The other day, I found a wedding invitation addressed to my adopted dad. I was surprised at the somewhat spartan and homemade feel of the invitation card. And unlike Burmese wedding invitations, there was no mention of the names of the parents or what higher education degree the bride and the groom each held.
The card displays only these details:
The names of bride and groom
Wedding Venue and Time
A short comment about wedding presents
A request to reply if attending or not
This card would have given the mother of a Burmese bride a heart attack.
On a typical Burmese wedding invitation, the following details are essential:
The names of the parents on both sides
The job titles of the fathers on each side (no tolerance for unemployment here! At least you should be able to say retired professor, doctor, general etc)
Quite often, the job titles of the mothers too, but they’re not as important as the fathers’
The names of the bride and groom
What position in the order of children the bride and groom each are
The name of any big wig relatives if you have any
The academic degrees the bride and groom each holds
The venue
The time
Not only that, a card that looks homemade will be an insult to both families, especially the bride’s, as they would see it as stinginess on the groom’s side (because the groom is expected to pay for the wedding and associated cost). It could be interpreted as not enough value put on their daughter. Therefore, the card will be professionally printed on glossy expensive perfume-scented paper. The flashier the card, the better.
So, a typical invitation would read:
Invitation to the Noble Auspicious Wedding
The noble highly educated smart polite young man, the sole heir, highly thought of and much beloved only son of his parents who live in Yangon: father, U Nay Htike, CEO of Burma International Pickled Tea Conglomerate and mother, Daw Mya Yee, former French teacher at IBC International School,
the beloved grandson of U Myint Aung, retired cardiologist of Yangon Hospital,
the beloved nephew of the revered cardiologist (head of cardiology) at Zin Maya Hospital
(drum roll please, finally the name of the groom …)
Maung Lu Aye
Director at Burma International Pickled Tea Conglomerate, MBA (Harvard University, USA) & MA Economics (National University of Singapore)
&
The obedient, well mannered, religious, highly educated, graceful, beautiful, pure, precious second daughter of her parents who live in Mandalay: father, U Hla Nge, Judge at Mandalay high Court, and mother, professor at the University of Mandalay (Law Department),
the beloved granddaughter of U Nway Kyi, former Mayor of Mandalay and
highly respected younger sister of Ko Nay Aung, owner of Nan Shay Textile Factory
(another drum roll here for the bride …)
Ma Mya Yin
English Language teacher at SOE International School of Languages, MA English Studies (National University of Singapore), BA English Studies (University of Yangon)
The two young people will blissfully wed with the full agreement and blessing of their families.
To this noble and most important event of their life, we as their parents, would like to respectfully invite you to honour them with your gracious presence.
Wedding Date: 16 July 2019
Wedding Time: 6 o’clock in the evening
Wedding Venue: Nway Yin Kyi Ball Room, Sedono Hotel
You may think that’s a very complicated and boastful invitation card. But it make sense in four ways.
The wedding is an event for the parents. It is so important because they themselves didn’t get to choose how their own wedding should be when they got married a few decades ago. Now is their chance to finally arrange a wedding. They get to choose the venue, who to invite, which toastmaster and which gay make-up artist to hire, what costume to wear and for the bride’s mother, how extravagant she should demand the wedding to be. Surely, they deserve that opportunity after years of sacrificing and caring for these children. It makes the parents happy, so it’s worth it.
This is the one and only rare opportunity for the happy couple to extract their money’s worth of the high degrees they acquired abroad. What is the point of getting a degree from Harvard if you can’t include it on your wedding invitations? This is the perfect chance to inform people of your highly-educated-ness in one fell swoop.
It gives them a chance to play selected memory loss regarding which relatives’ name to put on the wedding card. For example, if the grandfather of the groom was a poor rickshaw driver, they would have surely suffered from temporary absentmindedness and forgotten to include his name on the card. On the other hand, if the groom’s cousin’s cousin’s uncle is a health minister in the government, they would suddenly remember to put his name.
When will the bride and groom and everyone else ever get a chance again to wear clothes that they can hardly walk or breathe in and sit poker-faced looking at but not watching the pop band playing music, then with equally poker face gorge on the extravagant meals or cakes and coffee? This is their only chance to be forgiven when they don’t clap whenever the band finishes playing each song. So, they can just sit and look suitably expressionless.
After all this fun and festivity, the wedding will finish with no one getting drunk since there was only tea and coffee served. Then the bride and groom will be sent off to live in their own place for the first time.
May Buddha bless them in their newly married life.