I haven't written about Christmas Day lunch with the relatives yet, have I?

On Christmas Day, I was forced to go to lunch with my relatives. I had just met up with my grandmother the previous Monday, after not having seen her for close to a year. She's 81 years old and I do feel guilty about not seeing her, but at the same time, I'm not that close to many people outside my immediate family, so I don't like being alone with them for fear of running out of things to say. On top of that, I have to speak to my grandmother in Mandarin, which is a language I am not at all fluent in.

In any case, due to the length of time that had passed since our last meeting, she didn't recognise me. In fact the first words that came out of her mouth were, "Are you [my name]?" Hee hee! While she did have good reason to be confused - my hair colour had changed, I had lost a fair amount of weight and I was reading a book so my face wasn't clearly exposed, it was still amusing. Later on, she told me that I had become a lot prettier since she last saw me and that I resembled a Hong Kong actress, Shu Qi.

Now, Shu Qi is quite pretty, so I guess I should take it as a compliment, but the thing is, before Shu Qi became a mainstream star, she had been a porn actress. I didn't have the heart to tell my grandmother that, but it all came out during the Christmas Day lunch when one of my other cousins told her that. But hey, barring that little detail, I feel quite good. All of my relatives said that I had grown very pretty, which is nice, seeing as you'd think I had stopped changing once I hit 21.

Another interesting anecdote - that same cousin who told my grandma the truth, when he first came in, he couldn't recognise me and assumed that I was my other cousin's girlfriend. As this cousin that he thought I was the girlfriend of is half-Caucasian and not-too-bad looking, again, I'll take that as a compliment.