‘A kind of death’: How forced brides in China raged against their fate

Six years ago, Chinese-Australian musician, producer and songwriter Rainbow Chan discovered the songs of her ancestors, the Weitou people, who settled in Hong Kong from southern China 1000 years ago.

Among the songs were laments, sung in the now-endangered Weitou dialect by brides-to-be as they prepared for an arranged marriage to a stranger and the prospect of cutting ties with their families.

Rainbow Chan says her investigations into her Weitou roots have opened a “Pandora’s Box.”Credit: Louise Kennerley

Chan, who migrated to Australia with her family when she was six, was immediately struck by the songs’ feminist protest roots, their historical detail and importance for female camaraderie over hundreds of years.

“I knew about having Weitou roots but this project has opened a Pandora’s box,” she says. “Weitou is very patriarchal. Women in this society don’t really have much status so it was just amazing to see they have this huge pool of cultural knowledge and intelligence in the songs on so many levels.”

She began developing what has become her first theatrical production, a one-woman audio-visual song-cycle titled The Bridal Lament, which explores the music, lyrics and traditional rituals of a Weitou bride.

Directed by Tessa Leong, and featuring pop songs, projected animations, choreographed movement and multi-language storytelling, it is Chan’s homage to her ancestors’ experiences.

‘The songs were at this threshold moment where she can actually protest and publicly announce her rage and hurt’: Rainbow Chan in The Bridal Lament.Credit:

“It’s also still something that is contemporary in terms of gender politics,” she says. “That struggle of women’s voices is still very real today.”

When Weitou women entered an arranged marriage, usually between the ages of 14 and 17, it was considered a kind of death. Ties to family were severed and the women also became an outsider to the groom’s family.

Rituals before the wedding mourned this loss with singing and weeping in front of family and friends in a loft space in the family home.

“The songs were at this threshold moment where she can actually protest and publicly announce her rage and hurt,” Chan says. “After that, it’s expected that she will never cry again. The bride was not allowed to leave that space for three nights. Her feet were not allowed to touch the ground. She would be carried down from the loft, then into a sedan chair which is lifted off the ground and carried to the groom’s house, basically transferred from one land to the other land.

“Our show is trying to capture that. The sense of what it is to be suspended in that space.”

The Bridal Lament, which premieres at Liveworks 2023, part of Performance Space’s 40th anniversary program featuring 142 artists across 18 events, also recognises Chan’s experiences of growing up between the cultures of Hong Kong and Australia.

“I’ve navigated that my whole life,” she says. “It’s the feeling of not belonging but also trying to carve out your own fate. Trying to reclaim some sense of agency even though your fate might be predetermined, or others have made the rules for you. I immediately felt a connection.“

To learn more about the laments and pre-marriage rituals, Chan travelled to Hong Kong several times. On her second trip in 2018, she travelled with her mother and met with elderly Weitou women in the Caritas Lung Yeuk Tau Community Development Project.

Now aged in their 80s or 90s, and the last group of women to experience the bridal laments after arranged marriage traditions ended in the 1960s, the “grannies” sang the songs and explained their meaning for Chan.

“I was so moved by the sound by the melody, the lyrics,” she says. “It was like time and space dissolved all around me. They are super proud that someone is continuing the songs because they thought, ‘When I die the songs will die with me’.”

Chan says The Bridal Lament is about grief but also explores resilience, hope and survival.
“People say ‘Why do this show?’,” she says. “It’s because I don’t want this old knowledge to be behind glass in a museum where people are reading about it and not feeling it. I want it to be embodied. I want it to feel alive.

“Making the show has been incredible because the laments, the history of these women, is living and it continues to survive. I’ve been telling people to bring tissues. Because you’ll probably cry at some point in the show.“
The Bridal Lament by Rainbow Chan is at Liveworks 2023, October 19-22.

Don’t Miss Events at Liveworks 2023/Performance Space’s 40th Birthday

Barbara Karpinski is one of the acts celebrated in cLUB bENT. Credit: Heidrun Lohr

Heidrun Löhr – Proof
Celebrating photographer Heidrun Löhr’s role in documenting Performance Space artists and their work over 40 years, the walls of Carriageworks are filled with images drawn from 300,000 archival photographs. Oct 19-29

cLUB bENT bACK uP, Antistatic Redux, and Nighttime Righttime
Three events celebrating new and archival work by artists who grew their practice across Performance Space’s 40-year history. Antistatic Redux (Oct 26-28) features dance works by Lucy Guerin Inc, Branch Nebula, Victoria Hunt and Narelle and Marlo Benjamin; Nighttime Righttime’s (Oct 28, 29) includes experimental cross-artform works from The Fondue Set, Kaz Therese, Tina Havelock Stevens and Wart, and others and cLUB bENT (Oct 28) revisits the mid-90s with wild, genre-bending and no-limits work from 15 acts including Moira Finucane, Barbara Karpinski and Dean Walsh.

The Opera Project Inc – Crime Writers … criminal intent
An ensemble founded in 1996, known for its epic imaginings of contemporary theatre, returns with legendary Performance Space alumni Andrea Aloise, Kathy Cogill, Regina Heilmann, Nikki Heywood, Nigel Kellaway and Katia Molino. Oct 26, 27

Barbara Campbell’s Night 1001
An exhibition and re-voicing of the final evening of Barbara Campbell’s epic durational work 1001 nights cast, which ran for 1001 nights between 2005 and 2008, featuring the artist telling a story online, written daily with a 1001-word limit, prompted by daily newspaper reports about the Middle East. Oct 19-29

Mickey – Brooke Stamp
Dance artist Brooke Stamp invites audiences to enter the rehearsal studio in an immersive and improvised performance concentrating on the experimental processes of creating work. Accompanied by musician Daniel Jenatsch, Stamp builds an entirely new work each night. Oct 19, 21, 22