Mooncake Festival

Last Sunday, X and I celebrated the Mid Autumn Festival (in Taiwan, they do the lanterns with that Dumpling Festival. WEIRD) his colleagues who are mostly all Asian. They always invite me along to play translator.

We settled down at one of the two crowded tables in Cha Cha, Broadbeach. It's always terribly confusing for me, as half are Japanese and the other half Chinese/ Taiwanese and then they'll throw in some English in an attempt to include X. We wisely picked at the food and nodded along.

So anyway, this guy with an enormous head (this coming from someone with a pretty large cranium) sat across from me, smiled and introduced himself as 'Ken from Osaka' who used to be a 'psychologist'. We started off with the usual pleasantries - Have you been to Japan, The flight tickets are quite cheap on Jetstar etc. Then by the third line or so, he threw this in.

"Wow X, she is very young for you! How did you get her?"

Like wow. I mean, sure everyone thinks that. But none have been so bold as to actually voice it out.

I intercepted jokingly, "From the kindergarten.

Then again, "How did you get here?" His enormous head craned forward, "Did he...?" A finger towards X.

"No, no," X leapt to my defense knowing how these assumptions always upset me.

Had he made such a comment a year ago, I would have:
a) Thrown my drink in his face (which was only water anyway)
b) Made a very snide comment using lots of obscure multisyllabic words with regards to the lack of correlation between the size of his head and brain
c) Moved to sit elsewhere

But as you have it, I've somewhat matured and lost some of the ego and pride that come with corporate life. I explained my circumstances patiently instead.

Apart from that incident, all went well. X's Boss gave us a mooncake and we somehow managed to divvy it up into 10 miniscule slices to share with our table. "What about the others?" Someone asked.

I looked over at the other 15 red-faced drunks, screaming and babbling incoherently. "Nevermind."

Later, a few of us headed to the newly opened Movenpick for ice cream. It was terribly amusing. Taiwanese, Japanese, Thai, American/ Aussie, Malaysian. We spoke Mandarin/ English. Kazu, the Jap, nodded along and would interject, "Dui ya!" (That's right!) ever so often during appropriate silences.

I still can't quite relate, but I really like these people.