I’ve found myself in the 1. position of wedding guest for 2. strangers 3. times in Taiwan and China – and if tales related by fellow 4. travellers are anything to go by, my experiences aren’t unusual.

I’d been in Taiwan a month and already I was 5. my first wedding. It was in the 6. range where I came upon a 7. valley filled with a 8. crowd of 9. people beneath a 10. or so 11. tents with 12. tables weighed down by dishes too numerous to count. I parked my motorcycle to spy and enjoy the fragrance discreetly.

Seconds later, a man wearing a tuxedo and flip-flops waved a 13. palm at me and shouted something. His tone was 14. , and my week of Mandarin 101 was enough to clue me in to the meaning of the hand wave, scram in the west but come here in the east.