What is tradition? What does tradition mean? I believe everyone has their own definitions. For me, tradition must be something that we inherit from generations to generations, like traditional holidays we celebrate now. However, there are some traditions are fading from our life, which I think should maintain. Take the tradition, betrothal gifts, in wedding for example here.
Betrothal gifts, the gifts the bridegroom gives to the bride’s family as wedding token, is one of the old Chinese wedding programs, which placed a rich and meaningful role in all the programs. But, with the development of society, this ritual has lost its original form and meaning. As the book “Rituals” in Zhou dynasty records, there are six programs shall conduct before the wedding, and the betrothal gifts is the only one has been handed down so far. And according to “Rituals”, in old China, the betrothal gifts are things with good token, which are comb, mirror, ruler, dou(object shaped like dipper), scissors and embroidered shoes.
For comb means the couple will be knotted together; mirror means their wedded life will be a life with satisfactory completeness; ruler as the measure tool measures the happiness of the wedded life, symbolizes the couple’s endless happiness; dou as the measure container for food shows the wealth of the bridegroom, symbolizes the bride’s wealthy life after the wedding; scissors as the tool to make cloth, symbolizes the dexterity of the bride, also the wealth of the bridegroom family; embroidered shoes adopt the concept of Chinese’s homonyms, mean that the couple will be harmonious in the future life, because the characters of shoe and harmony in Chinese pronounce the same. These have been carried on for thousands of years until modern China.
Because in modern China, as the society became more and more materialized, people start to replace all the token things to money. According to the “Republic Daily”, published in Shanghai on 25th October, 1928, for a normal family, the bridegroom should prepare at least 70 to 80 Yuan as the betrothal gift, and some even up to hundreds or thousands Yuan. Besides that, jewelries and clothes also need hundreds or thousands Yuan as part of the gifts. Compared to the average salary level, 15 Yuan per month, in Shanghai at that time, the cost of the betrothal gifts was quite a number. The article exclaimed that this kind of cost is huge waste. Still, people from Republic of China will be totally astonished by today’s number. In the report from China Youth Network in 2017, we can see that the betrothal gifts is usually around 100,000 Yuan, some even up to 200,000 Yuan.
In my opinion, this kind of betrothal gifts shall not be called gifts but bride-price is more proper. This behavior just like trade in the market. It only use the money for a bride but a thing. What other differences does it make? Truth to be told, this so-called bride-price is some kind of trade, especially in some rural districts or impoverished areas. The bride family is using the bride to trade for their wealthy life, or the money that covers her brother’s bride-price. It’s like human trafficking under new times or even worse! In some remote areas, the girls are actually be selling, they are not actually the bride but the tool to give birth to child, or to carry out the mission of passing the family line. In that case, thousands of teenage girls are missing and being sold every year in recent decades, and thousands of family are heartbroken for the lost child.
Besides, this bride-price changes the way people think and the way people behave in China. It makes Chinese people totally materialized, valued everything with money, so that we do anything for money. Once I heard that a young man robbed a supermarket for money to get married. And I also heard that some parents worked to death in order to prepare the bride-price for their son. Under this circumstance, the phenomenon of picking up someone’s money on the street without retuning and working in a very old age are more and more common nowadays. Was that good? I hardly can think so. People are losing their conscience. Every year we can read some reports like this. Migrant workers value their hard-working money very much, so they take the money with them instead of depositing in the bank card when they come back home at the end of the year, and in accident, some of them drop the money on their way home. But even with the help of police, the money always cannot be returned. What a shame! That money contains countless sweat and blood, how could someone just take advantage of that.
At last, in my defense, the betrothal gifts are supposed to be symbolic, and have symbolic meaning, because the marriage