Most of the other posts I've made in the WTWE series have been relatively interesting and about certain things you wouldn't necessarily know if you weren't also planning a civil ceremony in Australia in place of your original plan to do it in Singapore. This one, though, does kind of shine the spotlight on the utter weirdness of traditional wedding "games", with which I'm sure most of you have had some experience.

Let me touch briefly on Chinese wedding games. They're called "door games", which are typically played between the bridesmaids and the groomsmen when the groom comes to pick up the bride to whisk her off to the ceremony. It's a lot of teasing and silliness where the bridesmaids try to prevent the groom from entering the bride's home, where the bride, fully dressed and ready to go, is stashed away in a room somewhere.

It's a way for the groom to demonstrate how committed he and his groomsmen are to getting past the "trials" and "tests" set forth by the bridesmaids to be able to take the bride. It's also a way for the bridesmaids to demonstrate how much they love their bride by not letting her go without requiring the suitor prove his worthiness to them.

The games themselves are anything from doing x number of push-ups to waxing the groomsmen's legs. A pretty common game is to make the groom eat something super sweet, something super spicy, super sour, and super bitter; this is meant to represent how a marriage can be all 4 of those things and to see if the groom can stomach them. An acquaintance's bridesmaids had set up the front lawn of her house as the set of a quiz show, where the final prize was the bride.

That game they play with the business card on Clueless? Suck and blow? Where you have to pass a business card from one person to the next using only your mouth? Another popular one.

And of course there's always bringing a hoard of hongbao (the Chinese red envelopes) stuffed with cash and just buying the bride off the bridesmaids. Lazier and a bit more capitalist, sure, but efficient.

Things can get overboard really easily, and you're only limited by the imagination and commitment of each member of the bridal party. It's essentially the Chinese version of the hens' or bucks' party, just on a smaller and (usually) less debauched scale. I do think it's a cool way for the bridal party to spend some time together before the wedding and to alleviate the anxieties of the day, but I do also think that because it only involves your bridal party, it can be a bit exclusive.

While this sounds really fun, logistically it's just not going to pan out for us, not least because it's a bit much for just my sister to plan and do on her own when she's not even in the same country! More importantly, there's a lot of commentary to be had about gender and culture and the way these are represented in the games. I get that the games are meant to be in good fun, but that doesn't mean I have to want them or like them if I don't approve of the more subversive message the whole tradition sends.