Wedded bliss doesn't have to cost a thing

Last year on the National Holiday, I attended the wedding of one of my best friends. The bride and groom, high-ranking 30-somethings in IT companies, dressed elegantly in Western style clothes. Guests who rushed to the French buffet all paused to have their photos taken by a wedding photographer.

The excited parents gave long speeches that roughly meant: Finally, you are married but hurry with the baby.

It was all very romantic, just as I had dreamed of years ago. However, when I got married about ten years ago, we didn't have the luxury to celebrate. We made the decision months before I received my master's degree, and my husband had just worked for three years. In addition to being unaffordable, a banquet was also inconceivable for us, because both our families lived faraway from Beijing.

We went to the civil affairs office where my husband's household registration was kept on file. A woman there said we both needed a photo in addition to household registrations, ID cards and verification of our identity from his boss and my teacher.

To save time, we took a picture downstairs where there was only one photographer with one camera. My fianc was clad in a worn-out blue shirt. Luckily, I had put on a coat with red and blue stripes, which was appropriate for the occasion.

That night, we called home to announce the news. Nobody seemed very excited, as we had been dating for four years and had visited both families to ask their approval.

But the next day, my dad showed up. Well, actually, he was not there to surprise us, but rather to attend a meeting. When he saw the photo, he smiled and said: "You look just like your mom in our old wedding photo."

When they got married in the early 1960s, Mom was also a fresh graduate from a university in Northeast China and Dad had been working in Shanghai for two years.

Before the 1970s, one's class status could determine everything. My grandpa had organized porters to fight the Kuomingtang in the Yangtze River before 1949. His family was classified as "poor farmer".

When Mom told Grandpa her fianc came from a family of the "medium farmer" class, grandpa wasn't happy. Fortunately, he found Dad to be an honest young man and finally agreed to his eldest daughter's choice.

Mom and Dad took their wedding photo in a small studio. They were lean and their clothes were shabby and patched. But they had the most brilliant smile and shining eyes I've ever seen.

Recently, my cousin threw lavish wedding banquets in Shanghai, where she works in a bank with her husband, and in Chongqing, where my aunt is a prominent middle school teacher. They invited hundreds of relatives, friends and local celebrities to enormous restaurants.

Dad visited my cousin in Shanghai's prosperous Pudong New Area. He said she wouldn't stop complaining about her mother-in-law and how insufficient her 8,000-yuan ($1,107) monthly income is.

"She is too young to understand what life is," Dad said, sighing.

(China Daily 01/31/2008 page20)