CHINESE WEDDING.(Chinese-American wedding season in New York, NY)

Right now the most likely place in New York City to see a young Chinese woman in a wedding dress--her lips painted the shiny red of a toy fire engine, her shoulders bare and quivering in the cold--is Central Park. This is the Chinese-American wedding season. By the Chinese calendar, only certain days are favorable for weddings. Which ones are congenial for a particular couple are determined by the days the bride and the groom were born, and the hours of their births. The Chinese in Chinatown call pure-blood Chinese born in America "ABC's"--American-born Chinese. They tend to get married on Fridays or Saturdays. First-generation immigrants, whom the Chinese call Newcomers, tend to get married on Sundays, Mondays, or Tuesdays. Many of them work six days a week in restaurants, and they use their day off to get married. The most popular wedding days are Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's.

Approximately two hundred wedding photographers work in Chinatown. Nearly all of them spend part of the day with the bride and groom in Central Park, usually at the sailboat pond, the Bethesda Fountain, and Belvedere Castle. (Couples who live in Brooklyn or Queens or New Jersey sometimes prefer being photographed closer to their homes. In such cases, the photographers go to Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Park, or Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, in Queens, or Liberty State Park, in New Jersey, which can be very cold if the wind is coming off the river. Couples in Queens who can afford a bigger budget sometimes like to go to the botanic garden, which charges admission.) A photo session in Manhattan also includes a visit, usually at the end of the day, to a pier on the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge, so that the photographer can take a picture of the couple with the Manhattan skyline in the background. On a busy day, it is not uncommon to see brides in these places backed up like golfers waiting for a tee.

Typically, the bride and groom arrive at the photographer's studio in Chinatown at around nine in the morning. They change into their wedding clothes, and the bride puts on her makeup. Around eleven-thirty, they and their party and the photographer drive up to the Park in a limousine, which lets them out at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street. The other day, it was about forty-five degrees when a ...