Archive for the 'Family' Category
February 13 2010: Happy Chinese New Year!
Filed under Asian-ness & Family & Relationships/Men with 11 Comments
Happy Chinese New Year to anyone for whom it actually means something!
I managed to inadvertently aggravate my parents by forgetting that it was Chinese New Year’s Eve tonight – it’s more important to our family than the actual day itself. Having lived away from home for the past few months though, I forgot entirely about the New Year, and arranged early on to meet a friend from Sydney for dinner tonight as she’s only down for a few days. Bad move on my part. At least I’m back in the family home in the afternoon, to at least do my part in the worshipping of our family ancestors – the burning of paper money, etc. I try my best to do what’s expected of a good Chinese daughter.
And – tomorrow’s not only the start of the Year of the Tiger, but also Valentine’s Day! I haven’t planned or organised much as I was quite extravagant in planning an elaborate birthday for Dylan last week, so I’ve just done something quite small (which I can’t write about here yet, because apparently he’s starting to read this blog again).
I have told him though, that however commercial or cheesy he might find the holiday, I fully expect him to make an effort tomorrow. We might be used to just chilling at home with a few DVDs, but tomorrow needs to be something more. It needn’t be as cheesy as roses and chocolate – I just need him to show that he understands that while the holiday might not mean anything to him, it means something to me, so he should just suck it up and treat me like a princess. So there. =P
January 22 2010: You’re A Terrible Daughter
Filed under Family with 18 Comments
In my attempts to reconcile with my parents and build a more adult-adult relationship (as opposed to the parent-child relationship they’d like to keep me in until the day I die), I’ve been going over to their house for dinner about once a week.
In the course of this week’s dinner, my mother said to me:
Why can’t you be like your cousin? She got your aunt a credit card to pay for all household expenses, so your cousin pays for everything for her parents. Why can’t you be filial like that? You’re a terrible daughter.
Geez mother, I don’t know. Maybe because you kicked me out of your house three months ago? That tends to stop me from paying rent each week, paying for phone and internet bills, and buying fruit and vegetables for the whole family.
Good luck getting my useless brother to get a part-time job once he turns fifteen. Good luck getting him to support himself financially by the time he’s seventeen. Good luck getting him to pay for his own university education. Good luck getting him to contribute anything to the household when he’s working. Go ahead and continue buying him $800 mobile phones and $400 iPod Touch packs when he’s only thirteen.
I’m sure spoiling him with lavish gifts and raising him in a way that results in him having no respect for his parents is really going to leave him supporting you in your dotage when he can’t even properly communicate with you and has no connection whatsoever to your cultural background. Maybe if you recognise the fact that I’m the only child you have who will actually feel obligated to care for you when you’re senile (instead of throwing you into a nursing home), you’ll realise that it’s fairly important that you stop treating me like an ungrateful and unfilial daughter, and telling me that I’m a failure and a disappointment.
December 29 2009: The Obligatory Post-Festive Season Entry
Filed under Family & Life & Money & Relationships/Men & Style & Uni/Work with 4 Comments
Despite the whole not-very-festive environment I’ve been brought up in, I think it’s almost obligatory for personal bloggers to have a post-festive season entry summarising everything they’ve eaten, received, and done? Far be it for me to flout this unwritten rule of the blog community – prepare yourself for long-windedness.
Christmas Eve
I actually worked for most of Christmas Eve, packing up boxes for an impending office move (as previously mentioned). This was about half of the total amount of boxes – it was a long, sweaty and dusty day. I did manage to get home by 5pm to clean myself up before heading over to my aunt’s for an Asian-style Christmas Eve dinner though. This essentially means that all the ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ bring a dish (Asian cuisine of course!), and we all stuff our faces with food. Chicken wings, lamb chops, potato salad, curry and vermicelli noodles with pickled veggies? That’s our version of Christmas fare.
Then of course, the adults start playing endless rounds of mahjong and drinking endless cups of tea as soon as dinner is over, while the children are relegated to a back bedroom to entertain ourselves the best we can. We might be in our twenties and late teens, but my cousins and I (and the children of other family friends) are still considered to be the ‘children’. Admittedly we fit into our designated roles remarkably well – we played Taboo and Pictionary with a few glasses of wine each, well into the early hours of the morning.
As a side note, I am vaguely communicating with my parents again, in that we can be in the same room without screaming at each other. Polite conversation with my mother is a good start though, as well as the fact that my father deigned to speak a sentence to me: “Refill my cup of tea”.
Christmas
I woke up on Christmas Day at Dylan’s house with presents to open! As a joke gift, he bought me a Hello Kitty candy set – as an Asian female, I’m obviously supposed to love Hello Kitty. (Which I do, secretly, but don’t tell him that because it’ll only reinforce the stereotype.) My real gift though, was a body board – and to celebrate Christmas, we drove two hours down the coast and spent the day at Cape Paterson together so that I could have my first ever body-boarding experience. We could have gone to a more local beach, but as Melbourne is situated within a bay, he decided it would be more exciting to drive further out past the peninsula so that we could surf in the actual ocean with real waves, rather than within a calmer bay.
I had a blast – absolutely an overall awesome day. We’re now contemplating getting into snorkeling as a hobby, as the coastline around Cape Paterson is absolutely littered with rock pools and marine life. I’m considering buying snorkeling sets for his birthday in February, though I guess ideally we should have the equipment by mid-January when the weather will be calmer and it’ll be easier to snorkel in the open ocean.
Oh, and I made him a type of mini-hamper gift with things he likes – a selection of different nuts from the market (walnuts, almonds, macadamias), a bottle of our favourite wine (Brown Brothers Moscato), a new coffee percolator and some organic coffee beans (he’s sick of drinking instant coffee at my place, so now he can have actual coffee), and some home-made dark chocolate with ginger. Nothing remarkable, just a few things I threw together into a basket, but he seemed to like it, so all is good.
Boxing Day
Boxing Day is a big day for my cousin and I. It’s traditionally one of the biggest retail days of the year with enormous post-Christmas discounts, and we have gotten into the habit of taking full advantage of the sales. We ended up shopping from eight in the morning to eight at night, across two different shopping centres. I ended up buying:
- A woollen underlay for my mattress – $89.95 from $299
- Leopard print micro shorts – $9.95 from $69.95
- A print top – $14.95 from $79.95
- Earrings – $5 from $14.95
- A headband – $5 from $29.95
I was remarkably controlled this year in my spending – the woollen underlay was my biggest purchase by far, but as I had been needing one since I moved out, and managed to pick up a trans-seasonal one (works in both winter and summer) for a third of the original price, I think it was a justified purchase. The top and shorts were a bit of a splurge as they’re really too casual and ‘fun’ for work, but I really think it’s about time I start dressing my age. The accessories were just cute cute cute, and cheap enough for me.
Overall, it was a fairly chilled couple of days. There was no blatant displays of consumerism (sure I went sale shopping, but didn’t go overboard!), and I only stuffed myself with food for one meal, so it was probably a million times more controlled and less indulgent than most people’s Christmases!