One important cultural difference that interethnic couples encounter early in their marital life is divergence in the nature of their traditional wedding rituals. A wedding is more than simply the expression of happiness that newlyweds and their families feel about a marriage; it also serves to socialize both the bride and groom’s relatives, friends and neighbors to the marital status of the individuals (Kalmijn, 2004; Trinh Duy Luan, 2011). The wedding
ceremony is also one of the rituals that represents the traditional practices of each ethnic group and varies across ethnic groups. Differences can be easily observed in how Kinh and Khmer weddings are celebrated and it would seem likely that dissensions and negotiations over divergent cultural beliefs and practices in their wedding rites could occur among Khmer-Kinh interethnic spouses and their relatives. As shall be shown below, some Kinh spouses and their relatives raised concerns about alien cultural practices in their interethnic weddings, however, they also showed their respect toward Khmer wedding rituals.
Before going to the findings I should underline two sets of hypotheses. First, persons who are close in status can share similar tastes and values but interethnic marriage by nature is a combination of individuals of different status. My assumption is that when individuals are of high educational status, they may appreciate the experience of cultural difference in their wedding rites. Similarly I assume that disappointment and tension in adapting to customary differences in such rites would be less evident when spouses are close in educational level or when individuals have developed understanding and awareness of their spouse’s culture as a result of mutual interactions.
Second, the nature of the cultural encounter that interethnic couples experience in wedding rituals has been shaped to a degree by modern attitudes and reform policies. The findings uncover the influence of official exhortations to ritual frugality as well as socioeconomic change in modernization, which have led to the simplification of both Kinh and Khmer wedding rituals.34 Neverthless, even though Khmer wedding rituals have been shortened and simplified to one day rather than employing the traditional lengthy and costly practices, which lasted three days, Khmer wedding rituals are still rather elaborate and ritualized; they are marked as ‘traditional’ and are even seen by some of my interlocutors as wasteful and outmoded. By contrast, Kinh rituals are more simplified and streamlined and hence are thought by many interlocutors to be more in keeping with ‘modern’ standards.
The findings highlight that individuals who are more hightly educated value and appreciate the different rituals of their spouse. Two highly-educated couples expressed their openness
34 Under the government reform program in 1986 in Vietnam, many social changes have affected the family
system and one of them is the replacement of the old systems of rituals (wedding ritual is one of them) with new ones which are less costly (Pham Van Bich, 1999).
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and interest in experiencing cultural difference in their wedding rites. Bon (a Khmer male) and Ngoc (a Kinh female) were a highly-educated couple who both worked as officials in the mixed area. Khang (Khmer male) and Loan (Kinh female) both were teachers in the mixed area. Speaking with Ngoc and Loan, the two well-educated Kinh female spouses in this pair of couples, I could sense their interest in experiencing cultural difference in their weddings. Even though Ngoc and Loan did not know in advance any details about the wedding rites of their Khmer spouses and they had to play the ‘main character’ in these strange rituals, they expressed their interest in ‘tasting the otherness’. Instead of complaining about the lengthy and complex rituals, Loan gladly recalled funny stories during her wedding ceremony:
One of the important Khmer wedding rites that we underwent was chanting, in which the monks chanted and blessed our marriage. However, I did not understand what the monks were chanting and blessing. So what I did was look at them and my husband and whenever they smiled, I smiled as well, as if I understood what was going on.
In addition, both Ngoc and Loan showed off their wedding photos in which they wore Khmer traditional dress. They looked very glad when speaking about how many people had praised their charming appearance when wearing Khmer traditional dress. They even expressed their pity for me, knowing that my own wedding ceremony had been so simple, saying that their weddings had been an interesting experience of tasting a new culture. Bon and Khang, the two male spouses in this pair of couples, also expressed their appreciation of their spouse’s Kinh wedding customs. They said that they had seen these rituals as a result of their long-term interaction with the Kinh community but this time they played the main role in the rituals so they were quite nervous. However, they said, they found it interesting to experience two cultures on their important days.
In addition, personal experience owing to exposure to cultural difference is also found to be a factor helping individuals cope with the different culture of their spouse. Khon and Lam were both from a low social class background—being low-educated and working in the same rock mine—when they fell in love and got married. They reached a consensus on how
to celebrate their marriage. Lam, a Kinh migrant, told me that by interacting with the Khmer community before his marriage, he was aware of the length and cost of Khmer wedding rituals. Lam confided that as his family was in economic difficulty they could not support his wedding financially so he considered simplifying his wedding. However, thinking that a person experiences a wedding just once in his/her life, he thought it was worth having an elaborate wedding. Khon, Lam’s Khmer wife, also shared her husband’s view on the arrangements, thinking that a wedding is very significant to a woman so it should be carefully celebrated. Khon showed her pride about her marriage saying that her husband had worked very hard to save money for their elaborate and costly wedding, emphasizing that her wedding was lots of fun with many rituals and was very crowded, with nearly two hundred guests.
In each of the three cases above, the location of the couples in Khmer populated areas had a significant bearing on the nature of their wedding rites. Owing to their long-term interaction with the Khmer community as a result of their migration, the Kinh spouses in the above three examples were aware of the elaborate nature of Khmer rituals before their marriage so they raised no significant objection to going through these rituals. Another relevant factor is that being migrants residing in a Khmer area, these Kinh spouses each had to adapt to and adopt local Khmer cultural practices in order to be accepted as ‘insiders’ in the local Khmer community. My explanation for their willingness to be involved in the elaborate Khmer wedding rites is that being an ‘outsider’ in a local Khmer community, they needed to show their respect for local rituals and participate in them to build up trust and consolidate social relationships both with their in-laws as well as the wider community of neighbors.
Interestingly, a different pattern of adaptation was evident in the urban area. There, spouses were under greater pressure to simplify their wedding rites owing to a variety of factors. These included the greater expense of living in the urban area, which made it difficult to come up with the savings to conduct a costly complex wedding. Added to this was the fact that most of the resources of the urban-dwelling couples had been devoted to their education and building up their careers. The work rhythm in the city was different to the countryside. The scarcity, routinization and commodification of time in urban areas meant that guests were unable to be present at weddings during the weekdays and the time
devoted to the rites themselves was much shorter. As a result, urban living itself had a tendency to efface the cultural complexity of wedding rites, and thus reduce the need for spouses and their families to adapt to the culturally distinct customs of their partners’ ethnic tradition. These trends can be demonstrated by two cases.
Couples in the urban area tended to celebrate their wedding in shortened, condensed and modernised wedding forms. This was the experience of Neang Phuong, who worked as a teacher in a kindergarten in Long Xuyen city and got married to Ty, a local Kinh man, who worked as a security guard in a company in Long Xuyen. Since her husband’s parents had passed away, she and her husband had to prepare and organize their wedding by themselves. They decided to celebrate their wedding in a simple way, just serving to socialize their relatives, friends and neighbors to their marital status. They followed a streamlined mixture of Khmer and Kinh traditional customs in their wedding rites. Their wedding was celebrated in only one day in their house in Long Xuyen city on a weekend day. This fits the common present trend that almost all weddings in the city are celebrated on weekends to accommodate the couples and their families as well as the participants.
Neang Phuong recalled that one day before her wedding, her mother prayed at the ancestral altar in her family house in Tri Ton town asking for their permission to celebrate her daughter’s wedding in Long Xuyen before travelling to the city to join the rites. In the early morning on the day of their wedding, the couples did formal but simplified traditional ritual practices in their city home. They bowed and invited Neang Phuong’s mother, her uncles and her husband’s uncles to a cup of wine thanking them for their care and instruction and receiving their best wishes for their marriage. And then the banquet was held with the dishes prepared by professional banquet caterers to treat the couple’s relatives, neighbors and friends. One day later, Neang Phuong and her husband accompanied her relatives to her family house in Tri Ton town to pray before the ancestral altar in her family house and visit her relatives and neighbors as well as to pray to Buddha in the nearby Khmer temple for luck in their marriage. The couple then stayed with her family for two days before going back to Long Xuyen to resume work.
Another example was Van (female Kinh) and Thi (male Khmer) who are homogamous in their high education and occupation in Long Xuyen city and their middle-class family background. By virtue of culturally diverse interaction in their schooling and occupation, they both valued each other’s cultural heritage and wanted to display their ethnic culture in their wedding celebration. However, after careful consideration and discussion, they saw that it would be a waste of money to draw on two traditional practices in their wedding. Their income was not sufficient enough for them to conduct the traditional lengthy practices and they did not want to leave this burden to their parents, who had financially invested in their schooling. They both shared the view that how they maintained the happiness in their marital life was more significant than displaying a manificient wedding ceremony. They discussed with their parents celebrating their wedding in simplified form instead of with lengthy and wasteful traditional customs. As both Van and Thi worked in Long Xuyen city, their wedding celebration was conducted on a weekend in Long Xuyen to facilitate the participation of their friends and colleagues. Quite similar to Neang Phuong’s wedding ceremony, their wedding was celebrated in Van house. Early that morning, Thi’s parents and relatives arrived at Van’s family home and the couple went through formal customs: praying at the ancestors’ altar and bowing and inviting their respective parents and uncles and aunts to a cup of wine, thanking them for their care and instruction and receiving their best wishes for their marriage. And then a banquet was held to treat the couple’s relatives, neighbors and friends, which lasted until late afternoon.
Such a simplified form of wedding ceremony was not unique to the urban couples. Many other couples in the rural Khmer-dominated area and the semi-rural mixed area celebrated their wedding in similarly condensed form. These couples and their corresponding families preferred this simplified form as it was more economical and less wasteful than old-style (Kinh or Khmer) weddings and they considered the simplified ceremony a sign of civility and progress in a modern, industrial and commerical society.
As such, one finding of this study is that differences in customary wedding practices did not loom large as a source of tension between couples in interethnic marriages because in a great many cases the couples themselves preferred simpler rites that were stripped of much of their cultural specificity and distinctiveness. In line with Le Nhu Hoa (1998) description
about the variation in marriage rituals in Kinh and Khmer communities in present times, my field study found that many lengthy traditional marital procedures in the study area have been hybridised and replaced by simpler and more condensed rituals. Such changes are influenced by cultural exchanges and long-term interaction between ethnic groups. Many Khmer people, both young and old, expressed their support and encouraging attitude toward condensed and simpler forms of marriage ceremony. The previous traditional rituals were so lengthy and costly that in many cases families became indebted after their children’s marriage ceremony so the more economically practical and simpler forms were preferred. Similarly, the patterns of the wedding ceremony of Kinh people in this province have also been changing to a simpler form owing to the influence of official exhortations to ritual frugality as well as socioeconomic change—developments similar to that observed in northern Vietnam (Malarney 2002).