so there was a first year wine and cheese mixer at the apartment of one of the first year english grad students yesterday evening and at some point someone says let's go to dinner. and they throw portuguese and brazilian restaurants around and suddenly someone says i know of this great restaurant and what do you know! it turns out to be penang. at which point i started laughing aloud because here were a bunch of angmohs in cambridge, massachusetts, who are talking about going to a singapore restaurant and not even realising it and there was actually a singaporean present.

so we went and the group being so large and no one hearing anyone else (i would have gladly ordered for the table only no one asked me) and they decided on going around the table and letting everyone order one dish and sharing whatever came. so the first dish came and it was the beef hor fun. which was in the menu as beef chow fun. (nobody, i can report, ate very much of it. the colour put them off, i think. i suspect people must have ordered it thinking it was chao fan. what it was of course was [gan] chao [he] fen.) a pity, for it was fairly authentic and has that smokey taste of horfun. and then the char kway teow came, which was also fairly authentic and obviously was ordered by me. and then a massive plate of fried rice came. i went into shock immediately. we're in a singaporean restaurant and there's actually a singaporean present, and they order fried rice which is the one ubiquitous thing to be found in any american-chinese restaurant?! it wasn't even good fried rice with special ingredients. if they would leave the ordering to me we could be eating chili crab and oyster omelette and beef rendang but no! what came were fried rice and other americanised chinese dishes like stir-fried vegetables and chicken dishes and very bland beehoon. dear god there was everything from satay and murtabak and wonton mee and nasi lemak and chicken rice on the menu. curries and pratas and rendangs! duck and sotong and fish! and all we ate was stuff we might as well have gone to the chinese restaurant across the square for. now i'm not saying that the food was actually bad. take the mango chicken. it was essentially sweet and sour sauce over chicken slices and chopped mango. nothing wrong with that. we like mangoes, we like sweet sour. tasted pretty nice. but since when, i ask you, did singaporeans eat mango chicken?!?! and why has mango chicken never made it into the lists of the makansutra? is it not plain that singaporeans don't eat mango chicken because we have better things to eat?!!! can you imagine? a singaporean sitting in a singaporean restaurant and being left out of the menu decision and wanting to kill herself everytime she saw what the others had ordered? don't you remember that essay of calvin trillin's? in his private hell he would be in the best chinese restaurant in the world but he is not allowed to have any say in the menu and his dinner companions would order the chop suey? it was EXACTLY LIKE THAT. it was all i can do not to weep aloud. but it would only be obnoxious for me to say all that, so i don't and wait to come home to complain to singaporeans. which now that i have, you can all console me as only singaporeans know how.

then the bill came and i started laughing again. because, oh darlings, just think about it. the bill was complicated enough with tax and tip and twelve people, and THIS WAS A TABLE MADE UP OF ENGLISH MAJORS! ordinarily there is always an engineer or finance type in a dinner party to do the maths, but here was the english department at dinner. fortunately one of the students brought his wife, who was in law school, and she was landed with the bill because, as someone pointed out, "at a table of english majors, the lawyer is the engineer." now she calculates the amount we need pay and everyone hands over the money. then she counts it and we're short. there is an awkward moment when everyone says, er, i've paid, i've paid too...how much are we short?...and guess what? it turned out it was her husband who hadn't paid for the two of them! so after all the laughter he puts down their share and everything is hoity-toity, yes? whereupon someone duo zui asks, so how much tip did we leave? and the wife peers at the bill again to make sure we've left enough, and what does she discover? that the tip was already included! so now she had to work out how much to return to each person...

this is why you never ever go to dinner with only english majors.