The Last Supper

The Last Supper

On the weekend, my immediate family and I had dinner at a Thai restaurant with my cousin from England, her French husband, and the cousins they're staying with in Sydney at the moment. The night went atrociously. The food was awful, and tasted like a McDonald's version of Thai. The conversation was even worse. A mere two bottles of red into the evening and the Aussie cousin's wife was flirting with the French husband, admonishing him on his failure to pronounce "stubby" in an ocker accent, and declaring that the French for "no worries" sounded like a rip-off of the Sydney suburb of Sans Souci (pronounced 'Sanz Soozi', and obviously derived from the French). Given that the Aussie cousin's wife was dressed like a stray prop from the touring production of The Lion King, "Hakuna Matata" would've been a more appropriate translation. Throughout the evening, the Aussie cousin's wife was also busily fawning over my brother, to whom she was eager to demonstrate that she knew he was gay and that she was eager to embrace him as part of the "family" (by which she must surely mean the ya-ya sisterhood). Which was fine, except that neither my brother nor I have outed ourselves to the family.

Meanwhile, the English cousin was trying to figure out who I was; the last time she was in Australia, I was two. It was clear that she and her family had come to Sydney thinking that, by staying with cousins, they'd be saving money while also living close to the city; unfortunately, the Aussie cousins live far away from town, in an area that my brother not-so-affectionately calls "Sleepy Hollow". When my English cousin heard this, she nodded furiously in agreement. Fortunately, my Aussie cousin heard none of this; he was too busy trying to talk to his daughter, who, as the youngest person at the table by about ten years, had nothing to say and clearly resented every one of us. I didn't blame her. It was the last weekend of school holidays, and she was stuck having dinner with a group of people that could have featured on a multiethnic version of Big Brother. Actually, I tell a lie. She wasn't quite the youngest person there. The English cousin and French husband have a little boy, who ran around the restaurant squealing incomprehensibly all night, ducking regularly into the kitchen, where he menaced the cooks with some cleaning fluid that he'd found on one of the counters. (How nice, by the way, that the waitresses were forced to double as child-minders for the evening.) "Viens d'ici" and "Attends" are apparently the only castigations he ever receives. Refusing to go anywhere he was told to, he pretended not to understand French and ran off to the cash register, where he spotted a bowl of lollies and made off with the stash.

Several hours afterwards, the dinner was still going, even though the restaurant staff was clearly waiting for us, the last table, to leave. My Aussie cousin's wife was in the middle of giving important advice to my father, should he ever need it, on how to welcome newly arrived immigrants into the country; she herself is Australian-born, while my father was born in Hong Kong. By the end of the night, encumbered by a migraine that every one else at the table seemed to share, I was happy to get out of there. "We must do this again some time," someone muttered. I might've hit whoever said that, except that I was reeling from the aftereffects of good wine, bad conversation, and too much MSG.