In honour of the Lunar New Year, I thought I’d tell you about my most Chinese piece of clothing, my wedding cheongsam, also known as a qípáo (旗袍).
When I was young, my parents were not big into tradition. I’m guessing it’s because they came of age during the Cultural Revolution in China, when Mao was bent on eliminating the “four olds”—old things, old ideas, old customs and old habits. And while the communists could not completely do away with centuries-old traditions of ancestor worship and superstition, only vague remnants of the past lingered in my parents’ belief systems.
“Don’t wash your hair on Chinese New Year’s Day,” my mom would say. When asked why, she gave no reason: “That’s just the way it is for Chinese people.” But my parents never really enforced any rules so, over the years, our Chinese traditions became half-hearted motions that could be taken or left depending on convenience.
When it came to my wedding, however, their heritage returned in a huge way. Suddenly they knew exactly what had to be done and why. “You can’t have white wedding invitations!” they declared. “White is the colour of death!!”
For the traditional tea ceremonies, my mother said I needed to rent a qun kwa (裙褂)—a red brocade skirt and jacket beaded, sequinned, and embroidered with flora and fauna, including a phoenix to represent the bride and a dragon to represent the groom. The skirt was so heavily adorned that it needed suspenders to hold it up.
In addition to the kwa, she also insisted on getting me a custom-made cheongsam for the wedding banquet. So through word of mouth, she found a dressmaker working out of a cramped storefront in a nondescript Chinatown mall. The woman spent nearly an hour showing us wedding fabrics, holding the shiny red bolts next to my face, pointing out the intricacies of each one, but nothing looked quite right. Then she suggested that maybe instead of scarlet, the classic bridal colour, I’d be better off in a non-traditional but still acceptable fuschia. To my surprise, my mom agreed.
Later, it occurred to me that my mother did not have a traditional Chinese wedding dress. A modern-day mail order bride, she came to Canada and slept on the floor in a spare room at my father’s house for two months before they decided to marry. My aunt and her two-year-old son spent every night there as chaperones. Only the bare bones of tradition were followed. There were no red wedding invitations, no invitations at all. My mother wore a white wedding dress she had sewn herself, no kwa, no cheongsam. My parents were married by a justice of the peace at the house and held a small banquet later in Chinatown. The next day, they both went to work because my dad had only seven dollars left in the bank.
My cheongsam didn’t survive our house fire, but even if it did, I’m not sure I would’ve worn it again anyway. After all, I don’t live in a Wong Kar-wai film. And it is a little too “on the nose” to repurpose as random formalwear—a sort of empty performance of Chinese-ness I’m not entirely comfortable with.
Every year as the Lunar New Year approaches, I think a lot about tradition. Since getting married and leaving my parents, I’ve marked the holiday in small ways, such as cleaning the house to make room for good luck. I find joy in bending my own actions to fall in line with ancient practices, being part of something larger than myself. But it also makes me question how Chinese I really am, and what I’m doing hanging onto traditions that were never a meaningful part of my upbringing.
The Chinese-ness my parents passed down to me has always been more about being pragmatic than about lucky red envelopes or traditional costumes. Yes, fancy clothes and ceremonial gatherings can be a lot of fun, but I’m trying to get deeper. I think there might be something for me in the less showy Chinese traditions of endurance and resilience, as well as in the unabashed desire for good fortune and better days ahead.
I hope my mom would say this is just the way it is for Chinese people—that family, history, tradition, identity and meaning are always in flux, a constant negotiation within the larger context of culture and survival. This is, at least, the way it has always been for me.
:) Teresa
What is happening even?? Closet Dispatch is a free, limited-run weekly newsletter by Teresa Wong, who wishes you health and prosperity in the Year of the Ox.