"Better to invite the wrong person than to miss out."
As soon as I got home, my mother, holding several wedding invitations in her hand, complained: "It's one thing for our own children and grandchildren to be invited, but there are families on this street who have never even known each other their whole lives, and yet they still invited you to your wedding!"
Good days are a time of "invitation overload." Not attending is impossible; retired teachers only receive 1.5 million dong a month, and in rural areas, the minimum wedding gift is now 50,000 dong! My mother spent over 1 million dong on wedding gifts throughout October.
It has been learned that many rural families, when organizing weddings for their children, ask the village head for a list of households in their village and neighboring villages to write invitations. This means "inviting the wrong people is better than missing out." That's why some families prepare 100 to 150 tables of guests for their children's weddings. Before the wedding day, the family borrows money to slaughter cows, pigs, and chickens... making the celebration as extravagant as any other.
After the wedding, the wedding gifts weren't enough to pay off the debts, so instead of a lavish celebration, they ended up with mountains of debt. There were even weddings where the groom and bride were children of farmers from the same village or hamlet, yet they still hired a wedding car to pick up the bride, which was wasteful.
The "National Unity for Building a Culturally Rich Life" movement, implemented by the Vietnam Fatherland Front Committee since 2000, requires villages and communes to establish regulations and customs regarding weddings in accordance with the new cultural lifestyle as a criterion. Many localities are known to be very serious about implementing wedding customs according to the new lifestyle. However, there are still many lavish, ostentatious, and wasteful wedding ceremonies, causing public outrage, including those involving the children of officials, Party members, civil servants, and even leaders.
Xuan Hoang
