Life

Comebacks to Pesky Questions This Lunar New Year

As the yearly interrogation from pesky relatives rolls around, here’s a little guide to turn those conversations really awkward, but educational.
Koh Ewe
SG
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Below is a guide to answering all your family members’ awkward questions during Lunar New Year. For ilPhoto: RODNAE Productions from Pexels

The Lunar New Year is a time of heartwarming family reunion. It’s also a time of nails-on-chalkboard-type questions that fodder small talk at the dinner table. As the Lunar New Year dawns on us, friendly interrogation from well-meaning relatives could well have many in a chokehold. 

For the most unsubtle family members, it doesn’t matter if you’re single, financially independent, or knee-deep in a life-changing workout routine; neither does the fact that you’re moisturized, in your lane, and flourishing. The notoriously prickly Lunar New Year questioning has a way of making you feel like the past year of self-discovery might have been for nothing.

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To be fair, these cliché questions (sprinkled with a pinch of elderly judgment) about your love life and career could be one way your distant older relatives try to connect with you—it may well be the only way they know how. But if the dreaded conversational gap is going to rear its ugly head during festivities, why not take it as a chance to educate your relatives and steer—nay, hijack—the discussion to the things that matter?

Below, a guide to exposing your middle-aged relatives to the perils of modern dating, the climate crisis, and the backbreaking pessimism of a late-stage capitalist workforce. Now, we all know that talk of death and dying is highly taboo around the festive season, but no one said anything about hot current affairs that also happen to be depressing as fuck.

Why are you still single?

Modern dating is incredibly perilous for the tender-hearted: We swipe endlessly on dating apps that want to do it all and navigate fuckboy minefields (recently spelled “West Elm Caleb”). However, one good thing to come out of the mess is a lexicon of grave-sounding terminology coined for the complexity of the modern dating scene, including ones that will likely suck the fun out of conversations with your wholesome relatives.

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Your answer: Over the past year, I’ve been ghosted, lovebombed, gaslit, and catfished. It’s hard to find someone who will stay post-cuffing season.

If they start asking what these grim terms mean, it’s time to give them a lesson in modern dating vocabulary. Maybe even bond over a dating horror story or two.

When are you having kids?

Lunar New Year interrogation doesn’t get much easier for those who are happily cuffed. When faced with baby chatter, there is perhaps no better time to kickstart a conversation about the climate crisis with otherwise uninterested family members.

Your answer: I can’t decide… Kids are cute but raising one in the climate crisis isn’t.

Eco-anxiety is on the minds of many parents and parents-to-be. People are increasingly deciding against having kids during the climate crisis (Granted, there are also those who have decided to have kids in spite of it). Besides concern about the carbon emissions raising a child entails, there’s also rising pessimism about the world that the child will inherit—one that many young people concur is doomed.

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Have you found a job yet?

If posed tactfully, this question may well be coming from a place of familial care and curiosity, rather than condescension. After all, keeping in touch with one another’s lives is a big part of what it means to be family. But then again, there’s also no harm in engaging in educational political discourse. Beginning, naturally, with the burgeoning anti-work movement.

Your answer: No, but have you heard of r/antiwork, the super popular workforce discussion that people are really getting into? 

Related question: Why aren’t you earning as much as [redacted cousin’s name]?

Your answer: I’ve become disillusioned with the capitalist rat race that has convinced people that they need to pit themselves against one another to be considered successful.

Have you put on some weight? / Why are you so skinny? / Any unwarranted remarks about your appearance.

When someone feels the need to point out something as shallow as an unfavorable observation about your appearance, a potentially interesting response is to go deep. Like therapy-level deep. Who knows? This might make for an unexpectedly profound Lunar New Year chit-chat.

Your answer: Being an unwilling participant in a sedentary lifestyle due to long work hours, and feeling crippling uncertainty about the pandemic has whittled down my motivation to make healthy fitness and food choices. By the way, have you heard of this condition plaguing tons of young people today, called body dysmorphia?

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