Getting Married--Hong Kong Style

We live next to the wedding mall in our harbor hotel. Yes, that’s right, a mall full of everything weddings. Wedding services, wedding makeup, wedding flowers,  wedding decorations, wedding planners, and restaurants that  shut down their public dim sum service to become wedding banquet halls.  I’m told that our mall is only second best in Hong Kong. The Golden Plaza in Mong Kok  district holds the prize for that—boasting more than 100 wedding shops. Our mall is home to a variety of other stores and restaurants (thankfully).

Weddings are a big deal in Hong Kong, much as they are most places in the world. The bride frequently dresses in a traditional red Chinese gown (red for good luck) adorned with gold and silver as well as in a Western white dress. Gowns can be rented or purchased from the stores that offer a range of wedding services.

This blog isn’t going to be the insider’s guide to a Hong Kong wedding. I’m no expert on that. I’ve never even attended a wedding here. Instead these are just my observations and photos of weddings I have observed at a distance—and the shops I pass every day on my way to and from the train station.  So this will just be  a voyeur’s guide to the wedding experience.

Mall Wedding Protocol

One of the first things we noticed about the wedding banquet hall in the mall was the TV screen outside that carried the names of the happy-couple-du jour  alongside a photo taken long before the event. Must be that it is not considered bad luck to see the bride in her dress, as photos are taken in picturesque spots all over the city prior to the big day—in parks, along the harbor, etc. Luck is a major part of the event, though, so fortune tellers can get involved in picking the most auspicious day on which to hold the wedding.

Getting back to the banquet hall description, we have passed the place many times when a wedding was being held.  A guest registry is set up at the highly decorated entrance to the restaurant. Inside tables are covered with cream-colored shiny material that matches the chair covers. At one end of the room, there is a stage for the bride and groom –elevated for a better view by the guests.  And if they can’t be seen well by those sitting far from the stage, a  large television screen will capture their movements.  We also notice that the TV screen outside the restaurant always lists the couple’s first names—their English first names, not their Chinese names given to them at birth. Perhaps this wedding mall is just for the Western weddings, as we’ve never seen anyone’s picture in the traditional red dress.

High Cost of Getting Hitched

Much cost is incurred by the weddings, even in the economic hard times. A local paper in August announced that the wedding halls in the entire region were fully booked from that time until October 2010! And the most popular places were the five star hotels, not the less pricey 3 star ones. A survey reports that the average price spent on these occasions was $30,000 (U.S.) in 2009—down from $31,225 in 2008. Weddings must be resistant to economic change here.  The total spent in Hong Kong in 2008 was reported to be $1.5 billion (U.S.).

To avoid the big expense, or just to get married in a more exotic location, many couples choose another country in Southeast Asia for the ceremony. I enclose a picture here of newlyweds in Siem Reap who went to visit Angkor Wat to be photographed. Our driver told us that couples wait until the end of the rainy season to get married there. That had just happened when we arrived.

In Memoriam

While I’m on the subject of weddings, I want to take the time to remember my good friend Beth Wood. It wasn’t so very long ago that I attended her wedding to my friend and colleague, Dan Drew, in the faculty club of the Indiana Memorial Union. I'm sure it was the happiest day of their lives. They seemed to be perfect for each other. She, so full of life and enthusiasm for most everything. He, the practical joker and always ready with a good story.  Both of them, really good people. We had many good times together—even after the cancer appeared in her lung. She smiled through it all—the surgery and the aftermath. And she had several really good years before the return of the disease. It claimed her life in the last week, but never her spirit. I can scarcely believe that we won’t ever be able to have lunch at the Limestone Grill or Tallent again. I will miss the twinkle in her eye and her excitement for life. She boosted my spirits on many occasions and taught me to value every precious moment we have left to us. I raise my glass to you Beth and thank you for being my friend.

Chasing Hong Kong Dollars--Lots of Them

Hong Kong residents think about only three things, as the saying goes. Work, Food, and Shopping. But I think the over-arching thought is about making money. And the evidence of that is all around me. In the scores of financial institutions that populate Hong Kong Island, in the high end stores that are found in most malls, in the equally up-scale hotels that dot the harbor, and even in the comments from my students about their life goals.

It is probably to be expected that money would drive some of the values here as Hong Kong is a major world financial center. That also explains the fact that the income gap between rich and poor is among the highest in the world. A recent UN report indicated that the richest 10 per cent of the people here possess about one-third of the territory’s income while the poorest 10 per cent get only 2 per cent.

One good indicator of how rich those people at the top are is the price that apartments go for here. In September a newspaper headline announced that a record was set for the price of a one-bedroom flat in a new building called The Masterpiece (which I can see from my hotel room window) at $3.3 million (U.S.). That bought the local businessman 816 square feet of space. Hardly a palace but how many people can say they live in a masterpiece?  (Pictured here behind the "Pinnacle Apartments," the Masterpiece is currently the tallest building in Hong Kong).

One interesting scheme  for raising a lot of money was offered up by a local bank recently. Upon reaching the 150^th anniversary of the bank’s opening, bank executives decided to issue a limited number of $150 HK notes and sell them at $280 as collectors’ items. The plan hasn’t attracted so many customers, I hear. Supposedly the bank was going to give the profits to charity.

Though we are constantly told about the changed behavior since the economic tsunami in Hong Kong, a recent global poll found that Hong Kongers are still spending as they did before the downturn (77% said that) and more than half are still buying luxury goods. (Synovate survey in August).  I’m not sure if that is true, but I do know that the malls are still chock-full of people almost any time of the day or night.

Hong Kong Students and their Goals

This atmosphere of consuming also affects my undergraduate students in the approach to their education and their choice of life occupation. Granted, my experience is only that, but I’ll share what has been happening in my classroom this semester.

I have noticed that the students in my international communications class appear to be less than interested in the topic of the course despite my efforts to make it relevant to their lives. Though it is a required course for all students in media and communication, it is a class in their major. And so I have inquired about their apathy towards the class. In my office one day two students said that they really didn’t want to major in communications, but they were there because they didn’t qualify for business school. In Hong Kong students take entry exams to be admitted to the university and are able to enroll in courses of study according to the points they receive. Since such a system is also in place in Turkey, I knew how it worked. So I asked if engineering and computer science were at the top of this hierarchy and therefore required the most points. “Oh no,” one of them replied. “Business is at the top.”  Communications is somewhere near the middle. Further discussion revealed that their goal was really to make money  rather than find a career that they love, and they chose whatever major for which their scores qualified them to reach that outcome.

The conversation helped me to understand why they might not be so engaged with a critical treatment of global media barons and the trend toward concentration of ownership. And their minds might be thinking about ways they could transfer majors as I talked about the revenue declines in the news business.

What they do seem to be interested in is electing student groups to represent the student body. I noticed this phenomenon as I arrived at the entrance to the university every morning for about two weeks. Each day a different set of groups in matching outfits and with signs bearing slogans would be shouting out cheers to promote their individual group. At 8:30 in the morning,, I  was surprised by their excessive energy and asked about the purpose of the shouting. Students told me that if elected, they would organize interesting activities for their classmates or even to try to get textbook prices reduced. Each group tried to outdo the others in the promises made. I commented to the security guard on duty that if they put just 10 per cent of that energy into their studies, they might be better off. He replied that he only wished he had the opportunity to go to school, but that because his family was poor, he was unable to attend.  Perhaps he might actually have enjoyed a class in international communication.

Though his comment made me sad, I knew that such events were part of student culture and that U.S. students who join sororities and fraternities were not much different than this. And besides, I told myself, they were learning leadership and entrepreneurial skills this way. Perhaps it will get them closer to their goal of making money after graduation.