Hong Kong arranged marriage heartbreak: the bridal laments women sang before leaving home
- Young women, often unschooled, were found husbands by matchmakers, and last days before marrying strangers were spent crying and singing songs of sadness
- The laments these Weitou women sang, passed down through generations, have been recorded, along with the stories of their lives, in a documentary film
Her eyesight failing, Liu Kam-lan sits, hands clasped together, with social workers from the Caritas NGO in San Uk Tsuen, a village in Hong Kong’s New Territories a few kilometres from the border with China. Around her, other elderly women chat and laugh.
She is asked to sing. In a lilting voice, she begins a “bridal lament” in the disappearing dialect of the Weitou people, who settled in the area during the Song dynasty (960-1279). The dialect is still spoken by elderly people in the old walled villages around Lung Yeuk Tau.
The song is one of sadness, and tells a story dating back more than 60 years. Like other young women, Liu was told by her mother to climb the wooden steps into the cockloft of her family’s home. There she would lie on a mat for several days while friends came to say goodbye, before she was married off to a man she had never met.
A few days later she would leave her home village forever – a new bride in a sedan chair.
This was the life of a Weitou woman. In their bridal laments are words of anger and bile for the matchmaker they felt betrayed them.
“In the darkness, by the wooden rail. On a regal seat you settle, accusations I bellow,” the song Berating the Matchmaker begins.
