When East Marries West
Spilling the (Chinese) Tea on Inter-Racial Marriage
I love weddings. Our peak wedding years have passed, I’m sad to say, although a couple of my younger cousins are getting married in exciting places next year, and last Friday we celebrated two of our friends tying the knot at our church. Weddings at our church tend to be a family affair, where we move the chairs and make the tea and feel a bit like we’re hosting the family and friends of the couple as well.
Viv and Will’s wedding was particularly special for a few reasons. It was the first marriage ceremony conducted by our new vicar, and lucky for him both the bride and groom are extraordinarily cheerful and easygoing people - not a bridezilla/groomzilla between them1. The evening reception was at the private bar in a smart pub in South London, and they had the greatest wedding playlist I’ve ever heard. At very nearly forty years old, I have less than zero desire to go out dancing these days, but what a wholesome and extraordinary joy to be “out” in a well-lit oak-panelled room filled with flowers and your friends in their beautiful dresses, not having to worry about your drink or your handbag, just bopping along to one stone-cold banger after another. The Spice Girls! followed by NSYNC! the Backstreet Boys! and then the Spice Girls again! I couldn’t have been happier.
(Except if James had been there, of course. He was supposed to come, and we had a lovely babysitter lined up - but during the ceremony, the school phoned to let us know that Ottilie (5) had been sick in class. We asked her later, what happened. She explained matter-of-factly, “Oh, I was sick on the table, and on the carpet, and on my chair, on my painting, on my skirt…” So he stayed back with her.)
Our wedding fourteen years ago was at the same church, and like Viv and Will, was a Chinese bride/white groom situation. Even a few of the same friends were there.
Cross-cultural weddings, in my experience, tend to be pretty spectacular. A sizeable proportion of the guests have probably flown in, and the food is always delicious, often there are fabulous jewelled outfits and fascinating ceremonial aspects such as the tea ceremony in a Chinese wedding.
My dad insisted that we incorporate a Chinese tea ceremony into our wedding day, even though none of us quite knew what it involved, even him. I was twenty-five, which seemed very old at the time, because I’d been to the weddings of a fair few Christian friends (when you don’t sleep together before marriage, you get married young), but no Chinese weddings. It turns out there are all sorts of fun things we could have done (I mean, made James do) if only I wasn’t such a deficient Chinese person. Like the gatecrash, where the groom and his associates undertake a series of challenges and bribe the bridesmaids in cash to win access to the bride.
If the church is where you marry in the sight of God, the Chinese tea ceremony is almost more intimidating, because you become man and wife in the eyes of your family. You serve tea to your elders and receive red packets in return. We were living in the wrong continent for family weddings when I was growing up, but we went to a couple, and I served tea to a few lovely aunts and uncles.
I received my last red packet from my cousin Benjamin Yeoh and his wife Anoushka Yeoh in their postmodern ceremony at the Young Vic, because shortly after that it was our wedding, and we had a little tea ceremony with my immediate family and my grandmother.
A couple of years later, my siblings served us tea at each of their weddings, and my girls served them tea as well.
Las year my cousin Rachel asked me to officiate the tea ceremony for her wedding, which made me really think about its significance and how to explain it to a crowd of white/international people who might not have seen one before:
According to Chinese tradition, this ceremony would be the wedding itself. It’s a time for the two families to meet, for the young couple to pay respects to their elders by serving them tea, and in return they receive red packets of money, jewellery, or even advice about marriage, which as we all know is the best gift of all.
For some of you who aren’t familiar with it, I’ll just explain that people in some cultures feel strongly about tea. There’s a right way and a wrong way to serve it. I’d go as far as saying that tea is of utmost cultural significance. And it’s important in Chinese culture too.
But no pressure Joe, I know you can do it. This is the easy part. You’ve already paid your way through the gatecrash, organised an epic proposal, made it through lockdown together, and got Rachel to go out with you after adoring her for years - after all that hard work, if anyone deserves a sit down and a nice cup of tea, it’s you.
And it’s all been worth it, because you get to marry Rachel. Rachel is so extraordinary and so cherished that it’s always been hard to imagine who could possibly be worthy of her. There’s always been something special about Rachel, over and above her remarkable beauty and charm, and it’s that Rachel is incredibly caring. Everyone here will have their own stories about Rachel’s generosity - she sends soup from our favourite place when I’m ill, she picks out books we’ll love, she is generous in giving gifts and generous in using her gifts to help people, and always shows up for us to help out when we need her or to celebrate special occasions. There’s something so special about Rachel.
And whilst Joe is also beautiful and charming, and ambitious and clever with money, it’s been so obvious since the day we met him that Joe really gets how special Rachel is. And I thoroughly approve of Joe being ambitious and a good investor, I mean, that practically makes him Chinese, but I particularly respect how he’s ambitious for their marriage. He’s proactive about investing in their marriage. And the tea ceremony is about the wider family investing in your marriage too.
But no pressure, Joe, it’s going to be fine. A lot of us Yeoh girls have married white guys, nobody’s spilled the tea. Until now!
The truth is, we Yeoh girls ask a lot of our men. Will you spend your annual leave in Singapore every year? Will you taste this durian? Will you shell this prawn for my grandmother? Will you do a karaoke variation of Les Miserables even though it might go semi-viral? Will you dress up as a panda and dance in front of eighty strangers at my niece’s birthday party? Joe doesn’t just say yes, he joins in with such class that I once said to my husband, do you think Joe will mind doing this? And James said, the thing about Joe is that he’s got such extraordinarily good manners that there’s literally no way to tell. Maybe he does mind - we’ll never know.
Probably the worst thing we Yeoh girls do is judge each others’ partners. Rachel is the last of us cousins to get married. When our cousin KW introduced us to her now husband, Rachel was about ten, I was older, and we were all like oh, an outsider? and then we were like…Yeoh? Or No? And similarly for everyone else who has married in, we’re so polite to their face, “hi hi nice to meet you” - but behind their backs: Yeoh or No?
That’s what the tea ceremony is all about. It’s saying, you’re a Yeoh. Welcome to our family. And thank you for welcoming Rachel into yours. Rachel’s family are going to come up and be served tea by the happy couple. When they accept the tea, they’re saying, we accept you. When they drink it and give Rachel and Joe their gifts, they are saying welcome to the family. Welcome. We love you. We are so happy for the two of you.
I love weddings: multi-day destination weddings over several days, church ceremonies where we stay in the kitchen to wash up, weddings with flower garlands and chuppahs and Indian dancing and cakes cut with swords, choreographed first dances, speeches that make people laugh, speeches that make people cry…
Our wedding was a pretty speedy single afternoon-evening affair, and all in central London so that we could invite all my family and my dad’s guests to the reception (to be fair, my parents were paying, and they generally had good ideas about the wedding itself2, although only up to a point3) and friends to the evening party. I’d originally envisaged something quite different: hiring out an entire youth hostel (this Gothic mansion in the Peak District) for a whole Wedding Olympics weekend: a pub quiz on the Friday night, wide games outside and board games in the library on the Saturday, culminating in a tug of war between my five strongest family members/friends and James’s, then the dinner and party on the Saturday night, followed by breakfast and the wedding ceremony at the chapel on the grounds on the Sunday morning. We’d keep score between Team James and Team Felicity all weekend and the winner…would get to keep their name. James vetoed this idea but I’m hopeful I can convince one of the kids to go for it when they get married. Plus a Chinese tea ceremony, of course.
There is one thing I wish we’d done differently. There’s an issue that haunts every Chinese-White marriage, and on the day of our wedding, well, it came up.
I only heard about this later, but apparently it went something like this:
The morning of our wedding, my dad called James, who was staying with his friends whilst I was at the hotel with my family."
Dad: “James, I need to speak to you. We have an urgent problem.”
Cue silent panic from James. “What…is the nature of this problem?”
Dad: “Well, of course I am cool about this, but my wife feels extremely strongly that when you and Felicity are married, it is not right for you to call us by our names.”
James: “Right…”
Dad: “So from today, we need you—I mean, my wife needs you—to call us both Mummy and Daddy.”
James: “Right, yes, and the wedding’s still on?
Dad: “What? Hahaha. Of course the wedding’s still on. See you at the church!” (hangs up)
And that was that, until the end of the day, as James and I were leaving, and he said to my parents,
“Right. Thanks, bye, erm…”
“Mummy!” said my mum, giving him a rather forceful hug.
“Oh, right!” I said, because my parents always both called my paternal grandparents Mum and Dad, and my maternal grandparents Mummy and Daddy. I turned to my new mother-in-law. “What should I call you, now that we’re married?”
“Elisa,” she said, quellingly.
“Right, yes, of course.”
That wasn’t actually that. It took me a long time to realise what the problem was, but at Chinese New Year, after James and I had been married for about six months, my mother pointed it out.
Mum: You know that James doesn’t call me?
Me: What?
Mum: James. He doesn’t call me anything.
Me: He calls you Mummy, doesn’t he?
Mum: No! He avoids calling me anything at all.
Me: I’m sure that can’t possibly be the case.
It was, in fact the case. Yes, he managed to go almost a year without addressing either of my parents by name. And no, this did not go unnoticed.
“The problem is,” he explained, “I did technically agree to call them Mummy and Daddy—under pressure, to be fair—but I can’t do it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I can’t. They’re not actually my parents. I call my parents Mummy and Daddy, and I thought I could for yours, but I can’t.”
Which was fair enough.
I’m quite proud of the solution I came up with, because it’s gone on to be adopted by most of the white spouses of my relatives, all of whom have faced this exact psychological barrier. James calls my mother ‘Mummy Yeoh’, and my father ‘Cool Daddy-Yeoh’, which works especially well because my father isn’t overburdened by a sense of irony.
I love mixed weddings, and I’m thankful for my upbringing in the UK and everything my parents taught me about being Chinese, and the fun we have trying to teach our mixed-race children about their heritage, even when we get it a bit wrong.
E.g. this half-term cooking project of ‘snowskin mooncakes’ a fortnight after the Mid-Autumn Festival, ft. a recipe for microwave mochi I found on Reddit, and a custard lumpier than anything served by the school canteen. What they lacked in authenticity and structural integrity they made up for in, um, caloric density. And we had fun!
And I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you like about weddings, and any cultural traditions you have to share:
It’s not without a tinge of shame that I recall some of our planning discussions with our previous vicar. Our church doesn’t have a building, we rent the building on a Sunday afternoon from a local parish who don’t allow weddings before 4pm on a Saturday afternoon because of the jumble sale they run every week, rails of secondhand fast fashion being offered to a conspicuous lack of punters.
“What if,” I demanded, “I turn up at one o’clock and buy their whole stock? We bag it all up and crack on by 1.30.”
Then there was the organist. My father-in-law had enthusiastically agreed to play the organ for the processionals but apparently the convention is that you pay the parish organist, an individual we hadn’t met, a flat fee for every wedding, whether or not his services are required.
“What?” We were on a budget, after all. “That’s completely outrageous. If this so-called organist insists on extorting money from me, then fine. I want him to arrive an hour before the service, in full morning dress, and stay until the last person leaves. He can turn the pages for my father-in-law. Tell him he’d better not be late.”
I don’t know how our vicar handled that particular negotiation, but I do know that I didn’t end up paying an organist fee. Sorry Jeremy.
My mother rang me at work about four weeks before our wedding.
“This has gone on long enough,” she said. “You need to buy a wedding dress, or else you will wake up the morning of your wedding with nothing to wear, and have to get married in your pyjamas.”
“Well, in that eventuality, I would say, ‘Mummy, take off your dress, I need it to get married in,’ and you would have to come to my wedding in your pyjamas.”
“You come home this weekend, your sister is going to show me how to use the Google Maps, I will make some appointments at bridal shops, and you will buy a dress.”
And we did.
Then, my dad rang me at work.
“Where are you going for your honeymoon?”
“Portugal - some middle-of-nowhere place.”
“Where, exactly?”
“The Algarve? I’m not sure exactly, James has booked a villa somewhere.”
“What’s the address?”
“Wait - why are you asking?”
“I was just thinking, we could fly out and—”
“What? No, you cannot come on my honeymoon! Dad!”
“I wasn’t thinking we would have every meal together…”
I loved reading about your wedding and seeing the photos - makes me nostalgic for my own wedding. We’re now at the stage where we are attending our friend’s kids weddings! That came around too quickly.
“Yeoh? Or No?” 🤣😭😂