Say, Lo Hei! What's Going On?

It's been a week since Chinese New Year's been over but reminders of its passing still abound. For one thing, the goodies still have pride of place over the dining room table.

What has ceased however, are the Lo Hei lunches and dinners. Over the past two weeks, I had a total of 7 Lo Hei lunches and dinners, varying in quality and exquisiteness. That is, after all, to be expected. For all meals and venues are different.

What is also vastly different, however, is the atmosphere - ranging from quiet, formal and polite to rowdy and raucous. And I realize that there is a quite direct correlation between the atmosphere and the quality of the Lo Hei and the meal in general.

At one end you have the lunches with my company's panel of lawyers. These are usually held in a very upmarket Chinese restuarant, with waitresses (some, I must say, in very comely Cheongsams) fussing over our every need. There, the Lo Hei Yu Sheng of course, is of the highest quality, the fish top grade and sometimes unique. The tossing is done with special long chopsticks and after the toss, which is high and enthusiastic enough to give everybody 'face' but not too high to look overboard, a waitress will come to clean any morsels which had spilled off the table.

At the other end is the Lo Hei I had with my family. We bought a Lo Hei set from NTUC costing $20-$40 dollars, some frozen salmon and Lo Hei-ed away with our own short chopsticks. We were very careful not to toss too high for any spillage or overflow would have to be cleaned by ourselves.

In between is my company and/or department Lo Hei's. This year, our company had a Chinese New Year dinner. This is the loudest and noisiest and the tossing, done amongst people who know each other well, the most energetic and forceful. Our table had enough spilled Lo Hei from the huge basin-like bowl to fill two plates. Later in the night, shouts of Yam Seng resonated around the hall and our Vice CEO stood on a chair and toasted all his colleagues.

In summary, I think the two key considerations are - familiarity and comfort levels. But there are other factors like personality of the hosts. For even among the formal lawyer-lunches, the vibrancy and range of conversation varied.

For example, some hosting lawyers just seemed to like to talk-shop - the cases they had with us, the cases they were presently fighting, industry trends, that kind of stuff. Fortunately, it is mostly the more senior partners who talk about those topics. I am usually seated amongst the associates and junior partners and I try to talk about more...well, different stuff... like the latest movies, my blog... or how funny it is that our bosses always talk shop. I remember last year, I was having a very animated conversation with a lawyer about how, when she was in hostel, she always could not study because her neighbour used to scream so loudly when making out with the boyfriend. All of a sudden, the lawyer stopped herself in mid-sentence when she realized that the whole table had gone silent and was looking at both of us. "What?" I said to everybody. Very much the same thing happened at another lunch when a male lawyer and I started giggling about the merits of meeting clients at Hooters.

Then there are the 'formal-formal' lunches - those that my boss's boss, a Brit, attends. There, even carefree I turn down my exuberance in favour of a more subdued disposition. During such lunches, the jokes comprise the more understated and subtle British humour rather than the more slapstick Chinese version.

All in all, I really enjoy the variety of social circumstances and look forward with gusto to next year's revelry....