Ok, I was going to write this earlier but then recovering from 8 glasses of wine with 0 glasses of water took a bit out of me. Not smart.
For those who haven't noticed yet, it's Chinese New Year. Gong Xi Fa Chai! And whatever version you normally say according to your dialect.
Chinese New Year is one of those things that, I find, have lost a lot of meaning as time passes by. I admit that there are somethings that are purely my fault in contributing to this but not critical. It's not that I hate Chinese New Year (although at some point in time I kinda did, apart from all the ang pau [red packets for those not in the know] that I will receive) or just being cynical about the whole atmosphere. I just feel very sad.
You must be thinking "What the hell? There's awesome stuff-your-face-abundance of food, ang pau, the general fun and laughter of the entire extended family, ridiculous CNY songs and TV programs to make fun of. How can you not look forward to it?" and you are right. Or at least it's partially right.
Being a person who has not celebrated Chinese New Year for about 7 years...Well, that's not really true. 7 years of not celebrating it like how I remembered. The first couple of years in those times were at a point where my nuclear family went through a minefield. Some lucky escapes but the damage has been done. This of course generated additional consequences to my extended family and thus how we (as a nuclear family) proceeded with the usual Chinese New Year traditions. Let's just say it's not pretty but now we're good, I think. The remaining years were my fault and this is where I was chasing the dream but as some of you know has hit a massive speed bump. At best that dream may be achieved again in 10 years time. So that is 7 years worth of lost family time. To which I didn't try or unable to try to regain.
But that is not the only reason why I've kinda lost the meaning although I would say it plays a major part in shaping my Chinese New Year traditions, whatever is left of it. The saying "You don't know what you've got until it's gone" couldn't have summed it up better. The usual Chinese New Year traditions involves making a 3.5 hour trip to Penang, staying at my grandmother's house together with the rest of the extended family, steamboat reunion dinner, going around from place to place in Penang to visit all these uncle and aunties whom some of them I've not known if it weren't for these traditions and of course stuffing your face with food everywhere in between. At its peak, my grandmother's house will have no less than 15 people living under one roof. The great thing about my dad's side of the family is that everyone of his relatives are still living in Penang with the exception of one of his sisters and us. So visiting people is a lot easier plus they are really great people. If that is not enough to scream "Oh what joy!" I don't know what will. My achilles heel was that I am stranger to my own mother tongue/dialect. This means that I have difficulty talking to a lot of them, especially my grandmother. And this was a big wet blanket to my Chinese New Year spirit and have lost a little of the magic so to speak. But this was when I was a child. Towards the couple of years before my grandmother passed away, it came back and I think it was because I was being treated as an adult, an individual and of course the feeling that I should reconnect with my roots. Unfortunately, my grandmother was very old and had dementia and couldn't recognize a lot of us longer than a few minutes. But that never stopped me from trying.
It was when my grandmother passed away did things take a turn, for the worse unfortunately. Grandmother died 2 months after arriving in Australia and quite immediately after did my family hit the minefield. So basically, that was the trigger. I couldn't go back for her funeral, I was disgustingly angry at my family particularly at one person and later would realize that that would be the end of my usual Chinese New Year traditions, so far. Until this day, I've not seen my dad's side of the family since my departure to Australia. This shifted the celebrations over to my mother's side of the family who are like everywhere but most of them are in Melbourne. I don't quite feel Chinese New Year every time I celebrate with them because unlike my dad's side, they still persist in using the label of "kids" on us even though we are very well into our 20s. So there are always 2 tables, one for the "adults" and one for the "kids". Why I don't like this is because the age difference between the oldest and the youngest in the "kids" table is larger than the age difference of the adults table and some of us are approaching the dreaded three-oh *cough* Heck there are people younger than me on the adults table but the exception is that they are married. In fact everyone in that table are married. This does a lot to my subsequent thought processes but I shall leave it at there. Second, over-the-table conversations are almost always about business. There is very little talk about everything else. It seems that it is assumed that everyone is interested in business and whatever words of wisdom as far as money goes one will always listen because that's what makes the world go round. Hence, all this empty chatter about business leaving me to talk to my best friend, my iPhone. Thirdly, food. Since learning to cook (and some fairly arduous recipes), I understand the feeling of making things from scratch as well as the feeling of others who share in home cooked food. So you can imagine my love for food when at my dad's side of the family when every thing on the table is cooked at home. The best soy sauce pork, preserved vegetable soup and a whole lot of other things can be found in that house. Jump over to my mum's side and what I get is...restaurants. Every single time we all eat is at restaurants. Even when they are back in Malaysia, they have a stronger preference for restaurant food than hawker food (sacrilegious I tell you). This year is a bit different, we ate at home. But half the food were brought back from somewhere. Their choices in food are a bit of a hit and miss but it was good this time but no way does it compare with entirely home cooked food. Bear in mind that you have to think this from their business point of view which is about convenience, maximizing pleasure while exerting the least amount of effort. As a side note, my dad is a pretty awesome cook and used to cook simple but kick-ass dishes at home but is no longer the case since we've left the nest, so to speak. Now every time we come back, we've always gone out for food and never eat at home. Sad? Yes.
So, hearing of all this excellent speak from friends (especially the Singaporeans. Why them is another story) via the usual social sites on how great their Chinese New Year have been with family, the food etc. one can only reminisce about the good old days where it used to be like that. So one of my short term goals now is to go back to Penang for Chinese New Year plus a bit more, perhaps just by myself. And again I might not have much time left just like when my grandmother was around.
So go ahead and enjoy your Chinese New Year. For it may not last the way you used to remember it, God forbid. And I look forward to when I finally can enjoy it the way I used to enjoy it, be it with my usual extended family or the family of another that does this. I may be a stranger to my own mother tongue and traditions but that doesn't stop me from enjoying it.
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Now if you are born in my generation or the generations before me, it is very likely that your parents come from fairly large families. 4-7 siblings is quite common but there are sides of the family that contain 10+ siblings. This makes Chinese New Year fairly big on any account once you add all your uncles and aunties and your cousins, it makes one (very) big happy family. And who can say that it's not fun? Think of all the ang pau that you'll get! Family dinners get huge and loud and crazy which I guess adds to the festivities.
Come to my generation and ahead of me, family sizes have shrunk dramatically. 2-3 siblings are the norm, but probably more 2. Fast forward a couple of generations where my parents generation have passed on and we find that the extended families have shrunk as well. We don't have a lot of cousins, uncles or aunties by virtue of the nuclear family sizes of today and we have a lot of distant cousins which if my own observations are true, are not much in contact. So Chinese New Years will be fairly small in comparison of the generations before that.
We take pride in the fact that we have this huge family "database" to make the festivities grand but how much of that will change we that "database" have shrunk considerably? Will these families be more close because extended families are smaller and thus easier to communicate/catch-up with? Or will it morph into something totally unexpected? What used to be just a strictly family affair, can it include social families into the celebrations to make up for the lack in extended family size? One where we invite our neighbours and their families, our friends and their families to join in? If we really do take pride in have big, loud and crazy gatherings for Chinese New Year, then this picture is probably the best prediction of where things are going to be a couple of generations down the road (which is actually quite a long time to wait given our current life expectancy unless Jesus comes again or some major global disaster hits). That's interesting because then the world just got smaller, breaking down the apparent barrier between strictly family and the rest of the community. Not only we spend less time with family relative to our generation because of the size but we spend more time with someone else's family. This mish-mash of family and friends at the dinner table will ultimately result in reducing our degrees of separation down even more.
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Hello there. Mind if I ask who are you and how did you know of this blog? You don't seem like anyone I know.