Okay. So it’s Chinese New Year and my great-uncle’s throwing his annual family dinner party function thing where anyone within third cousin relations is invited (I don’t even want to know about the bill he’s footing). I’d just spent the whole day with my grandma in the city at the Bazaar; we went home, got changed into more presentable things and then went straight to dinner. The thing is, I’d just spent the whole day eating random food whenever I felt like it and I already felt full before I even got there. So yeah, you have the standard… oh, I don’t know, EIGHT COURSE meal – soup, more soup, Peking duck in pastry, seconds of Peking duck in pastry, lobster and noodles and then comes the main course (yeah, that was just the appetizers, honey) of rice with six different stir-fries. Then comes even more soup, the fruit platter, the red bean syrup and the red bean pancakes. AND this is after they’ve eliminated the cold platter that used to come with it and the symbolic prosperity dish that no one eats because it’s so gross.

What’s really sad is that Great-uncle and the semi-extended family go there so often that the wait-staff know them all by name and also know the dining preferences and allergies of everyone on the guest list.

I’m already completely stuffed after the lobster but my automatic reaction is just to keep eating everything that’s put in front of me so by the end of the night I have to discreetly unbutton the top clasp of the corduroy pants that were hanging loose on me at five o’ clock. But alas, I don’t really have much to complain about – when else do you get paid a hundred and twenty-five bucks to eat an eight-course meal? (Uh huh. One twenty-five in cold, hard cash. God bless Chinese New Year and still being considered a child.)

So usually whenever I go to these extended-family-we-only-talk-to-once-a-year functions I spend the whole night rocking back and forth in a glazed state of boredom, compulsively downing water and tea (I shudder to think what would happen if they gave me alcohol) and making strained polite conversation with uncles twice removed every twenty minutes or whenever someone feels sorry enough for me to come over for a chat. But you know what? This year was different – my second cousins actually decided to talk to me instead of ignoring me all night. And I actually managed to almost enjoy myself there… (Nothing compares with solid girlie bonding over the highs and lows of The O.C.)

And oh my god, The Gregarious Dentist’s sons…

There are these three of them, right, randomly related from somewhere, who are always at these gatherings but whom I never talk to because a) we never get seated together and b) there’s three of them and they’re guys, and can I say those two factors are REALLY intimidating?? And you know how you never talk to random could-be-related guys at family gatherings.

Their mother’s the Asian one with the family ties, and their father is the aforementioned Gregarious Dentist who owns a winery. The thing is, they look completely non-Asian but also look completely unlike their father as well. I’ve always remembered them as a scrawny, skinny, standoffish bunch and never really noticed them much. But oh. My god.

I don’t know when, I’ve never really noticed much, but sometime in the last year they have all grown up and filled out and now all three of them are REALLY, REALLY RIDICULOUSLY GOOD-LOOKING. Ka-ching! Genetic jackpot every time! Great features, nice deep voices and starving-poet lean without being skinny. (Bear with me; I have recently discovered I have a thing for scrawny guys.) I guess they’ve probably been getting to be very good-looking over the last few years but this year it’s particularly striking. I didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that I thought they were hot, even though it’s a fact that they look good, because you can think someone looks good without them being attractive to you, because if in fact we WERE related, even if many times removed, that would be slightly incestuous and very, very wrong. As I later ascertained, their grandmother is the older sister of my great-uncle’s wife, which means they are fourth cousins by marriage and not related by blood at all THANK GOD. Because if they had been family I would have had to shoot myself and my incestuous thoughts.

Anyway, the oldest one’s like already early-twenties so they put him at the table with the rest of the adults. But J and M, second year uni and last year of high school respectively, got the dubious pleasure of being seated with the rest of us. So I’m sitting there going oh my god, I’m going to actually have to talk to these (very attractive) guys I’ve seen many times before but have never spoken a word to, and it’s getting really awkward with M and I both politely avoiding eye contact and me doing my glazed rocking duck compulsively drinking impression. So finally, he turns around and asks me what year I’m in at school and we start talking. Turns out he’s actually a very nice guy, reasonably easy to talk to, and goes to Trinity. Which just further reinforces my theory that many, many hot guys go to Trinity. God, I wish I went to Ruyton. Anyway, this year he’s taking Bio, Chem, Physics and Spesh and not MM2 like everyone else because like me he did acceleration maths, which means the Year 10 course in Year 9 and so forth. And he’s doing Physics, which is really hard. Which is like, wow. Dude, this is messing with my equilibrium here! Why are all the hot guys I meet lately really hot AND über-smart?

So then the food arrived and we stopped talking and started eating and I began to talk to R and H, second cousins on my father’s side, and the conversation gets really interesting. Talking with the girls is infinitely easier than talking with the guys and I run out of things to say to M and also I tend to go quiet around guys I think are hot so I ended up spending the rest of the evening engrossed in conversation with R and H and totally ignoring him. Poor M had to resort to chatting with his brother and eating lots and lots of food (oh my god, you should have seen the amount of food he consumed, although I suspect that’s probably just a guy thing and not an awkward dinner party thing). He probably thinks I’m a callous bitch now, as the first chance he got he left the table to talk to his other brother. Whoops. Oh well, I probably won’t see him again until next year and hopefully by then he’ll have forgotten all about it.

So besides for the whole avoiding the hot guy thing, that was, unexpectedly, pretty much the best extended family get-together I’ve ever had. Strange how much things change the older we get, eh?

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