Just before my departure for London, my uncle’s wife told me: “I’ve heard that in the West, if a guest dropped in unexpectedly just before dinner time, the host would excuse himself to go and eat his meal, and leave the guest sitting alone in the living room.”
This is something that would never happen to an unexpected guest in a Chinese household. In my house, one of the family would suddenly be “going out for the night”, to ensure that there’d be enough food for the guest. I was often that member of the family, sitting quietly in my bedroom in the annexe until the guest left (I was meant to be “out for the night”, see), before going to the kitchen to see if there might be any food left. If not, I’d go out to the roadside stalls and get some takeaway.
Some people would take advantage of this and deliberately visit just before dinner time, or arrive an hour or two before, then stay and stay until it was time for dinner, at which point the host would have no alternative but to invite the guest to join the family for dinner. One of my maternal uncles, who lived with us until after his second child was born, had such a friend during his bachelor days. This friend would arrive around 4pm, knowing that we’d be eating at 6pm or 6.30pm. In the end, we gave him the nickname of “Long Bum”, referring to his hanging around on and on and on until it was time for dinner. The only counteraction would be to delay serving dinner, but then you’d go hungry as you try and out-wait him, with the meal going cold in the meantime.
(Singapore 1960s)
No comments:
Post a Comment