Eat

Chopsticks high up in the air; ready to pounce.
Echoes of "Chiak, chiak, chiak!*" play on and on.
The race is for the swiftest. Unsuspecting youngsters beware.....

Repeated shakes of head and numerous protests do not stop the influx of food on the plate. Save from physically lifting my plate of the table, nothing I do can stop more food from coming my way. Resisting one grandmother is hard enough. Trying to stop 2 grandmothers and a grandfather from ladling even more noodles on my full plate is almost impossible. And it is pure rudeness to put anything on your plate back to the main plate. So if anything touches your plate; it's yours.
Don't get me wrong; as a poor student I welcome free yumchas but non stop eating for 1-2 hours stretches my stomach lining a little to far.

After a while I learn a strategy; to eat as slow as possible and to never leave my plate empty because food will magically plop on my plate if there's space.

Chinese and food go together. Our typical greeting for "how are you?" is "have you eaten?"
I can almost guarantee, in a typical conversation between a Chinese parent and child on the phone, one of the 1st things would be to ask "have you eaten?" & "what did you eat?"

It may seem out of place in our age of glorying slimness but I guess in my grandparents' generation, I love yous were not spoken out loud. But rather, in the settings of poverty; giving their children that piece of meat while eating vegetables themselves was the way of saying I love you. And one can always know who was the favourite child by seeing who got ladled out the biggest piece of chicken drumstick.



So I guess it's a privilege and an honor to be fed.
& thankfully, my M'sian grandmother whom I've not seen for a few months didn't say "Pui liaw.....*" (as it is the custom to comment how fat/thin/tan/fair one is)

*chiak=hokkien for eat
*pui liaw=hokkien for you've become fatter