Guide to Vietnamese Weddings - Part 2

Inviting a Reception
What to expect on arrival at a Vietnamese Wedding reception. Second in a series of short articles documenting one foreigner's first-hand account of current and past Vietnamese Wedding customs and traditions.

Read the first article at Guide to Vietnamese Weddings - Part 1.

Once the familial formalities have been settled and the traditional customs observed, its time for the BIG day!

Although Vietnamese Wedding reception invitations will be sent, the reception itself usually has no strict 'head-count' or seating plan. Rather, tables or groups of tables, will be loosely allotted to different groups of people associated with the happy couple. Immediate and extended family, work or professional colleagues, childhood friends, important local or family connections (especially influential ones), will be assigned to different tables.

It is not uncommon for a single invitee to turn up with a couple of family or friends in tow! Ordinarily one would expect this should throw the catering plans & preparations out the window. However, since most Vietnamese Weddings are held in restaurants or fully catered and have a set menu, all these uninvited 'extras' get to feast along with the rest. When I got married, the sage advice from the 'Three Wise Matrons' in my wife's Vietnamese family advised us to "... add 20% to the guest numbers 'cose he's a foreigner & all the locals will want to gawk at him." Advice which turned out to be right on the money!

The time you should be arriving at a Vietnamese Wedding Reception is a definite trap for the inexperienced. I arrived alone for my first ever Vietnamese Wedding. I'd only been in-country a couple months and hadn't met my future wife and cultural adviser yet. The invitation stated the time as "5:00pm Sharp". I duly turned up at about 4:50pm ... to be met by the Groom in flip-flops, shorts & T-shirt, sucking on a beer and overseeing the setting-up of the venue! It transpires that "5:00pm Sharp" is Vietnamese wedding code for 'arrive sometime around 7:00pm'.

Arriving late at a Vietnamese wedding is a culture thing. It goes like this: if you arrive at the time specified on the invitation, you are obviously hungry and in need of a meal. Now if you are that hungry, you are obviously lacking some wealth. Hence, to arrive before the other guests is to silently announce one's impoverished status to the world! Better to turn up fashionably late!

Vietnamese Wedding receptions are no place for gifts. Gifts are traditionally not given to the newly married couple. Rather, one should use the invitation envelope, or envelopes conveniently placed on the tables, to give cash donations. The money collected will normally be used to offset the cost of the reception and the catering. No doubt this goes some way to helping defray the cost of all those additional freeloaders.

It is always a conundrum to know how much cash to give at a Vietnamese wedding. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme nor reason to the amount one should give. Whenever concrete advice is sought from Vietnamese family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances the reply is inevitably "It's up to you." Very unhelpful indeed. What I have been able to work out is that it seems to be directly related to the 'swishness' of the reception venue and/or the catering.

Custom and family accounting dictate that one should write one's name on the envelope containing the cash. When all the 'donations' are in, somebody will open the envelopes, tally up the cash and record exactly who gave how much! This record will be held for future reference when attending that person's own wedding or that of one of their siblings. This neatly side-steps the problem of knowing how much, but you have to give before you get that luxury.

A larger than life picture of the happy couple will be placed outside the entrance to the reception venue. The proud subject's of the picture will be stationed nearby to dutifully greet every guest individually. Make no mistake, it's a daunting task to guard an oversize image of oneself for over an hour while exchanging essentially the exact same platitudes with a couple hundred different people. Do them a both favor, make your greeting and congratulations short & sharp, and head inside pronto.

Near or inside the entrance, there is often a large cloth on a table serving as a guest register book. In the same vicinity will be a large box or receptacle to place one's cash contribution. These will be watched over by a pair of young ladies, usually friends of the Bride. In my experience these attendants are always ladies, never any gents, and they come in pairs.

With the entry procedures completed, it's time to go about finding your allotted table. At a restaurant or specialist Vietnamese wedding venue, the staff will ask about your company or connection to the couple. If you are a foreigner and an invited guest, chances are that somebody from one of the families has been specifically assigned to show you to your table when you arrive.

In the early moments the seating arrangements can be very fluid and chaotic. You can expect to be moved to a different table or change tablemates a couple of times before you get to settle in your final niche. Go with the flow. As with many things Vietnamese, there is some madness in the method but always a sound underlying purpose.

Happily seated, strap yourself in and hang on for the Vietnamese wedding reception ride!

Guide to Vietnamese Weddings - Part 3