Red Bombs

Definition: Chinese wedding invitations, which almost always come in our national color of celebration and communism, with gold-color stamp printing.

I've reached that age where everybody who's anybody a few years older than me is getting married. I've been lucky enough to be attacked but twice this year, thanks to the meticulously calculated distance I keep from certain friends (geographical distance works best). Not surprisingly, the two bombs I received this year both came from mere acquaintances—more specifically, coworkers from another department who only ever make conversations when they want favors.

Dropping a red bomb on someone whose last name you must refer to the company contact list for is about the biggest favor you can ask of that person. For besides being stretched, boring and exhausting, wedding banquets are also very pricey. A traditional Chinese wedding banquet menu would include dishes like roasted suckling pig, shark fin soup, chicken, fish and fried rice; basically the same items in any dinner set you'd find at any Chinese restaurant on any given day. But, at the going market rate, guests are expected to pay at least double what they'd otherwise pay for the night's meal if the wedding banquet were held at a regular Chinese restaurant, three times that if at any hotel, or one-and-a-half times if the guest was to not attend. To lose a few hundred dollars for nothing, or to put in even a few hundred more to get a half-decent meal in return, that is the question.

Gift registries are non-existent in our culture. Chinese traditions deem it rude to ask for what you need; civil to accept everything you don't with a smile. Mind you, refund/exchange policies on goods sold are also non-existent here.

Chinese traditions also have it that each wedding invitation is distributed with either a bakery voucher (for guests of the bride) or a $20 red packet (for guests of the groom). Very few guests realize there’s the option of making a sweet profit of $20 by not paying anything upon receiving a red bomb. This option is not considered cheap when you know nothing more personal about the bride-/groom-to-be than his/her last name.