family clanning

Why hasn’t anybody else thought of that pun before?

My parents returned to the States on Saturday, which is good because I think they were getting tired of traveling and also because their Internet visits generate the majority of this blog’s traffic volume. I was getting kind of sad seeing a flat line of single digit numbers on my statistics widgets while they were traipsing around in Fujian.

To see them off, I returned to Hong Kong again on Friday and (barely) made it in time for a family dinner in Paradise City.

(Naming malls must be a kind of art form in Hong Kong, much like naming children. There are so many of them. Paradise City is the one right in the middle of the Heng Fa Chuen community / MTR stop, where my Hong Kong relations live.)

At the dinner table were four generations of people, some of whom had not seen the rest for some years (my grandmother, brought to Hong Kong from her Fuzhou home by my parents) and some were just introducing themselves to the wider family for the first time (Aidan, my cousin William’s 2-year old). Those present spoke a combined total of 5 different languages, and at one point I was speaking with William and our grandmother Popo in what amounted to a mutually exclusive lingual triangle where William and I are only able to communicate in English, Popo and William are only able to communicate in Cantonese, and Popo and I are only able to communicate in Mandarin.

Although in total there were only nine people there (baby included), Kim, William’s wife, speculated that it might have been the first time in a decade that so many people from her husband’s family had reunited for a get-together. She commented that her family in Malaysia would return to her parents’ home every Sunday when she still lived there.

“That works when the whole family is in the same city,” commented my own dad. “We also used to do that kind of thing quite often in my family. It also helps if there is somebody who the rest gather around, a family patriach. That had been my own father, but since he’s been gone, we’ve become used to not seeing each other as much.”

So in the style of CNN for whom news has become just a series of Twittered opinions, let’s put it to you, Pouws (and Posches, Huangs, Kungs, Gunawans, Chens, and everybody else who I am forgetting/never knew your last name because it was in a foreign language. It’s mostly you guys who are reading this anyway.) Would YOU elect to become the next LEADER of our clan? Applicants must be charismatic, engaged in a respectable profession and always willing to let people crash their home (or have many children for frequent wedding reunions). Multilingual fluency preferred. Gossips need not apply.

NaNoWriMo progress: I’m in trouble, guys.