Main piece:

You have to get married on a certain date, and it depends on your birth time, your birth year, your birth hour. There’s a thing called a “huang li,” which literally translates to yellow calendar, and it details for each zodiac person. You research it, and it’s a book that’s like a quarter inch thick and you look up your birth time and dates and you figure out which day is the most auspicious to get married. And it also tells you who to get married to––like, which zodiac animals. And that’s why I got married to to my husband on Saint Patrick’s day.

Background:

The informant, HK, was born in New York but has parents who are from China. She married and has three children. She now lives in texas.

Context:

HK now lives in Texas––I collected this story over a Zoom call. She has been one of my mother’s closest friends since college, and often, they would commiserate together with all of my other Chinese aunties about certain things their Chinese parents would make them do, or general annoyance over Chinese tradition. This was one of those calls.

Thoughts:

I had never heard of the huang li before, and I think it’s interesting because the day which you get married can be so nebulous in American culture––people generally want to get married in June (which we talked about in class), but sometimes it takes years for people to finally work up the energy to get married. I think it goes to show how much more relaxed people are in America not just about the actual wedding day, but just about marriage in general. The divorce rate in this country is something near 50%, whereas when my dad’s parents got divorced (both from China) it was a really big deal and most people couldn’t even believe it. In Chinese culture, usually even if you don’t like the person you’re with, you’re supposed to just stick it out (or at least, that used to be the rhetoric). The huang li is just one example of the traditions that make Chinese marriage more rigid, maybe even more of a commitment, thand American marriage.