The Road Home

The Road Home

Thanks for the comments, notes, and e-mails you've all been sending. And Fei Mou, I'm sorry to hear about your recent loss.


The funeral was yesterday. When we arrived at the chapel, my brother and I looked at all the red-eyed, swollen faces and were convinced that the service was going to be a really awful experience. But remarkably, everyone stayed in control -- my mum got through her eulogy, the babies in the congregation never bawled, the immediate family sniffed and sobbed, but there were no breakdowns, which I'd worried there would be. Perhaps most amazingly of all, my aunt's daughter remained rock-solid throughout; in the morning, she and her brother visited their mum and placed a red blanket (to keep her warm in the afterlife) on her. After the service, the cortege proceeded, as per Chinese tradition, from the chapel to my aunt's home (so that her spirit can return there one last time) and then to the cemetery, where we tossed flowers onto the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. It was a straightforward, unelaborate affair, in keeping with my aunt's general dislike of fuss. The congregation then went to Chatswood, where we had yum cha and toasted my aunt.

Some random points:

- the Chatswood wake included several cousins who barely knew my aunt, and who rarely turn up to any family events, but who always make time for free food.

- - my baby nephews are superstars. Whenever cousins and uncles and aunts have nothing to say to each other, they can always rely on the babies to gurgle and goo and smile, which is to say, to relieve the tension.

- questions I'd rather not be asked again: "Hi! How are you?" [er, this is a funeral...] "Have you gotten yourself a girlfriend yet?" "Where are you working now?" "So you're still at university?"

- conversations I'd rather not overhear: "So who do you think in the family is next to go?"

- I'm amazed by how many potential gays and lesbians there are in family. And they're so cool. One cousin, the spitting butch image of Lea DeLaria, turned up to the service dressed in a man's cream-coloured tux. Squat and stocky, and bearing a short-cropped hairdo, she walked up to me and punched my shoulder before plonking herself down on a pew, elbows leaning on her legs. Another cousin -- a naturopath-cum-muso -- brought her 'flatmate'. Whenever they were together, they looked like radiant and Willowesque. During the wake, I thought I could see my closeted lesbian aunt looking vaguely bitter that the younger generation seems to be having an easier time of things than she did (as a teen, she took off from Sydney and moved interstate, where she's been living with her partner for over forty years). But then that aunt always looks bitter, so it's hard to tell what exactly she was thinking at a particular point in time.

- my family isn't getting any younger. My brother and I were talking last night about the possibility of arranging a get-together with our cousins. Some of our cousins dislike my family because we went to a private school, and two of my siblings are doctors. The misconception that we're all a bunch of snobs isn't helped by the fact that my siblings who are doctors are, well, snobs. But I think people have finally begun to notice that my brother and I have been attending family events for several years now, and that we're interested in connecting up with the rest of our cousins. Who knows? When they work out that most of them make a lot more money than my brother and I ever will, maybe they'll even like us...