When a daughter of South Korea’s top financial regulator was married last June, one tradition was notably absent: cash-filled gift envelopes.
Before entering a Korean wedding hall, guests normally line up to hand their offerings to a cashier, who opens the envelopes and registers the givers’ names, and the amounts of the gifts, in a velvet-covered ledger. The practice is such a given that wedding invitations sometimes include bank account numbers so people who cannot attend can still send money.
“The problem with this tradition is that it can be abused for bribery,” said Kim Jong-chang, governor of the Financial Supervisory Service, which regulates the South Korean banking and securities industries. “In my case, many banking officials would have shown up with cash gifts. They would have wondered whether I was annoyed that they didn’t put enough in the envelope.”
“It’s not always easy in our weddings to tell the difference between bribes and genuine gifts,” he said.
The envelopes reflect a culture in which giving cash is considered so natural that people sometimes call it a “greeting.” Similar white envelopes are de rigueur at a baby’s first birthday party and less frequent when a friend opens a new shop here. Chipping in to help friends defray both wedding and funeral expenses is a custom that added up to US$6.9 billion last year, the National Statistical Office said.
Families keep records of how much they receive and from whom so that they can reciprocate. Failure to do so can ruin a friendship.
“Sometimes you even get invitations from people you don’t know very well,” Kim said. “They arrive like tax bills or IOUs.”
But in recent months, the wedding cash and the habit of inviting a large crowd of guests have been criticized as wasteful at best, and a conduit for vote-buying and bribery at worst.
In May, after news coverage critical of extravagant weddings at five-star hotels during the economic downturn, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak exhorted the country’s rich and powerful to set an example in fighting the “vain and extravagant” wedding culture.
Some, like Kim, have complied, not only declining to accept cash gifts but also keeping their guest lists — which can swell into the thousands — relatively short. Ban Ki-moon, the South Korea-born secretary-general of the UN, invited only a few close friends and relatives to the wedding of his son in May, as did Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan when his daughter married in April. Last month, Chung Jung-kil, Lee’s chief of staff, followed suit.
But in a country where social standing is measured by the length of the guest list, the financial take and the sumptuousness of the banquet, these low-key weddings were such oddities that they made news.
“Here, a wedding is less a celebration than an occasion for a family to show off,” said Lee Yoon-ji, who runs a wedding management agency and photo studio in Seoul’s upscale Kangnam district. “For instance, if the bride’s family finds its guests are many fewer than the groom’s, it’s humiliating.”
Every year, roughly 330,000 South Korean couples spend an average of between US$13,000 and US$17,000 each on weddings, said Lee Woong-jin, head of Sunoo, a matchmaking company that conducts an annual survey on wedding expenses. The cost can exceed US$40,000 for hotel weddings.
To the relief of the principals, much of that is usually covered by the cash gifts.
“This is a ‘you-help-me, I-help-you’ tradition,” said Han Seung-ho, 33, a photographer whose wedding last month attracted 370 guests. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. You chip in and you get help in return. Without their cash gifts, my wedding would have been a serious financial burden for me.”
The bribery worries resulted in revisions to South Korea’s election laws in 2004 that banned politicians from giving cash envelopes, except at the weddings and funerals of close relatives.
Three candidates for offices at provincial farmers’ and fisheries’ cooperatives were indicted in September and last month on charges of giving cash gifts at voters’ weddings.
The inflated guest lists have also come under scrutiny. A provincial education chief was widely criticized in the media in April after he reportedly invited 2,000 people — including the principals of all 460 schools under his jurisdiction — to his son’s wedding.
Chung Woo-jin, 50, president of Q&Q Medi, a medical supplies company, said many wedding guests attended “reluctantly,” fearing they might lose out on business contracts or promotions if they did not.
“So they show up to prove that they were there, give the envelope and hurry off to have the meal, without even taking a look at the bride or groom,” he said.
Chung said he felt compelled to go to between 40 and 50 weddings or funerals a year for friends, employees and business acquaintances, with his donations averaging US$85. But, he said, he refused to accept cash envelopes at his mother’s funeral in June.
The new push coincides with a youthful rebellion against a wedding culture controlled by the older generation. It is generally the parents who, facing the bills, send out the invitations and collect the cash; so, by and large, more guests are there for them than for the bride and groom.
“Some of my friends feel frustrated, wondering if their wedding is for them or for their parents,” said Lee Eun-jeong, 35, who works at a publishing company in Seoul.
She limited her wedding in June to 135 guests and did not accept envelopes.
“We also hate it when a friend who hasn’t contacted us for years suddenly gets in touch with us before her wedding, obviously with our envelopes in mind,” she said.
South Korea’s past moves toward wedding frugality have had limited success. In 1973, military strongman Park Chung-hee tried to ban written invitations, flowers and gifts from weddings and funerals, in the belief that such customs detracted from his modernization campaign.
But the restrictions were rarely enforced, and were lifted in 1999, opening the way for five-star hotels and wedding agencies to enter the marriage market.
Despite his own willingness to forgo the cash gifts, Kim, the financial watchdog chief, saw the new campaign’s prospects as iffy.
“Frankly,” he said, “I found myself thinking, ‘I’ve given out all these envelopes over the years. Why shouldn’t I get them once for my daughter’s wedding?’”
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