This year, I sit myself, a person in a table of ten, finding the meal replaying in front of me, a series of replays, a set of repetitions that make up the Chinese Reunion Dinner.
The Chinese reunion dinner heralds the Chinese Lunar New Year. It is the vanguard of all traditions, it is the symbol of a year well-spent; you end a year with your family, and you start the new one with your family as well, all in one meal, in one sitting.
These reunion dinners are like well-rehearsed shows. The atmosphere is repetitive. We wear our best happy faces; the house is painted red if we can help it, swathed in red-gold New Year paraphernalia: lanterns, silk knots, plaques, calligraphy-ed blessings and cut-outs. The smell of fresh fruit for offering the gods perfumes the house, fresh flowers and new-year willows are arranged to welcome the relatives. The house is literally swept twice for good measure (no sweeping away new wealth on the first day of Chinese Lunar New Year!).
The second repetition of reunion dinners, is the food. On the menu: Fishprawnsandgreenshoots (amongst others) for wealthprosperityabundance (amongst others). But god, in our house, there must be white cabbage soup. Not any old soup, but the kind with the most superior stock, infused and sweetened by the flavours of fish maw, abalone, fresh meatballs, and chicken stock. It’s standard good fare. You don’t have reunion dinners with sub-standard. Everything is the best, and cooked in excess.
The day of the Reunion Dinner, routines are repetitive. The silk knot gets hung up, the soup brews, the relatives arrive. New babies are cooed at, children run skitter skatter, increasingly bored every year, adults mingle, talk is light-hearted. We then sit down for dinner. We sip wine (or F&N) and toast to a bountiful year. We finish dinner and we clear off. Same-same.
But I believe, the biggest repetition of reunion dinners are the natures of the attending personalities.
Take my parents for example, the hosts of The Reunion. The anxious hen of a mother (this feature dinner, she is the wife) trying not to literally pour the consumable contents on the table- a day’s worth of preparation -down the throats of her guests. The head-of-the-table-man-of-the-manor father, who shifts his shoulder onto table, points chopsticks into air- and calls out to everyone, “Tuck in, Cheers!”, his heart filled with a chauvinistic This is on me! kind of pride.
And the others: my overly-obliging-courteous but usually rebellious brother; the loquacious uncle with full of praise (yearly repetitive praise) for the food; his wife duly appreciative, requesting recipe proportions; and my other quietly-sombre uncle upon tossing his two-cents worth into dinner conversation –two cents mostly unheeded (he who is recovering from alcohol intoxication, recovering lost respect), along with his long-suffering wife full of due small talk. Their children beg the same personalities: Bryan is an insolent ten-year-old, his sister without-temper and naïve, baby brother a curious cat with a sweet disposition, the twins, one as boisterous as the other is calm, both as unwilling to recite the Tang poems their mother begs for every year.
The unchanging personalities include me. I re-discover I’m still the daughter, and that l certainly could still be the kid if I want to be. Non-alcoholic, non-gambler, non-conversationalist (children are silent at the Chinese dinner table), non-adult. Likewise, this year, no one expects me to change. And I don’t have to change if I don’t want to. This year though, sitting at that table, I wished at that moment, I could have been a bit more different, less a daughter, less a kid, more a woman, more an adult. Non-repetitive.
I suppose my observations of the repetitions should conclude and point to something meaningful here.
This is it. I suppose this. I suppose- that as a result of these repetitious atmospheres, food, rituals, and personalities- the yearly Chinese reunion dinner is a huge exercise for maintaining existing family hierarchy, achieving textbook harmony and order. If you were to watch a video-recording of our lives as a family, with all the other scenes cut out except the yearly Chinese reunion dinner get-togethers- you’ll realize the dinners repeat themselves almost seamlessly. There are minor blasé differences, but essentially, we are repetitive. After all the cuts, you would feel like our lives only consist of the same Chinese Reunion Dinners. Chinese Reunion Dinners that are the same, year after year.
As a family (extended or core), we might have strayed during the year, we might have had our differences, we might have fallen short of the image of the perfect Chinese family along the way, but if there is one time in a year where there is any perfect Chinese family to speak of, for us, it is during Chinese reunion dinners.
To young, perplexed Chinese persons around the world, Tuck in, Cheers.
