Butt Bows

About three years ago, I was out of college and taking a really long time to find my first job in an impossible job market. My lack of experience of the world didn't make it any easier. After a year of failure in the market, I took a job, very briefly, at the 82nd Street Barnes & Noble in Manhattan.

There was nothing particularly positive about that job; three weeks into it, when I finally landed a "real" job (meaning, as I understood it then, one that involved putting on a necktie and going into a soulless office every day), I quit without giving notice. Very little would tempt me to go back to making not even $8.00 an hour answering boneheaded questions like, "Where is the nonfiction section?" or, worse, embarassing ones like, "Where can I find Amazing Sex for Dummies?" (I still wonder why dummies should get to have all the amazing sex).

One small highlight of that job, though, came in the form of a book called Bridezillas: True Tales from Etiquette Hell, which I used to read on my breaks or basically whenever I didn't have a customer in front of me trying to see if I could figure out the name of some book about penguins that had been an Oprah's Book Club selection two years ago. I took a sort of awful delight in the horrendous behavior of these brides as well as the cutting things said about it by the women who wrote the book.

This was before Bridezillas, the series, came to cable, and the word entered the more general lexicon. So I guess I was, briefly, on the cutting edge of something.

I thought about that this morning when my Adult Elementary class got onto the subject of clothes. This segued into formal clothes, which somehow segued into weddings. I found myself explaining bridesmaids' dresses.

Bridesmaids' dresses have become a stock joke in America. I have the general impression that nearly every woman between 20 and 40 has had at least one experience of having been dressed up in a hideous orange taffeta dress with an enormous butt bow, a crinoline, and an unflattering neckline, for which she paid at least $400 U.S. This last part, the cost, seems to be a particular source of resentment, given how few occasions the typical bridesmaid can wear that dress after the wedding.

I explained all of this to my students, and found that, amazingly, Taiwanese brides are too polite (or maybe too pre-feminist...it's hard to tell) to dress up their friends in hideous outfits just to make themselves look better. More to the point, Taiwanese wedding apparrel, even for the bride, is almost always rented, not bought, and it's considered the responsibility of the bride, groom, and their respective families to pay for the attire of members of the bridal party.

I was also thrilled to find that the wedding registry as we know it in America doesn't exist in Taiwan. Thank God. I have always considered this one of the tackier American cultural traditions, drawing up a list of things and saying to your friends and family, essentially, "Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!" The Chinese custom for weddings is identical to that for Chinese New Year--cash in red envelopes, red being considered a lucky color in Chinese culture.

This is something I have defnintely noticed about Chinese, or at least Taiwanese, culture. People are more restrained, in a good sense, when it comes to these kinds of manners. People seem able to forego the sprawling six-bedroom loft in favor of the modest little one-bedroom they can actually afford. They manage not to make their groomsmen, ushers, and bridesmaids hideous and miserable in the course of getting married.

As much as I find this country strange at times, I also notice that there is a lot Americans could learn from the Taiwanese. This is just one more example of that.