Ninety Minutes for a Wedding: A Saturday in a Seoul Hall — Epoche B1
My cousin's wedding took place in a Seoul wedding hall, in a slot that ran from noon to half past one, and three other couples were married in the same building that Saturday. I had been told this. I had not understood what it would feel like. At noon we queued at the photo wall on the second floor. At the desk beside it I handed over my white envelope of congratulation money; a relative wrote my name in a ledger, and gave me a ticket for the buffet. The ceremony began at half past twelve and lasted about half an hour. Then the family photographs, group by group, the photographer counting us into rows. After that came the pyebaek in a small side room: the couple in traditional dress, bowing to the parents, catching dates and chestnuts thrown into the bride's skirt for the children they are wished. Downstairs, the buffet hall was shared with the guests of the other weddings; I could not tell which strangers belonged to which couple. By twenty past one, people I did not recognise were already gathering in the lobby for the next slot. My first thought was that the hall worked like an airport gate. My second thought, on the train home, was that I had been watching the wrong thing. The important object of the day was not the hall but that ledger at the desk. Every envelope is written down, with the name and the amount, and one day, when there is a wedding or a funeral in that family, the amount goes back. So the building rents you ninety minutes. What it cannot sell, and cannot hurry, is a book of names that will be open again in thirty years. References Kendall, L. (1996). Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lett, D. P. (1998). In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea's "New" Urban Middle Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.