(LI SHIGONG)

When my Chinese fi­ance and I decided to get married, there was no question about it: We would get our wedding portraits taken at one of the Chinese wedding studios that came with quaint names like "Paris," "Rome,""Golden Ladies," or "Mona Lisa." "Are you going for the typi­cal Chinese look? Vaseline on the lens, the works?" a British friend asked, in, shall we say, "amused" fashion.  

It was a Chinese tradi­tion I would come to love; in the West, wedding photos are usually taken only during the ceremony and reception. 

When we toured the studio, we saw racks of clothes in different sizes—hanfu (traditional Chinese clothes), qipaos, and Western-style wedding dresses and tuxedos in all colors and styles. There were also different "film" sets, featuring the Chinese double-happiness symbol with peanuts, dried fruit and a sewing kit, a Western-style atelier and dining set, a lotus pond with a rowing boat, a vapor-filled lagoon, and a real stuffed peacock... Couples we saw in makeup and costume looked happy strolling around. Everyone was transformed into a star on shooting day!  

Shooting day during our first set of photos saw me in a green qipao with tulip flowers on it, standing or seated formally with my fiance, clutching a fan. My fiance was dressed in a solemn Chinese tunic suit. Then we were asked to pose with two "wine" glasses filled with jasmine tea and a mock-up of a yellowed English-language newspaper. 

"Elegant!" our photographer remarked while browsing through the photos on his digital camera. 

Next, I wore a Parisian-style dress with bell sleeves and a hat with a veil, while my fiance was put in a brown three-piece suit. I had taken a plastic Halloween pumpkin with me as we posed on the “Dream Castle” set, and an artists’ studio with copies of Western paintings and under the watchful eye of a plaster bust of Homer. My fiance and I “took photos” of each other using a replica of a pinhole camera. I then twirled around and pretended to paint, holding a palette. A German friend of mine later rather rationally remarked that no one paints in wedding dress, but we were in a fantasy world here! 

The "blushing bride" photos, as I call them, were my favorites and taken in a park. I wore a traditional white wedding dress and veil and my fiance a pista­chio-colored jacket, despite resistance 

from the staff who had insisted he go with a more traditional black suit like the other Chinese grooms we saw, but that wouldn't reflect his color­ful character. We posed in a wooded area of the park, where the assistant lit some joss sticks to make for a more romantic atmosphere.  

For our final set of photos, my fiance wore a black dinner jacket and an imitation medal, and a white shirt with ruffles, while I was put in a dress with a white hoop skirt and black top, and long black gloves (which begs the question who wears gloves nowadays on formal occasions?) I had my hair done up in a style akin to Audrey Hepburn's in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and wore a delicate pearl necklace. We took our places at a dinner table in the glow of candles.  

It was hard for me to move in that hoop skirt, so two assistants had to help me. Digging a little deeper into that memory, one even had to hold up the skirt while I used the lavatory, which was a moment that day I would rather not reminisce about any further. 

The whole process took about a month, from consultation to actual shoot­ing and photo selection, and wasn’t cheap. However, the photos would be­come a precious memory we are sure to cherish when "our hair is white," as the Chinese say. 

The author is an American living in Beijing  

(Print Edition Title: Vaseline on the Lens)   

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon  

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