Family Affairs

Last week-end, I went to my uncle's house to celebrate the anniversary of my grandfather's death. In a traditional Vietnamese household, birthdays are not celebrated, deathdays are. The responsability of celebrating the family ancestors' deathdates falls on the oldest male. My mother is the eldest child of my grandfather and my uncle is her younger half-brother, but since she is female, the honour goes to the uncle, and the chores of organizing the family reunion, cooking, cleaning, etc. go to his wife. She is also the dates keeper, and has to remember who died when, in order to organize the celebrations.

All this sounds complicated, but it's actually just a family reunion, a bit like Thanksgiving or Christmas in North America. My children did not want to go, but most of my living relatives were there, three generations around the dining table. My aunt made some chicken curry, but everybody else brought catered food, cause who has time to cook nowadays: eggrolls, roasted duck, strawberry pie, etc.. Grandpa's spirit was invited to come and partake of the food and then it's our turn to stuff our face.

At every family reunion, there's always a relative who's a big mouth and dominates the conversation. That role was played by my aunt's older brother, Mr. Know-It-All. My mother, who's not used to playing second fiddle, kept trying to outtalk him, but she's too old and too weak, so she did what women always do when they are losing an argument: she veered the conversation towards a typical female subject: trying to find a wife for my aunt's son, a 26-year-old photographer. Uncle Know tried feebly to interject an opinion, but we all knew he lost the battle.

Meanwhile, the hotshot photographer, who's shuttling between New York, Paris, Milan and Montreal for his work, taking pictures of gorgeous top models and having the time of his life, tried to explain to my mother, as politely as he could, that he was not interested, but we're talking about my mother here! I predict a wedding by next spring.

P.S. [25 October 2005] I forgot to mention that, in trying to warn her nephew against the life of sin and debauchery that he is leading, my mother compared New York to «Sorbonne et Gonorrhée».