“Korean weddings are so short!”
And why you’ll never catch me saying that again
“Korean weddings are so short!” — that’s an exclamation you’re very likely to hear if you attend a wedding in South Korea with other non-Koreans.
Weddings over here are usually very different to most weddings in the West. Most weddings take place in wedding halls: multi-level buildings where a new couple gets married every hour, with multiple ceremonies taking place at the same time, sometimes even on the same floor. Upon entering the busy lobby at my last wedding hall, I found the expectant couple’s venue on a large Samsung TV and then took the escalator up to the 6th floor. More than 200 people attended the wedding, all putting $50-$100 in small envelopes and handing them to the siblings of the bride before they went in. The ceremony took less than 40 minutes, and at least half of that was spent taking pictures. To quote the American father of the groom at another wedding: “What the hell is going on?”.
I’ll admit that at first, it can be very jarring to experience a Korean wedding as an outsider. For me as well, it was just so different to what I was used to: a church service followed by a reception. People use terms like “conveyor-belt wedding” to describe them, but after having lived here for a while, I honestly don’t feel that comfortable hearing that description any more for two reasons. First: different doesn’t mean bad, and that wedding is still that person’s special day, the day that they’re going to remember for the rest of their lives. I could go into twenty different reasons as to why this has developed as the norm for Korean weddings, but what’s the point?It’s just too easy to look down on other cultural conventions while being blind to your own culture’s subjective foibles.
But the other reason is far more impactful for me.
Last year, my Korean father-in-law passed away. We had grown to accept and love each other over the years and it was a very painful passing for me to accept. Guess how long his funeral lasted? 3 hours? 4 hours?
Try four days. Four days of mourning, grief, remembering, talking, sharing, commiserating, honoring, negotiating. My face has never been that sore from crying. At one point, I realized that for the first time in my life I was just completely cried out, there were just no tears left. The whole family continuously dressed in black and slept on the floor in the room next to the funeral parlor, rarely considering their own needs during the whole period. My wife’s co-workers travelled for 6 hours each way by bus, just to visit the funeral venue for 30 minutes. Staggering. Staggeringly respectful and beautiful and important and commemorative.
At some stage of my life, I will unfortunately have to consider my own parents’ mortality. And I wonder to myself, when that time comes, how long would the funeral last? 1 hour? Followed by some egg sandwiches with the crusts cut off? It’s not enough. I’d rather take the four days, thank you very much.
Korean weddings might be shorter than Western ones, but you won’t find me saying it anytime soon.
