China Part 5: Tying the Knot in Tiger Leaping Gorge

Tiger Leaping Gorge. Emmy remarked, "Not your typical place for a wedding."

Tiger Leaping Gorge II. Amos remarked, "Nobody's gonna get cold feet in a place this romantic."

During our winter vacation, the first thing we wanted to do was escape our 5 million neighbors in Kunming and hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge. This is one of the world’s deepest gorges, a full 2.2 miles straight up from the blue line of a river at the bottom to the towering peak of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. We stuffed our backpacks full of winter coats, long underwear, and peanut butter. We neglected to bring any formalwear at all. We simply weren’t expecting to attend a wedding in a small Naxi ethnic minority village perched a thousand feet up the side of the gorge.

We arrived at the Tiger Leaping Gorge trailhead at 4 pm, with no idea how far it was to our destination “Naxi Family” Guesthouse or even where the trail started. Luckily, two passing horsemen offered to show us the trail to the Naxi Family. After following a poorly-marked, foot-wide trail straight up a mountain for two hours, we reached a small village of maybe 50 people. “Come inside and have some tea,” the elder horseman said. Thanks, said Amos, but we need to keep moving to reach the Naxi Family Guesthouse before dark. “Oh, you can’t get there tonight!” was the shocked reply. “Too far, too far.” They had led us to a Naxi Family, all right—their own! Thrilled to escape from the tourist track, we accepted their offer to stay the night, scarfed down a dinner of home-grown pork, and flipped through an old photo album full of… thrilled tourists. We asked why the album was full of foreigners, and learned that they had no camera of their own—these were photos sent back by tourists who had hired out their horses. They mentioned that the whole village was about to celebrate a wedding, and we slyly let it slip that we had a camera. They invited us to join in the festivities.

Our Naxi guides make their living giving horse rides to tourists. They explained, "If you pester Chinese tourists enough, they'll eventually give in. With Americans, you just wait until they get tired. But not Germans. Germans are excellent hikers. You can't get business from Germans."

Amos rambled on and on about the village's view of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, while Emmy focused her energy on the persimmons.

The only thing worse than chickens fighting over corn cobs outside your door at 6am is stumbling over those corn cobs at 3am on your freezing 200 meter dash to the outhouse.

The logistical issues the bride and groom faced would have stymied your average American wedding planner. First, every villager within a 5-mile radius was invited to the wedding, and the family had no money to hire caterers or cleaning staff anyways. Second, the 50-person village didn’t have any special-event venues built to hold 200 guests, and the family didn’t own nearly enough tables, chairs, plates, or stoves to host them. As if that wasn’t enough, the village’s power was out due to road construction deep in the bottom of the gorge. These problems were solved by all the wedding guests coming a day early to help prepare the food. It turned out that every Naxi villager-guest was an expert butcher, cook, custodian, and event planner.

A number of the village men were also, luckily, expert hog intestine-squeezers.

We're not sure if the innumerable Han Chinese in China's flatlands forced the Naxi people to live on the side of a gorge, or if they just wanted a nice view.

Every wedding guest's financial contribution to the happy couple was recorded in the official register. The scribes waved off our Chinese names and recorded our contribution as LaoWai (Foreigner).

Each family carried their dining room table, chairs, and charcoal stove to a cobblestone courtyard in the middle of the village. This courtyard, the only place on the mountain large enough to fit 200 people, was very versatile. In the morning, old men lassoed five enormous, screaming pigs and slaughtered, skinned, and butchered them on five lucky families’ dining room tables. Amos was mesmerized and took hundreds of pictures until he was drafted to carry fifty-pound slabs of pig fat to the storeroom. Then young men hosed down the courtyard until the pools of pig blood ran downhill into the horse barn. While the women fried as much pork as the skillets could hold, we wiped down all the tables and found each one a place without too much pinkish water. Finally it was time for lunch. We ate in two shifts, so that while 100 people were eating, the other 100 were serving them. The bride and the groom waited tables for both shifts, and then ate by themselves. After they finished eating, cutthroat games of mah-johngg, Chinese Chess, and cards sprang up on the same tables that had already seen screeching pigs and bowls of fried pork. Some villagers went to sleep, some left to herd their goats, and many of the women picked vegetables from the nearby fields. The wedding was suspended until dinner.

You can see it in the eyes of the smallest, fifth and last pig that he knows exactly where his neighbors have disappeared to.

Men pour boiling water over the pig so they can scrape off its hair. At least Wilbur was free-range and hormone-free.

One of the burning questions answered during this trip was, “How do you smoke a cigarette if your arms are buried up to the elbow inside a half-ton hog?” Give up? Let the 10-year-old carrying the cigarette tray stick one in your mouth and light it for you.

After watching dozens of village women pass by with forty-pound loads of lettuce on their backs, we began to wonder why the only lettuce we had seen at the meal was the garnish for an appetizer tray piled with individual cigarrettes. We knew that eating meat was an important sign of prosperity in China. (In fact, 40% of our students had responded to the question “What is your favorite food?” with one word, “Meat.”) We didn’t realize that banishing vegetables from the wedding demonstrated how rich they were. One Chinese friend of ours noted that wedding food is “always terrible,” because people display their wealth by serving loads of cheap meat. At this wedding, the freshly-prepared pork was excellent, but by the second day we would have killed for a head of lettuce.

We always got stuck next to the cubes-of-pork-fat or intestines-and-gravy dish, too polite to reach across the table for the coveted pork-with-veggie-slivers.

Emmy sat on the blood-free side of the courtyard, clumsily peeling garlic amid murmurs of “Look! The American knows how to make Chinese food!”

After dinner, the guests cleared the tables and chairs from the courtyard and the groom built a bonfire in the middle. We were goaded into joining a traditional Naxi circle-dance, in which villagers of all ages joined hands and stomped their feet in a bewilderingly simple pattern, accompanied by a single harmonica-like instrument. The teenagers led the circle, leaping high into the air at every step. The older men and women came shuffling behind with huge smiles. The young mothers clutching their babies were next, followed by a handful of limping grandparents. The foreigners usually got stuck in between the babies and the grandmas. We got caught up in the dancers’ enthusiasm for about the first half hour, and then we began to wonder. Four hours of left-right-left-stomp? Is this really that exciting? But we could see by people’s expressions in the firelight that it truly was. The only people who didn’t dance were the bride and groom. They spent all night as waiter and waitress, offering trays of pumpkin seeds and cigarrettes to their guests.

The groom was 10 years older than the bride. All the wedding guests we surveyed instantly agreed this was an average and ideal age difference.

This combination slaughterhouse/dining hall/casino/ballroom included views straight onto Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, the bridal suite, the kitchen, and the now-empty pig-corral.

We agreed that the first day of the wedding was a little boring, except for the electrifying morning of nonstop pig slaughter. The second day, nothing changed except the bride wore a new red dress and the groom put on a fancy suit. We enjoyed the exact same fried pork, pork fat, pork intestine, and pork with green pepper dishes plus five hours of dancing. There was no ceremony! No forever hold your peace, no do you take this woman, no I do. The only reminders that we were at a wedding were the groom’s fancy suit and the bridal suite, a cramped room you could peek into from the courtyard. It was festooned with pink flowers, flashing neon hearts, and posters of smiling baby twin boys.

The Naxi people and other ethnic minorities are allowed two babies under China’s one-child policy. Usually the third or fourth question we're asked in casual conversation with strangers in China is "How many children are you allowed to have in America?"

The wedding day was considered auspicious because it coincided with a solar eclipse. These bratty kids made us promise to send them huge quantities of pictures.