With extended families whom you don't meet other than during Chinese New Year, they tend to be categorised as the ones that attempt to make conversation, the ones that interrogate, the ones that don't say anything, or the ones you wished you had more time to talk to. Normally there isn't much to say, you just sit still and smile politely and give the annual update.
And then suddenly when one of these relatives calls up and offers to pay for the rest of your university education/upkeep, because he has "spare cash" and wants you to "enjoy the rest of your undergrad life", you find that the once-a-year cursory conversations have now been translated into stress that your parents never ever gave you, especially parents who didn't care if you left assessment books to rot, a mother who constantly, even now, says "Pass can already la why you want to get high marks?". They said "First class honours, no less", and I flipped (and am still flipping).
I met up with a few of them over an extended lunch, at which they ordered two rounds of desserts, no mean feat for a group of an average age of 55, just so that they could watch me eat. Force feeding a person with an anorexic perception of self is not the best thing in the world but there was rum involved so I obliged.
The weirdest thing is that the whole affair was so comfortable, even though if you think of the power relations and all, I'm basically their charity case, in their eyes overworked and undernourished. (Well the one who's helping hasn't worked since his NS-clerical staff days so any work is overwork.)
What does comfortable mean anyway? A friend once said it's feeling like you can wake up in bed next to the person everyday. Not an applicable definition, both incestuous and it's a rather horrible visual image, but it's just the feeling like there's nothing to prove (even though there's everything at stake), and there was actual two-way conversation involved.
Alright maybe I"m just saying this because I'm people-starved and going slightly off tangent before the exams and any break from studying is a good break, but I finally see them as people, not annual blurry faces. I see the family traits of the Khoos passed down the generations in little things such as not wasting anything and painstaking scrutinising the bill (sending it back twice for amendments), things I never thought they would bother with especially since $12(plus)K is termed 'spare cash'. Yes the dirty linen with monetary squabbles washed so regularly in the papers aside, the multiple children of multiple wives aside, when they become real, in your face, perceptions inevitably change.
And this really is not about the money.
