在天愿做比翼鸟，在地愿为连理枝

For most Singaporean Chinese couples, the most expensive item of a wedding is, without a doubt, the wedding banquet.

According to tradition, the wedding banquet is paid for by the groom’s family, which in practice usually means the father of the groom, because in the traditional Chinese family, the breadwinner is usually the husband while the homemaker is usually the wife. However, Chinese couples these days usually tend to pay their own way. There are several reasons for this, but I think the biggest reason is because most couples want to be fully in charge of how their wedding banquet is organised. If the groom’s father pays for the banquet, it is only natural that the groom’s father decides the venue, which may or may not be to the liking of the couple.

Typical table setting for Chinese styled banquets

Of course, part of the Chinese tradition of attending a wedding banquet is to bring along an ang pow (red packet with money inside) to give to the couple to wish them well and help the couple offset the cost of the banquet, but I’ll deal with the topic of the wedding ang pow another day.

In Singapore, there are many places to hold a wedding banquet, but the most popular places tend to be either hotel ballrooms or restaurants. Both hotel ballrooms and restaurants have their pros and cons, and it can be quite a headache to decide which one to pick. In general, hotel ballrooms tend to be pricier than restaurants, and food quality tends not to be as good as restaurants, especially when compared with the famous restaurants in town. However, hotel ballrooms usually have a better atmosphere, and most of the time the hotel will offer complimentary hotel room stay for a night or two, which is very helpful for the bride in terms of gown changing and doing makeup before and during the banquet.

The choice of wedding banquet location usually depends on a number of factors, such as price, food quality, location, atmosphere and decoration, perks, the banquet coordinator and even opinions of parents. For those on a very tight budget, the choice is most certainly a restaurant. It is still possible for those on a tight budget to go for hotel ballrooms if some compromises are made, such as not picking a 5 star hotel, holding a weekday dinner or weekend lunch banquet instead of a weekend dinner, or picking a hotel outside the shopping district and the central business district.

Most hotels and restaurants offer a variety of menus at different pricing, so a lower end menu could help mitigate the size of potential wallet damage. If money is no object, I believe the most expensive and swanky place to hold a wedding dinner banquet in Singapore is St Regis, which can cost up to a cool $1,750, including service charge and prevailing government taxes, for a table of ten.

Swanky St Regis Ballroom (image from St Regis website)

The advantage of picking a restaurant over a hotel ballroom is that one can just visit the restaurant as an ordinary paying customer to try the usual food quality. Most hotels will offer food tasting prior to the banquet, but they aren’t going to give you bad food during food tasting for obvious reasons, so the quality of food during the actual dinner banquet could be vastly different from the quality during food tasting.

However, there’s a workaround to to gauge the quality of food offered by a hotel more accurately. Just ask the banquet coordinator where the food from the dinner banquet is going to come from and go to that restaurant as an ordinary paying customer to check the usual food standards before committing. Of course, even if the usual fare is good, there is no guarantee the dinner banquet will be just as good, but I guess it’s better than taking the banquet coordinator’s words at face value, and which coordinator is going to tell you their food sucks?

In terms of location, there’s a bigger choice of hotels in good locations compared to restaurants. There are so many hotels in the downtown area, which is well served by all modes of transport. If you anticipate the majority of your guests to drive, location probably isn’t a big issue. If a large proportion of your guests are taking public transport, it would be nice to pick a hotel that’s either near an MRT station or served by a large number of public buses.

When it comes to atmosphere and decoration, there’s no rule of thumb, except that you are more likely to get a venue completely unblocked by pillars with a hotel ballroom as compared to a restuarant. Some restaurants are really well decorated and can definitely beat most hotel ballrooms hands down. However, if you like high ceilings, you’ll probably end up looking at hotel ballrooms. To decide on whether the atmosphere or location is suitably good, one will have to visit the prospective venue, and it’s best to visit when there’s a wedding show because the venue would be decorated to simulate an actual wedding banquet.

High ceiling and pillar-less setup (Image from Concorde Hotel website)

Perks and banquet coordinators usually go hand in hand. Most venues offer some perks to entice you to book with them, and it is a good idea to compare the perks of different venues to see which has more to offer. However, perks are usually negotiable and it is possible to get the banquet coordinator of a wedding venue to throw in more perks than what’s officially listed, depending on the negotiating skills of the couple and the willingness of the banquet coordinator to accomodate.

Be sure to have a good talk with the banquet coordinator to see if you are are comfortable with him or her, and brush up on your talking skills to get the most bang for your buck. Do remember to read the contract carefully before signing! Make sure that all the negotiated perks are put down in writing. Verbal commitments can be easily dishonoured.

Finally, it’s a good idea to ask parents what they think of the venue you are intending to pick. Parents might have their own ideas about venues and it would not be a good thing to have unhappy parents at the dinner banquet. In fact, it’s best to keep parents informed of most things during the entire planning process of the Chinese customary wedding. The more traditional type of parents would want their say in the process, so do keep them in the loop.

For a convenient list of wedding banquet venues in Singapore, SingaporeBrides.com has a good list of venues, although it’s not a comprehensive list, especially when it comes to restaurants. The internet is a very handy tool for checking out potential venues, so make Google your best friend during the wedding planning process.

For Chinese couples, choosing a wedding date can be something really easy, or it can be something that is really troublesome.

The troublesome part comes in if either the couple or the couple’s parents/grandparents insist on having an “auspicious” date for the wedding. According to tradition, experts should be consulted to pick a wedding date that’s auspicious for the couple. It is almost mandatory in chinese tradition to pick an auspicious date for most happy or important events in one’s life, such as marriage, moving/renovating house, shifting of ancestral graves etc.

For Singaporean couples these days, there’s a wide range of practices when it comes to picking an auspicious date. Those who no longer believe in consulting Chinese astrologers, fortune tellers or geomancy experts will simply pick a date with certain numbers. For marriages, the number 9 is popular because the Mandarin pronunciation of the number 9 is the same as that of the Mandarin pronunciation of the word “久”, which means “a long time”. Hence, the number nine symbolises that the marriage will last a long time. Some couples might also avoid the number 4 in their dates, reason being that the number 4 in Mandarin pronunciation sounds like the word “死”, which means “to die” or “death”.

Usually, Chinese couples will also avoid having their wedding in the 7th month of the lunar Chinese calendar as that is the month known as the “Ghost Month”. The Chinese people believe that the gates of hell open for one month every year during the 7th Lunar month for the hungry ghosts to take four weeks worth of vacation in the human realm to eat one year’s worth of buffet offerings from the living. I guess people don’t want unexpected guests at their banquets tucking in! Anyway, most Chinese people steer away from holding any joyous events in the lunar 7th month as far as possible.

I have also heard from a fortune teller that the 6th month of the lunar Chinese calendar is also considered a bad month for marriages specifically. The fortune teller claims that those who marry in the 6th month will end up being “半世夫妻”, which means “half a lifetime of being husband and wife”. I don’t know how true this is, but I guess it’s up to the individual to take his/her chances.

The most common way of determining a good date for wedding is to use the Chinese Almanac (通书) to check if the date in question is a good date for wedding. Typically, the almanac will indicate if the day is good or bad for weddings in general, and I do believe one can also check if the day clashes with the Chinese horoscopes of the couple. As long as there’re no clashes on the chosen date, that day is usually fine for holding a wedding.

For those who are deeply superstitious or traditional, consulting a Chinese metaphysics or astrology master is essential. This is because the master will take into account the couple’s Eight Characters when selecting an auspicious date for holding a wedding. The Eight Characters are basically the year, month, day and hour of birth according to the Chinese lunar calendar, and technically speaking, they are most important element in determining auspicious dates because even though a day might be good for wedding in general according to the almanac, there might be a clash with one’s Eight Characters and vice versa.

The only problem in determining an auspicious date based on the couple’s Eight Characters is to find a competent master who knows what he/she is doing, as Chinese metaphysics is a mind-boggling web of information. I personally am not a big believer of Chinese metaphysics but I figured that it won’t hurt to play safe and take no chances, so I went around looking for a Chinese metaphysics expert on the internet, and I came across the two experts at Geomancy.net, of which one is a computer programmer by training and he wrote his own programs to calculate auspicious dates for a fee. They offer a host of other Chinese metaphysics services as well, such as geomancy services for picking a good house, life prediction and analysis based on your Eight Characters etc. Once your account is set up, you can log into the website to calculate the auspicious dates immediately, and I like that because I don’t have to physically go visit someone to get the dates.

Of course, all these traditions and superstitions of picking a wedding date aside, the couple would also have to factor in work commitments to make sure that neither party is likely to be in some mad project period in the workplace on the intended date or week of wedding. There’s also the issue of having to make sure that the venue you want for your wedding banquet is available, and there’s also the question of holding the wedding on a weekday or weekend. Weekends are usually more convenient for guests and family since most people don’t work on weekends, but weekend prices for wedding banquets are usually more expensive.

All things considered, it can be a nightmare to pick a wedding date, traditional chinese style. My wife and I, after much discussion and deliberations, have decided that 11th December 2010 is the best date, all things considered. So if you’re a Chinese couple intending to get married, or if your partner is a Chinese, you might want to start thinking about picking the wedding date at least one year in advance, or even better, one and a half years in advance.

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