Thursday, April 4: In a conversation about weekend plans, Suky mentions that she might be going hiking on the 21st, but then stops herself. "Oh," she says, "but that's Yu-jin's wedding. Are you going?"

I'm at a loss. The director of our institute is getting married? This is the first I've heard of it. "Are we supposed to go?" I ask.

"Oh, you didn't know about the wedding?" Suky asks. Then she turns to James, the assistant director, and asks him — in English — whether she can tell me about Yu-jin's wedding. Halfway through, she catches herself and switches to Korean. In English, James says that she can go ahead.

According to Suky, all of the teachers at ECC are invited. She knows this because Sally, the Korean lady who manages the front desk upstairs, has told her. Of course, as with virtually all information that percolates through ECC, no one is sure about anything — did Yu-jin actually say anything that would indicate that we've been invited, or did Sally just find out about the wedding and assume? The simplest way to solve this mystery would be to ask Yu-jin directly, but right now at least, the wedding is still something of a secret.

Or at least it's implicitly a secret — or something — so the only person I tell is Jenny, who is as excited as I am at the prospect of witnessing a Korean wedding. Korea seems to have wedding fever, with wedding halls all over the place: big atrocious glass buildings with huge portraits of happy couples out front. From the outside, they look like the nuptial equivalent of a multiplex cinema, but we've never actually been in one. This may be our only chance.

Friday, April 5: Arbor Day: no work. When Graeme and Karen come over, I share my juicy tidbit about Yu-jin, only to discover that they already know. Then they tell us about Korean wedding festivities, which apparently involve the passing of an unbroken raw egg yoke from mouth to mouth and the flogging of the groom's feet with fish. At least, that's what Karen's adult students have told her. Graeme doesn't think we'll be witnessing anything nearly that exciting, though. Apparently the eggs and fish are for the special guests. The ordinary guests just get a quick ceremony and a free lunch.

Thursday, April 11: We're planning to be in Seoul for the weekend, so I ask Suky whether we should get some kind of gift for Yu-jin, and if so, what. After all, I haven't a clue about Korean wedding etiquette. This question sets off a conclave among the Korean teachers. They finally decide that no gifts are required because 10,000 won is taken out of each teacher's pay every month for a fund called "Mutual Aid," which is supposed to pay for special events like this. (Graeme refers to the Mutual Aid money as "[ECC] President Kim's drinking and whoring fund.")

Friday, April 12: I email my friend Allison about the wedding. She tells me Korean weddings are fast and dull. Suky agrees.

Monday, April 15: The wedding is still a secret, but it is now a secret that everyone knows. James tells us that we can all meet at ECC and take the school's bus to the wedding. He tells us this individually, not as a general announcement.

When I mention to Suky how weird I find it that everything is so secretive, she tells me that Yu-jin is shy about informing everyone about the wedding. I don't buy it. Yu-jin has been "shy" about telling us pretty much everything, from basic administrative requirements to problems meeting payroll. Nobody ever knows anything for certain at ECC until after it's actually happened, which means that Yu-jin is never responsible for living up to any commitments. At this point I'm wondering whether she's informed the groom yet about the wedding, and whether he knows it's a wedding and not, say, an engagement party or a golf tournament.

Tuesday, April 16: Dissapointment: Suky tells us that we're not really wanted at the wedding, and that the invitation — the secret, informal, third-hand invitation — was out of politeness and a sense of obligation. I don't think I understand Korean manners.

Wednesday, April 17: Today each teacher is given a formal invitation card, printed in Korean. Are we wanted or not wanted? Is this more politeness, or are we actually invited? I don't know how to read the symbols — I figure it's one of those things foreigners can't understand — but when I ask Suky, she doesn't know either. By the end of the day, consensus opinion among the Korean teachers is that we are actually invited to the wedding, but it's an uneasy consensus and doubt remains.

Thursday, April 18: James goes around the room asking people if we'll be taking the school bus to the wedding. He tells us to arrive on Sunday at 10:30, which he subsequently informs us means 10:50. I assume we won't leave before 11:30.

Meanwhile, gossip is now in the open. Susan used to live next to Yu-jin, and noted that she recently had a gentleman caller quite regularly, and then she moved out. And she's gotten a haircut and dyed her formerly blondish hair a more demure black.

Apparently feeling magnanimous, Yu-jin has set up meetings with every single teacher to see what she can do to make our lives easier. When it's my turn, I offer my congratulations. She smiles shyly, asks if Jenny and I have plans. I say yes. That's as far as it goes, but it's by far the most warmth and human interaction I've ever had with Yu-jin. Yes, she's patted my on the shoulders and smiled before, but only when our pay was late. This is the first time we've ever had what could even remotely be called a personal conversation, and it feels nice. I wonder whether we'll ever have one again — is this is just a prenuptial thaw, or has the relief of finding a life partner actually mellowed Yu-jin out? I even begin to wonder whether all of Yu-jin's endless stress these last six months has been connected to the impending wedding, but then I remember that her reputation as irritable, inscrutable and confused was solidly in place when we arrived.

Saturday, April 27: I have nothing decent to wear, so I go shopping in Anyang. I manage to find a white shirt and khakis without much trouble, but the quest for a tie and a blazer is more problematic. I find myself in a department store, trying on jackets next to a mannequin that's dressed in checked pants and a plaid shirt. There will be no relying on the taste of the salesmen here. Amazingly, I find a wool navy blazer that fits without needing alterations. There are tasteful clothes to be found in 2001 Outlet, but you have to find them in between the brown linen suits with the elbow patches and the rack of multicolored sweater-vests. Oh, and by the way, if you ever wondered where old-man clothes come from, they come from Korea.

Sunday, April 28: We arrive at 10:50 and board the schoolbus, which departs at 11:30, heading for the posh district of Gangnam-gu — the only place in Seoul where you regularly see foreign cars, and we're not talking Fort Escorts either. We pass the dealerships for Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche and Ferrari before pulling up in front of an especially huge wedding hall. In we go, walking up the stairs and through the turmoil and confusion of several other weddings in progress, until we come out on the fifth floor. James points out a young man, delicate but handsome, who is standing in a tux by the door of the main hall and waving a white-gloved hand. He, we are told, will be Yu-jin's husband.

Then James asks us if we want to take pictures of Yu-jin. No one wants to miss this chance, but when we are led around the corner to the small room where Yu-jin is sitting — and, it must be said, looking radiant in her white dress — we discover that we're not taking pictures of Yu-jin, but having our pictures taken with Yu-jin, and not with our cameras either. The photographer counts off — "Hana, dul, set!" — and flash! and then we're hustled out, left to mill around the fifth floor lobby. Our attention is drawn by a curious little side room that has a raised, enclosed area for sitting on a traditional-looking floor. We ask Suky what it is, and she explains that this is where the mothers of the bride and groom are sitting in their hanbok. These traditional garments, long robes tied with a half-bow just below the breasts, were worn by most Korean women as recently as the 1970s, but now they're mostly trotted out for special occasions. Suky asks us if we want to take a look, so we do, and lo and behold, there are two middle-aged ladies in hanbok, sitting on the floor and reading the newspaper.

Soon James is back, shepherding us all into a group so he can give us our meal tickets, which will get us the promised free lunch after the ceremony. Then we're led into the main hall, which is decorated with white fluted pillars and piles of fake flowers and candles, all of which look like they came from some kind of high-tech wedding factory somewhere. After a few minutes, the ceremony begins with the solemn entrance of the armed flight attendants. At least that's what they look like: two women dressed like 1970s stewardesses, complete with little caps, come marching in, one on either side of the aisle, and each with a sword pointed in front of her. And they're not Korean swords either, but the kind of sword that US Marines carry on formal occasions. They stop halfway up the aisle and form an arch with the swords, and then Yu-jin enters, led by her father, and walks under the arch to the altar.

There's organ music and a kind of solemnity to the procession, but it's undercut by the unceasing rumble of conversation from the lobby, which never dies down at any point during the ceremony. Acoustically, it's like hearing a wedding being performed in a busy airport departure lounge, and this effect is heightened by the electronic crackle of the sound system that broadcasts the officiant's speech. He's Yu-jin's husband's professor, and he apparently gives a lecture on economics and then exhorts the couple to read a lot of books, or so we are told afterwards. While this is going on, the videographer is swooping all over the place, the klieg light on his camera alternately blinding us and casting weird shadows. Then, with a blast of bubbles from a bubble machine, it's all over. The cake is carted in. Dry ice is spilling out in clouds underneath it, which makes it look like it's about to blast off. The groom slices it, but no one appears to eat any of it, and it certainly never makes its way to any of us. Then Yu-jin marches out and the flight attendants are suddenly wielding trumpets, which they position at about crotch level and then fire — yes, fire — sending out showers of confetti. And that's it. Yu-jin is off to the bowing room, and we're all being hustled upstairs to the seventh floor, past a wedding in progress on the sixth, and into a big room with tables lined up like in a soup kitchen. We hand over our meal tickets and sit down to what is, to be fair, a pretty decent meal of beef rib soup and the usual Korean assortment of side dishes. Unfortunately it's sweltering, so we eat quickly and go. Graeme, Susan, Jenny and I spend the rest of the lovely spring afternoon wandering around Gangnam-gu, looking at boutiques and having pretty good Mexican food for dinner.

So yes, Korean weddings are fast and dull, but fascinatingly so. I mean, a bubble machine? Flight attendants with swords? This is what they consider a Western wedding, but as usual, what Koreans think of as Westernization looks more like playing dress-up to me. Somehow Korea has managed to obscure its own overt traditions by taking on the surface elements of American and Western European culture — the white dress, the swords, the tuxes — but that just makes the whole affair that much more inscrutable. What does a white dress actually mean to a Korean? Why on earth would a Korean couple choose to have a formal US Marines-style wedding, except with the part of the soldiers played by women dressed like airborne cocktail waitresses? If they all wore curious costumes and bowed a lot and ate mysterious things, I would have been much less confused. As it is, Yu-jin's wedding felt like some kind of mutant cultural phenomenon that crawled out of the modernizing mind of Park Chung Hee, Korea's relentlessly modernizing dictator from 1963 to 1979. Park's ruthless rule simultaneously built South Korea into a powerful modern economy and wiped out traditional Korean culture wherever possible. Traditional holidays were replaced with meaningless national days off like Arbor Day and Constitution Day; shamanistic rituals were banned; old houses were destroyed in favor of anonymous brick and concrete boxes. Factories and heavy industry were promoted as Korea's only safe passage to the future, and the culture of industrialization — uniform clothes, apartment towers, even weddings — was actively promoted as a replacement for traditional culture, which was considered backward. A generation grew up that didn't remember Korean culture from before the civil war, and a curious gap was created.

To this day, Korea has a deeply conflicted, awkward relationship with its own traditions. On the one hand, Koreans are proud of their culture, which they've preserved against brutal repression from the Japanese and through an awful civil war. But the traditions are often treated like museum pieces, like something unchanging and therefore lifeless. You never hear Korean drums in a hip-hop track. Holidays are celebrated, but their religious significance is downplayed.

This is only a conjecture, but I wonder whether the division of Korea has something to do with the arm's-length approach to prewar culture. The Korean peninsula is just about the most monocultural place on earth, except that for the last fifty years the north and the south have been completely isolated from each other; what links them is what existed before the war. If South Korea began to move that traditional culture forward, to let it breathe and grow and even change into new, previously unimagined forms, the connection between north and south might break. Anything that isn't shared between north and south must not be considered "real" Korean traditional culture. And so South Korea looks forward and outward instead, creating its contemporary culture out of what it finds in the rest of the world. Still, despite Koreans' increasing taste for rap songs, Christianity and hamburgers, it would we a mistake to think that these things are replacing Korean culture. Rather, they are becoming Korean culture.

Scientists tell us that it's the edges of ecological zones — the places where jungle merges into grassland, or where wetlands become forest — where most new species evolve. In the same way, Korean culture is evolving most rapidly at the edges, where it meets up with other cultures. The core may be preserved like a stuffed critter in a natural history museum, mounted on a pedestal and carefully kept from changing; but on the outskirts, where ordinary people eat, work, get married, go to the movies — in those places, Korean culture is vibrant, energetic, frequently tasteless, often inscrutable, and unquestionably alive.

Addendum:

It turns out wedding halls are nothing new in East Asia. From The Travels of Marco Polo:

"Near the central part [of the city of Kin-sai in eastern China] are two islands, upon each of which stands a superb building, with an incredible number of apartments and separate pavilions. When the inhabitants of the city have occasion to celebrate a wedding, or to give a sumptuous entertainment, they resort to one of these islands, where they find ready for their purpose every article that can be required, such as vessels, napkins, table linen, and the like, which are provided and kept there at the common expense of the citizens."