A Thai Wedding ~

So I’m very excited to report that I was invited to and attended a real-life Thai wedding! It took place in Samut Songkram province about 45 kilometers SW of Bangkok. The bride and groom were Jackie and Guillaume, respectively. Jackie is one of my teachers at the AUA and Guillaume is one of the more advanced students there. Guillaume is from somewhere in the south of France and has been here for some time. They met at the AUA.

I was sort of invited spur of the moment, but was very happy to have been invited, especially since Thais usually only invite family and close friends to such private functions. It was the last day of classes at the AUA before the winter break and I just happened to run into Jackie at the nearby skytrain station as we were both heading to the twice-yearly Jim Thompson sale. Jim Thompson is a large retail chain that is the leader in the sale of Thai silk. Its founder, Jim Thompson, is widely recognized for having single handedly revived the silk trade in Thailand. Anyway, it’s very expensive to shop at their stores, so when the sale happens, all the women flock to it. Particularly the Japanese ladies in BKK, as I’m told. Naturally, I felt a little weird when I actually got there and I was one of the handful of men there. I just had to check it out to see what the fuss was about and maybe get a few gifts to dole out once I get back home, where there is no JT. So Jackie was going there to meet her brother, who works for JT in their HR department. We decided to head over together and got to talking about what we were going to be doing over the break. The topic of her quickly approaching marriage came up, during which she expressed that she had been trying to keep it fairly hush hush because she didn’t want to just invite anybody to her wedding. Given that many of the students at the AUA Thai program are westerners, where weddings tend to be big events where casual acquaintances are usually welcome to attend, she knew that if the word got out, there may be many people whose feelings would be hurt by not having been invited. After she explained all of this in Thai with some English thrown in and a little bit of self-struggling that was apparent on her face, she invited me to come! When we got to the convention hall, I met her brother and her fiancée and they explained how I was going to get to her home as neither the skytrain nor the subway goes out that far. Yay!!


One of the other things that I was looking forward to was seeing my other AUA teachers outside of the classroom and see what they were like then weren’t donning their teacher guises – like when my professors at Seattle University took off their professor suits and went out for drinks with me, heh heh – after I graduated, of course!

To get to the wedding, I had to get up very early to catch a 5:20am mini-van leaving from the AUA campus. The other passengers included a couple of teachers in the AUA Japanese program and more advanced Thai program students who had gotten to know either Jackie or Guillaume. When we got to Jackie’s grandparents’ home, I was quite excited to see how accurately it fit her descriptions of it in class. Jackie was raised by her grandparents as her parents lived further south near Hua Hin province.

The house was a gorgeous, traditional Thai-style wooden house that sat upon stilts and was fairly open-air in many parts of it. Perfect for the tropical climate that is Thailand’s. On this particular morning though, it was rather chilly and many of the guests, including myself found ourselves shivering. But no matter. Jackie’s mother graciously provided all of us with hot cups of coffee and steaming bowls of “johk,” a common Thai breakfast food that can be described as a thick, rice soup that is pretty much the same thing as Chinese congee.


The series of ceremonies started around 9 am with a lot of incense and prayers, kneeling and bowing to various ancestors. Then, as is the custom, 9 monks came to the home and so began the seemingly endless regiment of chanting in Pali to bless the union. So commoners (everybody in the house except for the monks) have to sit a particular way where you tucks your legs underneath you to one side. You’re not supposed to sit cross-legged because to do so would suggest that you’re an equal to the monks. It was torturous and reminded me of my childhood, when I had to endure the same thing when my mother would take me on visits to the temple. We concluded the ceremonial pieces by blessing the couple individually by pouring water from a conch shell over their hands as they kneel, bound together by a symbolic piece of white string.


Then it was time to eat! But first, a couple of observations…

Growing up in a Chinese home, I had never seen a Buddhist wedding ceremony that involved monks. Chinese marriages tend to focus more on family and ancestors and has less to do with religion. Whereas the Chinese wedding centers upon a tea ceremony where the bride and groom presents cups of tea to both sets of parents, there is no such thing in a Thai wedding. There was something similar in the form of an “exchange.” Various elders, often married, would present a special envelope with some sum of money in it and the bride and groom would offer small gifts in exchange.

For Thais, there are three (four if you’re male) events in life that mark the most important points in your earthly existence: birth, marriage, and death (and entry in the monkhood if you’re male). Each of these events require the services of monks – who, ironically, are well compensated for their roles as the human intermediaries between heaven and earth.


Whereas one can say that the tea ceremony in a Chinese wedding is the “I do” moment, there is no easily identifiable moment when the bride and groom become husband and wife. One of my fellow guests and I ruminated upon this very topic for some time. Interestingly enough, she is a Cambodian-Chinese-Australian, whereas I am a Cambodian-Chinese-American. Together, we played the game of trying to relate the things we saw with what we were familiar with.

One of the questions we entertained was, if somebody had grounds for objecting to the union, when would they make this fact known? At what point have you crossed the “point of no return?” We then rationalized between ourselves that this being Thailand, if someone had something real against the whole wedding, it would have come out long before the wedding or simply not at all. To us, it seemed unfeasible that the Hollywood wedding-crashing-ex who drops in just in time to stop the wedding and confess his undying love scenario to actually happen.

Food: The manner in which the food was served was very much like that of a Chinese wedding banquet. Only, in a Chinese wedding, it would have taken place several hours after the morning tea ceremony, usually around 6 or 7 pm. In the Thai wedding, the banquet became lunch. I asked one of my other AUA teachers about it and they told me that sometimes, the family will choose to hold an evening banquet instead of the afternoon lunch. Sometimes, they will do both. So each dish was served in courses, beginning with an appetizer and progressing into main dishes and ending with desserts.

By 2pm, many of our van mates were ready to head home, including myself. The fact that I had gotten up at 3:30 am was starting to take its toll on my energy level. This is besides the fact that the previous chilly day had turned into yet another hot and sticky tropical day. Ah, Thailand. You’ve got to love the climate here!

After we said our goodbyes to all the appropriate people with the customary “wais.” We then jumped into our van for the two hour long drive back into Bangkok. And when we got back and I got myself showered, I dragged my exhausted self back into bed…