ok it's that time of the year whereby all those chinese drums and cymbals and instruments that make those 'tik tik tok tok' sounds you here at wayangs, rear their ugly slit-eyed faces once again. yah, chinese new year. that fucked up festive season that makes you feel like christmas. visiting all your relatives and getting bombarded with questions about you abilities to look for a girlfriend in your 20s. i imagine 10 years down the road, they'll be questioning my sexuality. and 20 years from now, they'll be wondering about my gender, whether i'm a guy with a dick who's interested in dick, or a girl with a vagina who's interested in dick (or a girl with a dick who's interested in vagina).

still i've just had the first new year's feast today. it's the eve of the Chinese New Year and it's a customary thing to go over to the relatives and have a meal together. it's always at these times that the father would start ranting on about how lucky we kids are these days. he tries and scare the cousins and his own sons with the fact that his family only had chicken during special occasions like marriages, funerals, new births, etc. and the fact that they were so poor back then that they had to scrap by several days with just plain porridge and pickled vegetables. recounting tales of poverty like these just don't seem to work on our modern day kids who have ready access to McDonald's and chicken of every cooking and serving method. chicken has become a commodity today. i mean, there are even restaurants who experiment and play with their chicken just to give their customers a gastronomical adventure.

and as if having steamboat, a cold dish, some shark's fin soup and a metal frying plate for a reunion dinner wasn't enough, there is now the introduction of red wine into these gatherings. and oh how i hate the red wine. it never seems to go down well with any of these supermarket foods that i'm taking. the pokka green tea and peach tea and some gassy drinks are still pretty okay. but throwing wine into a heartland meal is like throwing your Tiffany diamond into the heartland cogwheels. it'll prolly jam-brake the whole system, cause some serious inertia and lead to terrible messes of vomitus.

well, one of those paternal cousins brought some white wine that he bought at the airport on a previous trip to Bangkok. and as much as i appreciate the effort to up the class of this reunion dinner, i think it just didn't do justice to the wine. another auntie from the mother's side offered everyone some cabernet shiraz before the steamboat meal. ok lah, this one have to give effort for trying and acting a little bit like a heartlander sommelier. she brought her own wine glasses so that 'you can bring out the full aroma and the various notes in the wine'. the parents were wowed off their pants. the grandmother was prolly like 'si mi lan' (she refused to partake of the wine).

as for me? i don't eat that much anyways. i just drink. don't you just love the chinese new year (NB: i'm drunk).

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