It is important to remember the person you picked is much more important than keeping every little detail correct at your wedding. Photo: Li Hao/GT
Troubled minds
Yang initially planned to save the money from a formal wedding and have a long trip with her fiancé. But her fiancé's parents disagreed, saying there should be a proper wedding following Korean traditions, otherwise it would appear that the couple eloped.
Now that Yang has adjusted her focus to having a perfect wedding, she has discovered there are things that she can't control.
In South Korea, if you hire a wedding company, it offers you a set package, providing you the hotel, food and other details, she said. Even if she doesn't like certain parts of the deal, she's powerless to change anything.
"In China, if you rented a place to have the ceremony, you have it for a whole day, but in South Korea, the hotel we rented is hosting three weddings in a day, so they won't change the decorations and setting for you, unless you add in a huge amount of money," she said.
Knowing the background of her wedding photos will be exactly the same as two other couples is disappointing for Yang, but there's nothing she can do, she can't ask her in-laws-to-be to spend this much money.
Li Han, 25, a friend of Yang's who got married in May, witnessed Yang's struggles.
"I see her status updates online all the time, many are like 'I'm regretting this,'" she said.
Recalling back to her period of anxiety, Li said she totally understands what Yang is going through.
Because her father is a marriage ceremony marshal, Li knew the business quite well and didn't hire a wedding company. She wanted her wedding to bear her own fingerprints.
But once she started, she realized it was much more than she could handle.
"If I wanted 100 things done at the beginning, in the process I would have to cut at least half of them," she said.
She had a lawn wedding; the yard she rented had an artificial pond. Worried the water might not be clean, she wanted to drain the water and have a layer of flower petals in the bottom, but her husband disagreed.
"He told me it was too tiring to do all the other wedding stuff, let's not get into decorating someone else's yard," she said.
For decorative fruits, Li at first wanted three colors, red, yellow and green. The fruits provided by the hotel didn't meet her requirement, so Li wanted to go on the street and buy kiwi herself. That's when her husband snapped.
"He couldn't take it anymore and asked me why I'm making a fuss over a minor matter," she said. "Brides are supposed to be the focus. They should not direct the wedding."
On the other hand, Li felt as if she was doing everything all by herself. Her in-laws aren't in Beijing and her parents can only take care of some of the planning, not all. There were a couple of times that she argued with her husband so fiercely she wanted to smash something, but her reason held her back.
Annie Wang (pseudonym) is getting married this November. Even though she has only begun to get into the specifics of wedding preparation, she's already having disputes with her boyfriend, who is pursuing his PhD studies in another city.
Her pressure came from her parents. For example, they wanted to invite about 500 guests to the wedding, while she thinks it's too much, and 100 would be enough.
"It's so hard to make everyone happy," she said.
First panda born in Taiwan is female | Photos
Feedback
RSS
