Today at a dim sum palace in Brooklyn Chinatown, it was like the typical Chinese restaurant situation where you see disparate groups of people all seated at the same round table with a Lazy Susan: an Asian woman with her brown husband, a Chinese couple with their four-year-old who won’t sit still unless he has his iPad in front of him with a handful of Pepperidge Farm goldfish, and two older Asian female friends with a random eight-year-old girl who refuses to eat or speak. Except in this case, we were all technically the same party. My aunt always insists on inviting random Jehovah’s Witness Chinese friends to our family meals. It’s like her thing. She always treats them, and she probably never gets treated back, and she really doesn’t care; her generosity seriously knows no bounds. My cousin and his wife didn’t acknowledge or even say hi to the random Chinese friend my aunt met in China who joined us for lunch. The eight-year-old girl stared into space and didn’t touch any of the food that her mom’s friend, who took her to this restaurant, put on her dish, and Chris and I happily ordered away and got all our favorite dim sum dishes, and then some.

That’s a day in the life of the extended Wong family meal. Fun, fun, fun.