The Au Family

5.2.2015

Clearly, I won't be falling asleep this morning, as I've been awake since 4:30. 

Uncle Jackson drove us around yesterday for an accelerated guided tour of the must-see sights in Sydney. The Rock, Rose Bay, and Bondi Beach. A few of these places were really charming and I would have preferred to spend the day exploring the streets on foot. But, we were on a schedule to be back at Aunt Lillian's place for the big family party.

Uncle Joseph calls Lillian the General Manager of the Au Family. And manage she did. She started planning this party a month ago, and she impressively got almost everybody to show up-- all of nearly 40 people --and bring food! She's also an amazing cook, and clearly, a very successful businesswoman. Even her three kids-- Suzanne, Derek, and David -- are mature and helped with the party without direction. In fact, all of the kids I've met have the same sense of responsibility and respect instilled in them. 

The family trickled in. Leonard, Aunt Evelyn's son, was tasked with taking the photos. So I set up my camera and tripod next to his for the shoot. First the octogenarians, then my dad's generation, then mine, some of them holding babies. I would post the photos but they are trapped in my camera at the moment.

It's funny, when you look at all of us together in a room, you can see the various sets of physical features repeating and changing with the new blood that joins the gene pool each generation. Surprising similarities occur even across different branches. For example, Suzanne reminds me so much of Georgina; the fine details are different enough between them, but as an overall impression, I would have though they were sisters. They are second cousins, however. There's weirdly also a Spanish looking part of the family, and also an actual Spanish part of the family-- in-laws of course.

There was enough food to feed a small town, and I missed out on most of it, because there were so many people to talk to. Namely, I forgot to try the fantastic looking salmon which I had watched Aunt Fiona prepare. People kept pouring me sangria, so I had plenty of that. Drinking with family-- also a new experience! 

Technically, there are just 2 uncles and 3 aunts, and everyone else is a second or third cousin to me. But I'm supposed to just call them all Auntie or Uncle.

The evening was pretty surreal. Here were a room full of intimate strangers, very westernized yet very Chinese, speaking in a rather pleasant and kinda funny accent. With each new person, we introduced ourselves by explaining who our parents and grandparents were. I'm Maggie. My dad, Sagon, is Uncle Stephen's brother, and your Aunt Emily was my grandmother. A response I heard more than once was-- Aunt Emily was a lovely lady. It's true, she was genuinely classy. Anyway, the times I'd been at family parties of this magnitude and variety before tonight, they were other people's family. Tonight's experience revealed a world previously unknown yet so close and personal.

Other than everything I just mentioned, the night's highlights included Aunt Lillian's riveting telling of her and her sister's arrest and escape during a trip to Beijing at the height of the goverment's crackdown on Falun Gong in the 90s. It's too long to tell now, but it was pretty amazing stuff.

The other was the discovery that the German ancestry business is a running joke here among the family, sort of. It has repeatedly come up in conversations about our family ties. Great grandmother is supposedly half German. But people aren't sure it's true, because in old photos, she looks quite Chinese. She does look whiter than everyone else in the photos, but I'm not sure why no one else except for Aunt Evelyn seems sure of this information. My dad had first told me this years ago, but when asked recently he doesn't remember telling it and was surprised to hear it himself. It would make sense though-- some of these relatives sure don't look very Chinese.