A cultural exchange -- of vows

When Ashokkumar Patel and Sirvart Kassabian entered the ballroom for their wedding reception this month, they followed the beat of their hearts -- and two drummers. There was the barefoot and turbaned dholi, or traditional Indian drummer, who escorted them into the room. And there was the Armenian dance music, which drew both sides of the family onto the floor. While the Patel women swirled around in red, blue and orange saris, the Kassabians danced the night away in pink, red and black evening wear.

Patel, 35, and Kassabian, 31, are now honeymooning in Italy, relaxing after months of high-stress wedding planning. They found that blending high-contrast cultures into an event that simultaneously reflected themselves and respected their families was no easy trick -- but it’s one in which a growing number of couples are engaged.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2002 Current Population Survey, 2.9% of the country’s 58 million married couples are interracial (up from 1.8% in 1990 and 1.3% in 1980). In many instances, that translates into a confluence of traditions and styles.

Talk to area wedding planners and they’ll tell you that the number of cross-cultural couples is on the rise. Randie Pellegrini, executive producer of Cordially Invited, a Beverly Hills event production firm, estimates that 80% of her client couples come from different cultural backgrounds; the couples represent different ethnicities or practice different faiths.

“People want the big movie of the Prince Charming marrying his true love and [living] happily ever after. Sometimes it’s just not in the same culture,” said Pellegrini, who has coordinated weddings for a wide variety of mixed-ethnicity couples, including Swedish-African American and Jewish-Japanese.

In urban areas such as Los Angeles, the trend is especially apparent. The percentage of U.S.-born interracial couples here is nearly triple the national average, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. Here, people from wildly diverse cultures to rub elbows everywhere, from the grocery store to the office, and, sometimes, fall in love and get married. These days, it isn’t uncommon for weddings to be officiated by a priest and a rabbi. Receptions might include a mariachi band and a gospel choir. The banquet might offer sushi and hummus.

“One of the huge trends we’re seeing in weddings is this personalization factor. Couples are really trying to incorporate special details that mean a lot to them, and culture is one of the largest ways to personalize your day,” said Kathleen Murray, weddings editor for the Knot magazine. “A marriage is combining two families, so it shows appreciation to their families and also honors where they came from.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. Anyone who has planned a wedding knows how stressful it can be to coordinate the bridal party, attire, invitations, caterers, photographer, banquet hall, musicians, favors and everything else. Try combining Hawaiian and German traditions. Or Chinese and Irish.

For the Patels, the cultural nods began with a wedding invitation in Armenian, English and the Indian dialect Gujarati. It continued with a two-part, two-day wedding ceremony. The actual ceremony kicked off with an ancient Hindu beautification ritual at the Valley Temple in Northridge on a Friday and ended the following evening with an Orthodox Christian exchange of vows at Holy Martyrs Armenian Apostolic Church in Encino. Dinner was a mix of Indian cuisine and Middle Eastern fare, followed by music, which segued from Hindi to Arabic.

“We wanted all our guests to know that [Sirvart] and I still love our cultures, but we love one another too,” said Patel, who met Kassabian six years ago in medical school. “We don’t want our families to think that we’re going to forget about our culture.... We just want to reflect what we think about these things.”

The rise in marriages between faiths and ethnicities goes hand in hand with various cultural phenomena, most notably the delay of first marriage. Today, the average age is 27 for men and 25 for women in the United States. In 1960, it was 23 and 20.

That may not seem like a significant increase, but the implications are enormous. Instead of meeting and marrying someone from socio-economically defined neighborhoods or high schools under the watchful eyes of their parents, increasing numbers of young people go away to college, travel around the world, have jobs and live on their own before they are married, giving them more exposure to other cultures as well as personal and financial independence.

“If you’re living at home, it’s hard to keep secret from your parents who your boyfriend is,” said Michael Rosenfeld, assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University. “What’s happened in the last 40 years in the U.S. is young adults have the opportunity to have social lives that their parents are unable to supervise. They’re exposed to different people and have the opportunity to have a relationship with them without their parents immediately knowing about it.”

Twentysomething brides and grooms are typically more accepting of interracial relationships than their parents. When the Pew Research Center in Washington began polling Americans about their attitudes toward interracial dating in 1987, only 48% of the public approved. By 2003, the most recent year the question was asked, acceptance had increased to 77%.

The greatest acceptance was among the youngest polled: 91% of Generation Y participants said in 2003 they approved of interracial dating, compared with 85% of Gen Xers, 77% of boomers and 49% of the World War II generation.

Clearly, social barriers are eroding. That’s part of the reason why today’s generation of twentysomething brides and grooms feel so comfortable with the idea and are marrying outside their own ethnicities and faiths more than ever.

Still, there’s a divide when it comes to their wedding guests, who oftentimes span three or four generations. For older guests and first-generation parents in particular, intercultural weddings are often rife with fear -- of the unknown, of being the minority, of the dilution or extinction of centuries-old traditions and a way of life.

Sometimes the fear and disapproval are so strong that it prevents relatives from even attending. Yvette Kovacs, an event planner in Garden Grove who specializes in Indian weddings, coordinated a wedding between a Hindu man and Muslim woman in which the bride’s entire family steered clear.

“You could see the gap where the family was supposed to be, but the bride and groom just carried on. I think in their hearts they kind of accepted that,” said Kovacs, who estimates that 65% of her weddings are mixed.

“What’s different about modern life,” Rosenfeld said, “is that young people can make it in this world on their own without their parents if they have to, and they’re perfectly willing in many cases to choose love over their parents if their parents force them to make that choice. In the past, that choice was harder to make. When the U.S. was a farming economy, your only livelihood was to inherit the family farm, so you couldn’t really go against their will. Now we live in a modern corporate economy. You get an education, you find work someplace else. Parental opposition doesn’t have the force it used to have.”

You don’t find love, as the saying goes. Love finds you. And sometimes it comes in a different package than expected.

“I call my studio the crying room because when people come here, they either cry from joy or are in my arms weeping because their family is disowning them,” said Susanna Stefanachi Macomb, a minister and author of “Joining Hands and Hearts: Interfaith, Intercultural Wedding Celebrations.” “What I try to do is just appeal to their hearts. What I focus on is love. I try to find a way to bridge the differences and rejoice in their commonality.”

In her nine years as a minister, Macomb has married couples in a variety of emotionally charged situations -- a Jewish holocaust survivor and a German Roman Catholic, a Muslim and a Jew in post-9/11 New York, an Indian and a Pakistani. In helping couples plan their ceremonies, Macomb uses the same strategy that successful couples turn to when their marriages hit the inevitable rough spots: She focuses on the similarities, the ties that brought them together and continue to bind them.

Pellegrini uses the same strategy, probing couples’ connections through questionnaires that ask them about everything from their family histories and values to how they met, what they want out of their marriage and their favorite foods.

“The deeper you dig, the cooler and more touching it becomes,” said Pellegrini. “I always find the sentimental and the things that connect between the two people.”

For a wedding ceremony between a Jewish man from Queens, N.Y., and an African American woman from Los Angeles, for example, she incorporated the African American tradition of jumping over the broom. For the bride, the tradition was a cultural nod to her forebears. The tradition has its roots in Africa and was carried on by slaves in the U.S. who weren’t allowed to marry. The bride and groom literally jump over a broom, which is then used to sweep the ground, to symbolize brushing away the old and welcoming in the new.

“It’s all about what touches the heart and the overlaps of the two cultures put together,” said Pellegrini.

For Ling Chan, who is Chinese American, and John Gatins, who’s of Irish descent, that meant the recitation of the Prayer of St. Francis during their ceremony and endless Irish folk songs at the reception. It meant wedding invitations with the Chinese double joy symbol and red paper lanterns hanging from the trees in the nature reserve where they took their vows.

As a whole, the event was “a Fellini kind of thing,” said Chan, who married in 1999, on a date that was considered auspicious in Chinese astrology. “Neither of us grew up in Ireland or China, but we did mix in little details.”

And that often makes for an even more memorable and special wedding, not only for the bride and groom but everyone who’s there to witness it.

Five years after Rena Puebla married her second husband, she said her guests are still talking about it. None of them had ever been to an African American-Japanese wedding reception before. The African print tablecloths, leather giraffe statues and collard greens coupled with sashimi and live, traditional Japanese music performed by women in kimonos proved memorable for their 36 guests.

The only thing missing was culturally appropriate cake statuettes. An African American-Japanese combination simply didn’t exist, so Puebla opted for a pair of white doves and resolved to rectify the situation with a line of ethnically interchangeable cake statuettes, which hit the market in January under the Costa Mesa-based Renellie brand name.

Sales of the interchangeable Asian, Latino, white and African American cake toppers have since topped 500. None of them have been same-race couples, Puebla said.

As demand presents itself, Renellie may expand with Indian and Middle Eastern cake toppers, but no such coupling existed for the wedding of Patel and Kassabian, whose reception extended into the wee hours with a traditional Indian dance troupe, Arabic music and a live flamenco guitarist.

“We’re very protective of our language, religion, culture,” said Kassabian, an Armenian who lived in Lebanon until she was 13, when her family moved to Northridge. “For my parents and all their friends and family, it’s taboo to talk about dating someone from another culture. For me, it was: He’s a great guy.”

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Two become one

Blending high-contrast cultures into a wedding that reflects the bride’s and groom’s personalities and respects family backgrounds is a challenge. Here’s what three cross-cultural couples did on their way to “I Do.”

Armenian-Indian

Bride: Sirvart Kassabian, 31, Armenian American

Groom: Ashokkumar Patel, 35, Indian American

Married: June 11, 2005 in Encino

Invitations: Written in English, Armenian and the Indian dialect Gujarati, they also featured a custom-designed, abstract graphic of the Hindu elephant god, Ganesh.

Ceremony: The two-part, two-day wedding event kicked off with an ancient Hindu beautification ritual at the Valley Temple in Northridge on a Friday and ended the following evening with an Orthodox Christian exchange of vows at Holy Martyrs Armenian Apostolic Church in Encino.

Reception: After following a traditional Indian drummer, or dholi, into the Omni Hotel ballroom, the couple was ringed with guests dancing to Armenian dance music. Two prayers -- one in Gujarati, another in Armenian -- were followed by a barefoot and turbaned Indian dance troupe performing in the traditional bhangra style. Middle Eastern cuisine and Indian fare were served for dinner. Hours of Arabic, Armenian, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish music and a flamenco guitarist rounded out the night.

Attire: Engagement photos showed the couple wearing formal western attire and traditional Indian clothes. Patel wore Indian attire to his beautification ritual. For the wedding, he wore a black tux, and Kassabian wore a white gown, even though black and white are considered mournful colors in Indian culture.

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African American-Japanese

Bride: Rena Puebla, 51, African American

Groom: Ron Kokawa, 49, Japanese American

Married: January 22, 2000 in Dana Point

Invitation: Elegant and simple, the circular cream and gold-leaf invitations reflected Kokawa’s Japanese sensibility.

Ceremony: Puebla and her husband have a pact not to talk about religion, so their ceremony was nondenominational and held at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel. Two women in kimonos played the koto, a Japanese instrument, as guests arrived and as the couple walked down the aisle.

Reception: The koto players continued until the couple’s first dance -- to Natalie Cole. After that, it was jazz. Dinner was a mix of ham hocks, collard greens, sushi and sashimi. Table decor consisted of African print fabric and leather giraffe statuettes on one side and Japanese fabric and fans on the other. Chopsticks and rice bowls were among the wedding favors.

Attire: Kokawa donned a tux, ascot and tails, with Puebla decked out in a lace-accented, cream-colored gown.

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Chinese-Irish

Bride: Ling Chan, 36, Chinese American

Groom: John Gatins, 37, Irish American

Married: May 8, 1999 (an auspicious date in Chinese astrology) in Malibu

Invitation: The Chinese double-joy character (meaning good luck and happiness) was incorporated into the invitations, program, menu and thank-you notes.

Ceremony: Chan is Methodist and Gatins is Catholic, but neither is practicing so they opted for a nondenominational, outdoor ceremony at the historic Adamson House along the Malibu coast. Chan and Gatins wrote their vows, and the groom’s two sisters each recited a Catholic prayer.

Reception: The groom’s father sang “Danny Boy” and other Irish folk songs. Platters of Chinese California fusion cuisine were served family style at each table. Red rose floral arrangements were wrapped in Asian brocade silk, and red Chinese lanterns hung from the trees.

Attire: Red is a symbol of luck and good fortune in Chinese culture, so Gatins wore a red tie with his charcoal suit. Chan wore a white gown for the ceremony and draped it with a red wrap for the reception.