I spent this past weekend in good ol’ Wichita, land of construction barrels and proliferating chain restaurants, ringing in the new year with the family. I’m referring to the lunar new year, of course, which, as any Chinese or Vietnamese child knows, is objectively way better than the piddling, backwards Gregorian calendar version. Instead of getting regretfully drunk, the thing to do for the lunar new year is to gorge oneself on as much delicious food as possible, and of course, pillage one’s relatives and any moneyed adult for shiny red envelopes.
Cha-ching!
Yes, being showered with lucky money is very much preferable to being astoundingly hungover the next morning. The tradition, for those of you not in the know, is that all the adults will distribute little red envelopes, stuffed with crisp new bills from the bank, to all the children running around on New Year’s Day. Luckily for me, the definition of “children” has been stretched in my family to include “young adults with student loan debts.” Heh heh.
Aside from the money, and the wonderfully delicious food, the best part about lunar new year is the chance to spend time my extended family again. My cousins are turning out to be funny, if rather quirky, people, and it’s nice to see them grow up. (Although terribly, terribly shocking. Some of these kids were busy wetting their beds not too long ago, and now they are driving around in cars. Cars!) The great thing about hanging out with my cousins is that I have someone else, besides chiaroscuro, to commiserate with regarding the wild eccentricities of the family: the strange things we used to do as children (like ducking and covering whenever someone rang the doorbell, melting plastic Barbie heads in the sun, etc). The conversation this time around revolved around the mysterious man who lurks in the basement of my aunt’s house.
Some time, probably four or five years ago, I accompanied my mother on a visit to said house. Now, this particular aunt has an even looser grip on sanity than my mother (who, by the by, believes I shouldn’t think about moving to Portland, Oregon because of the danger of tsunamis) - she’s quite paranoid and doesn’t much care for leaving the house, except to visit her less hermited sisters. Anyway, my aunt needed to get something from the basement, so we followed her down. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a shadowy figure moving in one of the rooms, behind a half-open door.
“Who’s that?” I asked. My mom didn’t say anything then, but later she explained that this was my aunt’s “boyfriend” (which, in Vietnamese adult vernacular, can really mean anything from ‘friend who is male’ to ‘life partner.’ In this case, she meant that they are married).
“What? How long have they been dating? How come he never comes to any of the parties?” My maternal extended family in Wichita has get-togethers roughly once a month, and I had never seen anybody accompany my aunt before.
“Oh, he’s kind of, how you say, mental?” said my mom. “He doesn’t like people; he just stays at home.”
Hence began my mini-obsession with the crazy guy who dwells in my aunt’s basement. Apparently he’s the brother of a friend of my aunt’s; they met when she was visiting his house. Being that I’ve never seen the guy in direct light, let alone any interaction between the two, I’m not sure of the driving force behind the relationship. I do know that my aunt collects some sort of social security benefits for taking care of him. I don’t want to assume that my aunt just married him to collect a government paycheck, but then again, I can’t dismiss that possibility when it comes to my notoriously stingy, penny-pinching aunt.
Anyway, he’d never really come up into conversation among members of my family other than my mom and I, until about yesterday. So I’m a bit relieved that it wasn’t some shared hallucination between me and my mother, and mildly amused at the notion that my family has a basement lurker. If I were any younger, he might haunt my nightmares, but now I kind of wish I could befriend him, and maybe lure him out of his basement lair somehow (according to one of the cousins, he does mow the lawn sometimes). Maybe if he would come to our parties, he’d get over his fear of people. He could sit at the “kids” table, with the children and the rest of us who don’t speak Vietnamese! He could get to eat New Year’s Cake* with us and laugh at all the adults. It would be a grand time.
* - Actually a savory dish made with rice, beans, and egg, wrapped in banana leaves. Really tasty when fried.
