Weddings in cultures that place a high value on lavish nuptial displays are instructive anthropological experiences. Even when the cultures may be vastly different, the celebrations can take on similar characteristics: the brides gussied-up like a display manikins, the food plentiful, the music overly loud and the dancing, well, it too, looks uncannily the same. I'm not talking about church basement receptions that offer a miniscule slice of dry cake and a dixie cup of cloying fruit punch.
Other than histories of recent civil war, the legacy of hideous refugee camps, and a present vying for the highest rungs of internationally defined corruption, Afghanistan and Cambodia are different not by degrees, but to their very cores. Despite this, weddings in both counties seem cut from the same cloth!
The brides in both countries are coiffed and made up with glitter, added bits of hair and elongated eye lashes, and liberal layers of color lacquered to a shiny finish. The three or four outfits she wears during the party are ruffled, laced, sequined, and flounced, accompanied with matching shoes, hair ornaments, bracelets, belts, necklaces and tiaras.
The food is traditional. The menu in Afghanistan is pillao, mutton, chicken, and fruit downed with tea; the dinner in Cambodia is a series of Khmer meat dishes, soup, rice and canned drinks. The dancing is the same, exactly the same--traditional rhythmical promenading with arms raised and hands circling to the music. The ubiquitous presence of beer in Cambodia and the separation of the sexes in Afghanistan are two glaring differences.
The Wedding of Mr. No's Daughter
When Deb Rutherford, Emergency's Medical Coordinator, and I arrived at the wedding party for Mr. No's daughter we were greeted by the families of the bride and groom at the elaborate entrance to the restaurant. The bride, in lavender satin and the tallest, pointiest, most impractical matching pumps, and the groom in a white ill-fitting baggy, and I suspect very fashionable suit, greeted us at the top of the stairs. She smiled though a severe application of industrial strength foundations, eye-liner, mascara, eye-shadow and lipstick. Her heavy, gold, snake-coiled ankle bracelets were a masterpiece of improbability. I wanted to take a picture of them, but thought it a bit rude to concentrate my photography on the bride's feet. It is sometimes difficult to know what such brides look like without the extra layers. The groom's warm, ready smile seemed to say, "accept, accept, it will all wash-off tomorrow."
Entering the cavernous room of the wedding party we were engulfed in deafening music and oppressively humid heat. We declined a table of honor in the front near the speakers and sat at an empty round table that quickly filled with a dozen of the hospitals newly hired single young male nurses and therapists, the young bucks. They got down to business and opened the "banquet packs" piled on the table. Each plastic wrapped pack contained a half dozen small plastic bowls, wooden chopsticks, and thin metal spoons. They passed around the cans of warm beer and soda and procured a bag of ice. Drinking beer with ice through a straw wouldn't go down in my town's New Atlas Bar, but somehow seems in keeping with the enjoyment of a SE Asian banquet.
Toasting
Diluting beer with ice is a lifesaver in the heat and helps to avoid total alcoholic dissipation that comes with the Cambodia habit of toasting. Sometimes the toasts come as a challenge: a friend arrives at the table with a full glass and invites one person or all the members of the table to a toast, pointing to the bottom of the glass, a drink to the finish. All this is accomplished in a spirit of bravado and a concerted effort to get drunk. Or one can approach a table and in the spirit of friendship toast your friends. The straw makes it difficult to down the whole glass, while the melted ice, now 80% of the glass's contents, makes even a bottoms-up less potent.
The toast is not to anything or anyone in particular. One simply holds out their glass and says, "toast!" I like the idea of toasting and I especially like visiting tables of Cambodian colleagues and offering to drink with them. They like that I, the barang doctor, will initiate one of their customs. As our table, expanded to 15 with the advancement of the evening, we toasted each other every five minutes. Each clinking of glass against glass made us laugh, eager for the next toast.
The Food
The food arrived in courses set on a lazy susan in the center of the table. The first course of appetizers included little dishes of a vinegrated salad of root vegetables, pieces of dried meat, some other bits that are customary at such affairs, but whose names or ingredients I either don't like or don't know and roasted peanuts sprinkled with sugar. Picking peanuts up one my one with chopsticks is good practice, but it is far easier to put a spoonful into one's bowl and eat them with the fingers. Various platters of meat and vegetable dishes followed, including the thighs, legs and feet of birds about the size of sparrows that crunched with great satisfaction in one mouthful. A whole chicken landed on the table as the next course, pulled apart by dueling chopsticks. Shrimps in broth with rice followed. Desert was a packet of rolled wafer cookies. I piled all the unopened packages into the arms of the son of Madame Hourt, the hospital's matron.
One accepted custom, even when the party takes place inside, is to throw one's empty cans and all litter under the table. When, at my first Cambodian wedding I saw a table of men casually throwing their empties under the table, I thought it rather crass. I soon realized that it was not just common, but expected and an easy way to clear the limited table surface of unwanted cans. I don't normally throw my trash under the table, but found it a wonderfully liberating experience.
The bride and her family and attendants aren't the only ones dolled up. Cambodian women and girls seem to have a closet of extravagantly laced and sequined tight fitting satin and brocaded bodices that they wear with ankle-length sarongs. Puffy sheer sleeves and scalloped embroidered necklines are standard. Neither Deb nor I own such attire. We came in our best clothes--me looking rather dowdy and Deb looking like she could have been heading for the beach. Amidst the finery of the women, the typical man comes to a wedding in a shirt with the tails hanging out or a T-shirt. The children are dressed like dolls.
After the dinner we were given handfuls of fragrant white jasmine flowers that we threw at the bride and groom as they walked to the stage at the front of the room. Nicer than rice. No silver ribboned presents are left on a table for the bride and groom. Instead, each guest receives an envelope into which money is inserted, a name written on the outside and dropped into an elaborate bowl or given to one of the wedding party.
Dancing like Apsaras
Having eaten our fill, and tired of toasting with watery beer, as soon as the music for dancing started, everyone at our table rushed to the dance floor. At my first Cambodian wedding, I was instructed, "move your hands like Angkor Wat." The connection with the thousand year-old Khmer ruins went right over my head, until the second instruction: "like the dancing fairies, the apsaras." So we danced like the apsaras immortalized at Angkor Wat with our hands circling above our heads in graceful circles, the very same way they dance at weddings in Afghanistan.
