The Tse Family "Cho Uk" (祖屋) – Part 2 of 5 -- The 1st special item of the house is...

... the dinning table!












The most celebrated birthday

The dinning table is at least as old as the house, if not older, and many of the Tse Family gatherings, from small to medium to big, take place around the table. While it might look ordinary, the dinning table has witnessed a lot of unforgettable Tse Family moments. Among those, it includes Uncle 2's birthdays, the most celebrated b-days in the Tse Family.

Uncle 2's birthday "usually" falls in August (check out my cousin's blog to see why I use "usually"), which is a prime time for the "once in a few years mega Tse Family gatherings". Except, again, Goo Ma, Uncle 4 and his son, everyone in the family has participated in Uncle 2's birthday party at least once, and has taken similar pictures around the dinning table as the two in this post.

Quiz 6

So, can you tell which years were these two pictures taken, or how many years apart of these two pictures?

Who qualify?

However, not all of us are qualified to sit around the dinning table. When there are around 40 of us in the family, even if only a quarter of us show up at the same time (which is quite a "regular" size for a Tse Family gathering in Edmonton), we can hardly fit to the dinning table all at once. So, usually those "older ones" can actually sit around the table, while those "younger onces", especially those not very good with chopsticks and speak better English than Chinese, will use a plate and folk to take some food before the older generation gathers around the dinning table and go to eat at the basement where English TV is on.

Tse Family catering

Last but not least, thanks to Uncle and Aunt 2, delicious food is always served on the table. It's a pity that they don't open a restaurant :(

Food Prices

Lately, fresh food prices in HK are going up like crazy.

For example, pork price has been up for 30% these couple of days. We are not going to have fresh beef from Mainland tomorrow, and hence price is expected to increase again. Children in poverty are having difficulty to have simple breakfast of bread and milk cause the flour price goes up as well. The morning radio programme I listen to has been joking about it's more profitable to buy and sell fresh food than stock, as beef price has increased 50% in just a month.

Sound like we are at war or something.

I heard a joke (I hope it's a joke) from a friend today:

A person is liaising with his/her boss about pay rise.

Boss: So how much do you want?

Worker: Same as the increase of flour price.

Crazy.

It's said that we are having the best economy in 20 years. The result is we have inflation again, but salary rise (if any) simply can't catch up with inflation.

The Tse Family "Cho Uk" (祖屋)

In Chinese, there's something called "cho uk", which is a house that passes from one generation to another, and where significant family events take place.

Where is it?

For the Tse Family, I think we have, or at least used to have, a "cho uk" in our hometown Hoi Ping (開平), China. But for the younger ones in the family, the Tse Family Cho Uk is located in Millwoods, Edmonton instead. That is, Uncle and Aunt 2's house.

Except Goo Ma, Uncle 4 and his son, all of us have stayed, or at least have frequently visited there. I believe that Uncle and Aunt 2 have lived there for almost 30 years, and I heard that neighbours on the same street are still the same ones three decades ago. The house is always warm, in terms of both the caring and the laughers, and also the thermostat that always points to +25C, despite the freezing cold temperature outside! It's also a place full of unforgettable memories of the family. Let's start with mine.

Cho Uk and Ida

The first time I stayed at Uncle and Aunt 2's, I was only eight. That's one of those "once every few years mega Tse Family gatherings" that we, and the #4 and #5 families spent the summer in Edmonton. At the time, the youngest one in the family was my brother (ranked the 9th out of the 19 of us), and I remember that the basement of the house was not yet furnished, nor the plants in the front and backyards there.

The second major period that I stayed at Uncle and Aunt 2's was during college years. I usually spent my weekends and school holidays there unless I was busy. One time during summer, Rose and I had a hard time deciding whether I should be counted as one of the people living in the house when Rose's trying to fill in the census survey form for the Statistics Canada. (Rose had an even harder time to decide whether her mother tongue was Cantonese or English!) When my friend drove me home during weekend, they would ask whether I was going to "Uk K" (屋企) or "Uk K Uk K" (屋企屋企), with "Uk K" being HUB and "Uk K Uk K" being Uncle and Aunt 2's place. Sometimes some very clever friends would drive me to one of those two places without asking and it ended up taking me twice as long to get "home"!

I used to use Uncle and Aunt 2's place as my "permanent address" for quite some years. Even today, I am still very tempted to write down the Millwoods address every time I need to write down a return address under my name!

***** *****

This constitutes the first of the five posts about Uncle and Aunt 2's house. In the next three, I will talk about the three items/places that you simply can't miss in the house. Stay tune!

Same dream, every year