The Family Law

By Benjamin Law

Writer and columnist Benjamin Law revisits his joyous and much-loved family memoir, spilling the tea on his family's latest antics

The book that inspired the major SBS television series!

Meet the Law family – eccentric, endearing and hard to resist. Your guide is Benjamin, the third of five children and a born humourist. Join him as he tries to answer some puzzling questions. Why won't his Chinese dad wear made-in-China underpants? Why was most of his extended family deported in the 1980s? Will his childhood dreams of Home and Away stardom come to nothing? What are his chances of finding love?

In this updated edition with a new chapter, Benjamin Law fills us in on his family's antics from the past decade.

‘Benjamin Law manages to be scatagogical, hilarious and heartbreaking all at the same time. Every sentence fizzes like an exploding fireball of energy.’—Alice Pung

‘A vivid, gorgeously garish, Technicolour portrait of a family. It's impossible not to let oneself go along for the ride and emerge at the book's end enlightened, touched, thrilling with laughter.’—Marieke Hardy

‘The eccentric, clever and beautifully resonant The Family Law. It's sharply written, brilliantly observed and infused with an authenticity that makes it compelling.’ —Saturday Age

‘Very funny...you may find yourself at times almost barking with laughter’ —The Monthly

‘Law is a writer of great wit and warmth who combines apparently artless and effortless comedian's patter with a high level of technical skill.’ —Sydney Morning Herald

‘Simultaneously weird and instantly recognisable, the Laws are an Australian family it's well worth getting to know’ —The Enthusiast

‘Wonderful. Everyone should run to their nearest bookshop and buy a copy.’ —Defamer

‘An addictive read.’ —Courier-Mail

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Nov 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781921870354

Benjamin Law

Benjamin Law is the author of The Family Law, Gaysia, the Quarterly Essay Moral Panic 101, and editor of Growing Up Queer in Australia. He's also a TV and radio broadcaster; co-creator, co-executive producer and co-writer of the Netflix comedy-drama Wellmania; creator and co-writer of three seasons of the award-winning TV series The Family Law (SBS/Hulu/Comedy Central Asia); and playwright of the sold-out mainstage play Torch the Place (Melbourne Theatre Company). He appeared on Survivor: Heroes v Villains in 2023.

Book preview

PRAISE FOR THE FAMILY LAW

‘What is it that makes Benjamin Law’s writing so good? It’s the flair for language. It’s the sharp wit. It’s the open warmth. It’s the blend of the thoughtful, the silly and the affecting. It’s all of these things, in one package.’ —JO CASE, Readings

‘One of this country’s leading humorists – our answer to Law’s literary hero, David Sedaris’ —The Big Issue

‘A writer of great wit and warmth’ —KERRYN GOLDSWORTHY, The Sydney Morning Herald

‘Crisply written and outrageously hilarious … Law’s black wit and cheerfully malicious tone make The Family Law an addictive read.’ —The Courier-Mail

‘Very funny … you may find yourself at times almost barking with laughter.’ —LINDA JAIVIN, The Monthly

‘The eccentric, clever and beautifully resonant The Family Law … sharply written, brilliantly observed and infused with authenticity’ —Saturday Age

‘Simultaneously weird and instantly recognisable, the Laws are an Australian family it’s well worth getting to know.’ —The Enthusiast

‘A rollicking series of insights into the life of a pretty awesome family … for those who love their writing fresh, fun and packed with laughs, it’s perfect.’ —Bookseller + Publisher

‘A vivid, gorgeously garish, Technicolor portrait of a family. It’s impossible not to let oneself go along for the ride and emerge at the book’s end enlightened, touched, thrilling with laughter.’ —MARIEKE HARDY

Published by Black Inc.,

an imprint of Schwartz Books Pty Ltd

Wurundjeri Country

22–24 Northumberland Street

Collingwood VIC 3066, Australia

[e-mail]

www.blackincbooks.com

Copyright © Benjamin Law 2010, 2023

First edition published in 2010. This edition published in 2023.

Benjamin Law asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

9781760644833 (paperback)

9781921870354 (ebook)

Typesetting by Duncan Blachford

Additional typesetting by Marilyn de Castro

Cover design by Marilyn de Castro

Cover illustration by Andrew Joyner

Author photograph by Daniel Francisco Robles

For my family:

Mum, Dad, Candy, Andrew, Tammy & Michelle.

Contents

Introduction

*

The Family Dictionary

Baby Love

The Family Business

Scenes from a Family Christmas

Holes

Tourism

Sleep Cancer

Heat! Vermin! Pestilence!

Tone Deaf

A Room of One’s Own

On Nudity

Like a Hole in the Head

Towards Manhood

You’ve Got a Friend

God Camp

The Pretenders

Skeletons

We Have the Technology

Oceans Apart

Amongst the Living Dead

In the Mood

So, You Are a Homo

Wrecking Ball

Two Gays, One Bed

*

Acknowledgements

He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away. —ZADIE SMITH, On Beauty

Introduction

Several days before we started shooting the TV version of The Family Law, Mum contracted Bell’s palsy. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ she said to the cast and crew with the side of her face still capable of human expression. ‘I just remember feeling very hot in the back of my head. Then I woke up and looked like this.’

‘This’ looked like she’d had a stroke, or an animal had attacked one side of her face and severed some vital nerve. Once we got over the initial shock and discovered she was going to be okay, everyone found her condition fascinating – Mum included. The left side of her face looked perfectly normal – cheery and animated, like always – while the right half looked waxen and vacant, like it’d casually checked out, activated an out-of-office auto-reply and left the building for the day.

Bell’s palsy is mysterious, but usually harmless. Give it enough time, and nearly all cases resolve on their own and don’t leave lasting damage. But with all the accumulated medical knowledge we’ve acquired throughout human history, it’s weird that we still don’t know what causes this temporary facial muscle paralysis. It’s even stranger given how common it is. After Mum got Bell’s palsy, we found that many people we knew – relatives and friends; acquaintances and colleagues – had already had it. It was as if everyone had experienced partial facial collapse, or knew someone who had, and we were latecomers to a trend. They’d just never told us until now, presumably because they hadn’t ventured into the outside world for the period their faces had shut down.

One friend told Mum and me about the time she’d contracted Bell’s palsy as a teenager. One day she woke up, went to the kitchen for breakfast, and her mother’s face suddenly curdled in alarm.

‘Mum, what’s wrong?’

Her mother grabbed her by the elbow and stood her in front of a mirror. They both screamed.

She was rushed to the family GP, who carried out every possible test to confirm she hadn’t experienced a catastrophic neurological injury. Soon enough, the doctor felt confident enough to calm everyone down. Bell’s palsy, she concluded. Benign. Harmless. Give it a couple of weeks and it’ll sort itself out.

In the passenger seat of the family car on the way home, my friend felt awash with relief. Sure, it wasn’t ideal that she was drooling and half her face looked like a basset hound running in slow motion against a strong wind. But at least she wasn’t in danger. Then she looked over and clocked her mother crying.

‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ she asked from the side of her mouth. ‘The doctor said everything’s fine. It’ll clear up eventually.’

Her mother broke into fresh sobs.

‘I know,’ she said wailing, ‘but you’re hideous.’

On the set of The Family Law, Mum’s appearance alarmed everyone she encountered. You could see it in their eyes: immediate shock, followed by the snap internal monologue with themselves: Be cool, be cool. Mum had the good humour, patience and grace to explain what had happened to her face, assuring them that it was only temporary and would resolve itself in time. But she also imbued the story with the subtext that it could easily be them next, a little like a witch putting a curse on someone. It could happen to yoOoOooOoouuuuu …

Bell’s palsy gave the impression that Mum was juggling mixed feelings about filming The Family Law. She wasn’t – she was excited about my memoir being adapted for TV; she just had Bell’s palsy – but her outward expression summed up how I was feeling on the inside. Those first few days of shooting, I experienced a combination of exhilaration and deep anxiety. Exhilaration because we were making something ground-breaking: a show where roughly 90 per cent of the speaking roles would be played by Asian-Australian actors. Anxiety, because it’s one thing to write a memoir in your twenties about your family, but it’s borderline sociopathic to turn that memoir into a TV show where actors are hired to simulate your family. Watching my parents and siblings interact with actors we’d hired to play them was an experience for which I don’t think there’s any comparison.

I mean, what if my family didn’t think the actors were good-looking enough? Or what if the actors were too attractive? Was the TV show fictionalised enough? Or was it worse that we’d lifted scenes straight from real life and my family would KNOW? Wait … was the actor playing my brother … flirting with my real-life sister?

Jesus Christ. How did we even end up here?

*

Here’s how The Family Law came about.

After her breakthrough debut memoir Unpolished Gem, literary superstar Alice Pung put out a call for contributions to the anthology she was working on, called Growing Up Asian in Australia. In my mind, the title felt weirdly, spookily and somewhat selfishly custom-designed for me (‘Wait a second … I grew up Asian … in Australia!’). I wrote two pieces – ‘Tourism’ and ‘Towards Manhood’ – in a delirious midnight haze I barely recall. What I do remember is hitting send, looking up and blinking, and realising the sun was rising over the Brisbane River. It’s rare for stories to come into the world fully formed like that, but looking back, I must have been writing those stories in the back of my mind for years and something just clicked.

Several weeks later, Alice’s publisher got in touch by email. He’d liked the essays. Had I ever considered writing a book?

Of course the answer was ‘no’. I was pursuing my dream job at the time, freelancing for newspapers and glossy magazines, and assumed those formats would be lucrative and absolutely heaving with cash forever. Being a published author? It felt a little presumptuous. I wouldn’t even know where to start.

‘Absolutely!’ I lied. ‘Writing a book has always been my dream.’

Honestly, I didn’t have any idea what to write. But I’m also an insufferable people-pleaser primarily driven by fear. And nothing motivates me to follow through on something more than trying to prevent a house of lies tumbling down around me. Give me a few days, I told the publisher, and I’d come up with a pitch.

I didn’t know how to write a proper book, but I figured I could write a collection of personal essays – like ‘Tourism’ and ‘Towards Manhood’ – that would feel like a book. Which is another way of saying that I was prepared to gaslight readers into believing I was an author. The positive way I spun it to the publisher was that it’d be like David Sedaris’s books: the collected essays of a gay guy, also from a big family, with a memorable mother, who wrote about his family with the same savage affection I felt for mine.

I pitched that book, and we signed the deal.

‘So,’ I told my family. ‘I’m going to write a book!’

Everyone cooed and gasped as they hugged me, happy for my success.

‘It’s going to be a memoir …’

Hmm … I could see them thinking.

‘And it’s all about us!’

Someone audibly exhaled. One of my siblings might have rolled their eyes. They should’ve seen this coming. And now I felt the full weight of the task pressing on me. Because how are you supposed to write a memoir about your family without throwing them under the bus?

In weird timing, I found myself interviewing David Sedaris over the phone for the local newspaper just before I signed the contract. At the end of the interview, I asked one last question which had nothing to do with the story. Did he have any rules when writing about people in his life, especially people he cared about?

‘Say someone … had just scored a writing contract,’ I said. ‘And hypothetically it was about their family. What advice would you give them?’

For starters, Sedaris said, it was important to depict yourself as the biggest jerk in any given story, to ensure your depiction of anyone else didn’t come off as callous or cruel. You always had to be the bigger clown. He never betrayed anyone’s confidence either. For instance, if he heard a hilarious story about some idiotic in-laws from his sister, he’d never write that story and publish it, because those in-laws would know it was his sister who’d let slip. Instead, Sedaris recommended writing the story, never publishing it, but reading it aloud at events in every city across the world except where those in-laws lived.

‘Finally,’ he said, ‘just write about people who don’t read very much.’

My family did read, though. So when I had a full first draft, I went to Officeworks, printed six copies – two parents; four siblings – had them spiral bound and sent them off via Express Post. The feedback came back quickly. Most of my siblings’ comments focused on spelling and grammatical errors. Nerds.

Mum found it hilarious, and she especially loved my depictions of … well, her.

‘Classic,’ she said, praising herself. ‘Squeezing a lemon through a penis hole. Hilarious.’

Months went by and I didn’t hear anything from Dad, though.

When we got closer to publication, I gave him a call. It was a quieter moment in the day as he prepped to open his Thai restaurant for the evening, and I asked him whether he’d found time to read my book yet.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Too busy!’

‘Uh, do … do you think you’ll ever read it?’

There was a pause as he thought.

‘No, don’t think so!’ he said.

He was so cheery about it!

In that moment, I knew he never would read The Family Law, and I didn’t blame him. Honestly, who has the time to read books, let alone a restaurateur who worked seven days and nights a week and whose second language was English? I wasn’t hurt. In fact, I was relieved, but also worried. What if other people read the book and thought less of my dad? I knew I’d tried to depict him as loving and caring, but there was painful and revealing stuff in there too. Didn’t he want to know what I wrote?

‘Your readers,’ he said, ‘they’re smart. They know if Danny Law write a book, different story! Your mum write a book? Different story again! You write your own story. Is okay with me.’

Essentially he was saying: I trust you. I’ll never read your work, and I barely understand what you do for a living, but I trust you.

God I’m lucky. I know people who’ve written memoirs and been disinvited from weddings. Others have ended up in court. But it seemed – still seems, I think! – my family weren’t going to disinherit or disown me. Still, after the book went to the printers, I started quietly fretting about other things. Like: who would want to read this story about growing up gay and Asian, in coastal Queensland, at the height of Pauline Hanson’s anti-Asian political campaigns, while your parents’ marriage fell apart? It felt a bit niche. Didn’t exactly scream ‘classic Australian story’. No sheep. No farms. And despite the fact we grew up on the Sunshine Coast, my family seemed actively hostile to nature. Throw in my depiction of a demonic emu, and the book wasn’t exactly a celebration of the Australian landscape.

But as it turned out, lots of people ended up relating to the book, and in completely different ways. Some were Asian-Australian. Others came from dysfunctional but loveable migrant families. Some were children of divorce. Or they were gay, and the book gave them a little bit more courage about the prospect of coming out. Or perhaps they could understand their mother tongue, but couldn’t speak it, and had never read a story that reflected their struggles and disconnection from a language that felt like home. Or maybe they belonged to the most maligned, under-represented and misunderstood of all Australian minorities: Queenslanders.

Then, when the TV rights for the book sold, another vexing question came up. Who would play us? Mum was doing laundry in our childhood home when I asked her whom she thought could depict her.

‘Good question,’ she said, turning on the top-loader as she mentally scrolled through the Rolodex of the roughly zero Asian women who’d made a significant career on Australian TV so far – even though Asian-Australians constituted roughly 10 per cent of the population at the time. She came up with no one. To my shame – or was it the shame of the Australian TV industry? – I couldn’t think of many people either.

Then Mum lit up.

‘Oh, you know who’d be great?’ she said.

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘Judith Lucy.’

We didn’t end up casting Judith Lucy. (Sorry, Judith.) Instead, The Family Law cast Fiona Choi, who was nominated for an AACTA Award for her portrayal. And we didn’t just make one season of The Family Law; we made three – a rarity in Australian TV history. The series ended up finding a home on SBS in Australia, Comedy Central in Asia and Hulu in the United States, and was pirated heavily, and inexplicably, in Jamaica.

Eventually, Mum’s face recovered from Bell’s palsy. Australian high school students now study extracts of this book regularly as part of their final-year exams and send me abuse about it on social media, which actually thrills me – mostly because their school has already paid me lending rights and I feel the abuse is a fair trade for the money I get.

But in a way, I also get their frustration. What’s the big deal with this book anyway? Sure, it was touted as a ground-breaking Asian-Australian story in 2011, but nowadays Asian-Australian books, memoirs and authors are all around us. And in a sense, The Family Law is kind of everyone’s story now. Still, if I’m honest, thinking of how far this little book, and the literary scene, have come in just over a decade induces a dizzying sensation in me. It’s a real buzz. Or maybe I’m just feeling a little hot in the back of my head.

Benjamin Law, 2023

Gadigal Land, Eora Nation (Sydney)

The Family Dictionary

Lately, I’ve been stitching together a zine for my family that gets passed around over Christmas. It’s called The Family Dictionary. Designed to resemble a language reference book, it compiles all the new in-house phrases, terminology and punchlines we’ve developed over the year, alongside helpful illustrations and diagrams. Some entries are universally suggestive and you wouldn’t need to be a family member to understand them. No one needs to stretch their imagination to figure out what a slitoris might be. Heurgh – uttered as if you’re dry-retching – denotes disgust and horror at something. Flahs is a bouquet of fancy flowers, and scrongtrum still sounds funny, even if you haven’t seen the difficulty my mother has in pronouncing ‘scrotum.’ (She’s Chinese, and the placing of the ‘r’ makes it difficult, she says.)

Most entries, though, are more esoteric. Some are hard to explain without the aid of accents. For reasons we’ve long forgotten, commence seduction has to be said mechanically with robot-arm movements; yeh fookin’ pig-nosed slag – developed during a car-trip competition to find the most crass insult imaginable towards women – has to be Scottish. Other entries demand complex body movements and choreography. The Pardamonté is a dance style my sister Michelle has developed, which complements something I do called the Dance of Despair. Both resemble rhythmic gymnastics, but instead of using ribbons and clubs in a sports stadium, we use fitted sheets and plastic bags in the living room. It’s really something; you should see us in action.

Over the years, though, we’ve lost too many entries. We were watching home videos of a family trip to London when I rediscovered a backlog of phrases and private jokes I’d forgotten, voices and characters we’d nearly lost. Who could forget Betty, John and Frank, the trio of confused, hearing-impaired seniors who verbally abused each other? And whatever happened to that skit with the incestuous father, where I’d surprise my sisters by violently

Reviews for The Family Law

[questbird · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A story of a Chinese Australian suburban family, as seen by a younger son who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s. It is funny and coarse and occasionally a bit sad. It reminded me a bit of a gen-Y version of 'He Died with a Felafel in his hand' for the Queensland setting and the descriptions of the crappy family home. Mostly this is about the author's mother, a Malaysian Chinese stay-at-home mum; her fears and quirks, but also the author's. I particularly enjoyed the parts about the crudities of Cantonese language, and the author's ambivalent relationship to his 'mother-tongue'.

[shelleyraec · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Family Law is an amusing collection of anecdotes by Benjamin Law sharing the joys, traumas and candid moments of growing up in his eccentric Chinese Australian family in suburban Queensland. There is a distinct Aussie flavour to Law's reminiscences which are easy to relate to. Law examines his life with a wry sense of humour and an eye for the quirky differences of his family and their experiences. I laughed out loud more than once, particularly with his mother's blunt, if crude, statements. I also appreciated the candour with which Benjamin shares his relationship. This lighthearted memoir is a quick, fun read.