an AmeriNese wedding banquet

This weekend, my mother was really hoping to take her uninitiated Italian boyfriend to a genuine (delicious) 10-course Chinese wedding banquet. What they got instead was some strange hybrid of America and mainland China, with an MC that screamed into a microphone for the entirety of the four-and-a-half meal, and sing-alongs in Mandarin interspersed with choruses of the Black Eyed Peas, 'N Sync, and Vanessa Carlton.

I should point out, before I start, that I grew up attending one banquet or another for the majority of my childhood Saturday nights. Too difficult to invite hundreds of people to weddings in small Chinatown churches, the banquet was where the community could celebrate the couple, and when I was little, many of my parents' siblings, cousins, 2nd cousins and family friends were getting hitched. And while all of this may seem like a "treat" of some sort -- who doesn't want to eat Chinese banquet food every weekend? -- it was a tedious and drawn out affair for the toddler that I was, or the 'tween that I was becoming.

Four hours. Imagine FOUR hours with your family, no games, no entertainment, no English, for that matter. After a while, my mother and father took their cue from other benevolent parents and allowed me and my siblings to bring our handheld Gameboys to dinner (they were clunky plastic things with black & white screens, back then). They let us drink as much soda as we wanted (mistake), as long as it kept us from whining. They packed tea cups full of fried rice and turned them over on our plates, lifting them gently to make little "rice castles," which we'd eat, wide-eyed and giggling.

Needless to say, we always knew what kind of food we'd be seeing and the exact order in which it would be served, which is why this Saturday came as such a surprise. The meal typically begins with cold plates of meats and jellyfish, and evolves into large pieces of shrimp fried in batter garnished with walnuts, huge ceramic bowls of shark's fin soup, slimy abalone on a bed of bok choy, a "bird's nest" of fried noodles housing stir-fried vegetables and scallops, crispy-skinned roast chicken, whole fish of white meat, fried rice, long-life noodles, fruit, sweet red bean soup, wedding cake.

I wish, dear readers, that I had a photograph available of the first dish that we ate. Imagine a shallow bed of shredded iceberg lettuce, covered with large haphazard cubes of canteloupe and honeydew, on top of which lay two, whole, lobsters in their shells, with squirts of mayonnaise laced OVER the red-hued shells and claws. This is what they called "lobster salad." (Well, that's what my uncle called it, and in seriousness.)

There's much more to say on the topic (read: fire-swallowing performers in slinky black gowns, conga lines, crab sticky rice with [gasp!] raisins in it), but I will spare you the details. I think my mother's boyfriend was a little disappointed with the food, and perhaps not prepared for the length of the affair. I just had a good time sitting, giggling with my sister and my aunt, waiting for, hoping for, smelling the dishes we'd grown up with, and laughing at our red-faced 2nd cousin ("Drunk Cuz"), full of cognac, who reminded us that banquets are about more than just the food.