Lab, Week 12 Biography

(Image: My Family- Wedding Photo)

(Biographical note: This story is an extension of my Japan trip story. In this leg of the story, I visited China to go to my cousin's wedding. I wrote this story in a diary-esque format. This format allowed to me use a more informal, observational tone.)

The main reason I went to China this Christmas was to go to my cousin's wedding in the boondocks of China. We had to take a car there because all the bullet-train tickets were sold out from people going home for Chinese New Year. We stayed in this ramshackle village where they only had one restaurant. They chopped off the chicken's head right in front of us (I wasn't a stranger to this sort of thing by now having visited my relatives in China several times before, it was more of a curiosity than a shock to me), which was honestly good preparation for the massacre about to occur at my cousin's wedding. The village itself wasn't bad, and my family stayed in a hotel in a nearby city. The city was small by China standards, but enourmous by my standards. Not a McDonald's in sight though, which was a little terrifying. I'd never been that far from civilization before.

Everyone in the village participates in the wedding. They whacked every chicken in the village to feed everyone, and they literally killed the fatted calf for the event. The best part of the wedding was all the ritual stuff that they made my cousin do. They made her jump over fire in her wedding dress. At one point, this old priest came out holding a knife and a chicken and stood in front of her. My sister and I thought that he was gonna sacrifice the chicken, but at the last minute he just chucked the chicken right at my cousin, and it flew over her head. Not sure what that was about, but I'm definitely having an old guy throw a chicken at the bride during my wedding.