, followed by spotlight, was ushered up the catwalk, closer to me, stopping every so often for photos. Finally, at the end of the catwalk, the couple pecked a kiss on the cheek. Twenty minutes. We were ushered to the buffet.

Pyebaek is a secondary ceremony that only family members are present for in which the parents-in-law are officially greeted by the bride or groom, and (sources say often, so I’m not sure how often this happens realistically) the groom allegedly provides a piggy back ride for his mother and bride in order to prove his responsibilities to them. I didn’t see this, of course, but I did see Ellie and her husband (who looked like a South Korean Joseph Gordon Levitt) after the first 20 minute ceremony dressed in traditional hanbok, having changed from her Western gown. I don’t think I’d be too far off to assume that her groom, only moments beforehand, was giving out piggy back rides.

There’s not a big to do about cake and ice cream or wine and spirits as there is a about the buffet. Buffets have taken the Korean continent by storm — they infiltrated mainstream eaters’ culture with the option of unlimited food, and a smorgasbord to boot, featuring cuisine from around the world (well, not really, because Korea really only touts other Asian dishes and Italian and American fast foods). Buffets are extremely popular, running anywhere from $20-40 a head, in my personal experience. The buildings, chefs, silverware and décor are usually five star, with salad bars enough to get lost in. Almost another national pastime, families invade buffets around early noon and lunchtime and devour plates of food. But they don’t leave. In Korea, they wait it out. They bring reading material and sip coffee. There are always play rooms for children to expel the calories they’ve just consumed. Once some time has passed, they do round four, five or six. Needless to say, an easy way to satiate a whole lot of people in a hurry is to usher them into a buffet.

My girlfriend, ex-director and ex-coworker were all so adamant about providing me with silverware because I can’t use chopsticks (actually, I can, but whatever) and drinks that when I actually sat down after filling up my plate, I had four spoons, two forks, one chopstick and three beers.

The buffet was massive, of course. It included every Korean dish I was familiar with (typically at a wedding, you’ll see pickled cabbage called kimchi, marinated beef called bulgogi and dumplings called mandu) in addition to pizza, fried sweet potato, Chinese noodles and a whole table full of sushi. For any kind of ceremony, from weddings to deaths, Koreans consume tteok, which is a sticky rice cake with no taste. I sat in a dining hall with maybe four other families who’d seen a wedding that day and watched as one of a group of middle school or high school boys employed by the buffet company to bus tables covertly — he thought so, anyhow — filled the top cup in the cup stack he was busing with a bit of beer. He rushed it to the kitchen area while the other boys waited near the drinks, and in three seconds, the boy emerged with an ear-to-ear smile, beaming, being pat on the back by his friends, joyous and participating in the celebratory smorgasbord atmosphere.

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