Not too long back, over sushi, hotpot and orangetomato sherbet, I had a conversation with Debb:
Filed under: conversations, memories, places
January 25, 2009 • 5:50 pm 2
Repetitious Chinese Reunion Dinners
This year, I sit myself, a person in a table of ten, finding the meal replaying in front of me, a series of replays, a set of repetitions that make up the Chinese Reunion Dinner.
The Chinese reunion dinner heralds the Chinese Lunar New Year. It is the vanguard of all traditions, it is the symbol of a year well-spent; you end a year with your family, and you start the new one with your family as well, all in one meal, in one sitting.
These reunion dinners are like well-rehearsed shows. The atmosphere is repetitive. We wear our best happy faces; the house is painted red if we can help it, swathed in red-gold New Year paraphernalia: lanterns, silk knots, plaques, calligraphy-ed blessings and cut-outs. The smell of fresh fruit for offering the gods perfumes the house, fresh flowers and new-year willows are arranged to welcome the relatives. The house is literally swept twice for good measure (no sweeping away new wealth on the first day of Chinese Lunar New Year!).
The second repetition of reunion dinners, is the food. On the menu: Fishprawnsandgreenshoots (amongst others) for wealthprosperityabundance (amongst others). But god, in our house, there must be white cabbage soup. Not any old soup, but the kind with the most superior stock, infused and sweetened by the flavours of fish maw, abalone, fresh meatballs, and chicken stock. It’s standard good fare. You don’t have reunion dinners with sub-standard. Everything is the best, and cooked in excess.
The day of the Reunion Dinner, routines are repetitive. The silk knot gets hung up, the soup brews, the relatives arrive. New babies are cooed at, children run skitter skatter, increasingly bored every year, adults mingle, talk is light-hearted. We then sit down for dinner. We sip wine (or F&N) and toast to a bountiful year. We finish dinner and we clear off. Same-same.
But I believe, the biggest repetition of reunion dinners are the natures of the attending personalities.
Take my parents for example, the hosts of The Reunion. The anxious hen of a mother (this feature dinner, she is the wife) trying not to literally pour the consumable contents on the table- a day’s worth of preparation -down the throats of her guests. The head-of-the-table-man-of-the-manor father, who shifts his shoulder onto table, points chopsticks into air- and calls out to everyone, “Tuck in, Cheers!”, his heart filled with a chauvinistic This is on me! kind of pride.
And the others: my overly-obliging-courteous but usually rebellious brother; the loquacious uncle with full of praise (yearly repetitive praise) for the food; his wife duly appreciative, requesting recipe proportions; and my other quietly-sombre uncle upon tossing his two-cents worth into dinner conversation –two cents mostly unheeded (he who is recovering from alcohol intoxication, recovering lost respect), along with his long-suffering wife full of due small talk. Their children beg the same personalities: Bryan is an insolent ten-year-old, his sister without-temper and naïve, baby brother a curious cat with a sweet disposition, the twins, one as boisterous as the other is calm, both as unwilling to recite the Tang poems their mother begs for every year.
The unchanging personalities include me. I re-discover I’m still the daughter, and that l certainly could still be the kid if I want to be. Non-alcoholic, non-gambler, non-conversationalist (children are silent at the Chinese dinner table), non-adult. Likewise, this year, no one expects me to change. And I don’t have to change if I don’t want to. This year though, sitting at that table, I wished at that moment, I could have been a bit more different, less a daughter, less a kid, more a woman, more an adult. Non-repetitive.
I suppose my observations of the repetitions should conclude and point to something meaningful here.
This is it. I suppose this. I suppose- that as a result of these repetitious atmospheres, food, rituals, and personalities- the yearly Chinese reunion dinner is a huge exercise for maintaining existing family hierarchy, achieving textbook harmony and order. If you were to watch a video-recording of our lives as a family, with all the other scenes cut out except the yearly Chinese reunion dinner get-togethers- you’ll realize the dinners repeat themselves almost seamlessly. There are minor blasé differences, but essentially, we are repetitive. After all the cuts, you would feel like our lives only consist of the same Chinese Reunion Dinners. Chinese Reunion Dinners that are the same, year after year.
As a family (extended or core), we might have strayed during the year, we might have had our differences, we might have fallen short of the image of the perfect Chinese family along the way, but if there is one time in a year where there is any perfect Chinese family to speak of, for us, it is during Chinese reunion dinners.
To young, perplexed Chinese persons around the world, Tuck in, Cheers.
Filed under: musings, places , family, festivities
November 13, 2008 • 4:29 pm 0
Changeling
October 3, 2008 • 2:38 am 2
the meaning of this rain
Its 2:30 am in the morning. I thought it was a good idea to wake up and write- after lying awake for some time to the rain hitting hard on this window. It is an attic window- and captures the sound of rain in quite an interesting way. This particular rain, this Yorkshire rain on this attic window of a student hostel, reminds me of another rain, a Nepalese rain on the zinc roofing of a brick and motar house. And both rains in their intensity is perhaps not too unlike the Singaporean rainforest rain back home against my condominum window panes. The nice thing about hearing rain in the midst of your sleep is that you feel safe- warm and safe. The elements might be raging outside, the covers of your shelter are getting absolutely battered for your sake, for your posterity, but you rest still, dry and secure in many chambers of your bed. I have never identified much with the homeless. Perhaps now when I see them, I shall recall the rainy nights.
Just rain, and I have collected so many different kinds over the last four years. Australian rain is generally not unlike the UKian rain in daylight, either like threads of water in spring, or like icy stones in winter. How I waited for the hail then. Perhaps it was my romanticisng nature. How I imagined the hail, scrutinsed the whites of my sunlight to determine afore-imagined hail. Hail is truly magnificent, when it does happen. But just regular rain has its touch of class as well. In Melbourne, the morning showers that visit just before I step out of the apartments are the best, they leave the walking pavements shiny, Nature’s way of loving you.
And of course the rain of the slippery hillsides in Sunaula Bazar. How dusk ends and night falls and the rain persists. How midnight owls call and farm mice scurry to the sound of the thunderous rain because- it can only be like that- on a zinc roof. No poetic pitter-patter when it rains in Dhading, Nepal. Only glorious rainfall. My favorite memories of the rain is how it made their lives humble and graceful, that when it rains you know that their lives are self-preserving, and meaningful. My imposing Hajur-ama never rushes when the rain does, she bids her time, as if her age commands the rain to respect her- she walks home slowly barefooted, sometimes buffaloes in tow, sometimes a water container on her hips. If her walk could sing, it would be, Let it rain, let it rain, be it. Rain in the villages trigger a whole new set of chores that need to be dismantled- the greens earlier sunned, have to be collected, the freshly laundered colors on washing lines have to be folded away, the goats have to be chased into their sheds, the dirty pots and pans should all go out for a free wash. Rain in Nepal is the grit of life.
Coming to hear this rain in the early steeples of this morning in yet another foreign land, at age 23 is a gratifying experience for me. Perhaps because I am pleased to have accumulated my varied rain-wise experiences thus far. I acknowledge they aren’t miserly experiences for a 23 year old. And I am further excited about what more rain-filled experiences lie in store for me- 33, 43, 53. (Honestly, I don’t mean that. I have an inability to think too far. At the most, I can visualise rain up till age 30). At age 23, I am here in the shire of York, sussing out my sister’s spanking new degree waiting to happen. The prospects of her dormitory life, her young and rest presumptous nineteen-twenty-year-old friends and her idealistic academic discourse is making me green with envy. My own undergraduate days linger in the corridors of my mind- In times of rain, be it in bliss or bitterness.
For the horizons now, it is fit that I give justice to the home-grown rains of Singapore. Beyond feeling frustrated that I can move nowhere, beyond feeling like I am hiding away from the rest of my world, I need to be similarly inspired by the rain and live, properly, by it.
July 18, 2007 • 8:10 am 2
Perhaps I shall write
Its 5.36pm and I am in the State Library of Victoria, wildly at peace.
My book -The Bride Stripped Bare- and my narrator’s voice is ripe in my mind. Written in second person, the author beckons me into her world of desperation. She – writes ‘you’- so I suppose, collectively we sit in the depths of an old and anonymous library surrounded only by the quiet of words and thoughts. She is heartbreakingly married, but seducing her lover in her mind, yet is also teasing coyly the Oxford types in the library going pantyless upon a second floor divided from the first by patterned cast-iron grails, all this with her pen poised between slim fingers as she aches to write a novel storying an oppressed nineteenth century genteel woman drowning in the misogynist rule of her marriage.
Me. I am sitting cold and relentless in a foreign, oak-ed swivel chair, parked at a fifteen-minute access computer terminal, chalking sets and sets of fifteen nobody wants. The noiseless heels around me, the darkening sky from the dome of the Latrobe reading room, ground me; just as my relentless a-hundred-and-one wants, needs, fears, guilts, and pleasures -neurosis- bombard my senses and I write, only to satiate.
It is an oasis of calm. The cold allows me to collect my thoughts- my fingers fly across the keyboard, for warmth and for catharsis, never more agile – I’ve always wanted to play an instrument.
From where should I begin to take action? Should I take heed first from within- my fleeting dreams, my intense curiosities, my travel lust, my grander ambitions, or from without- my my coming-of-age responsibilities, my relationships that buoy me, the friendships I wish to cement, the desired environment I wish to live in? Should I act upon what I have but fail, or should I actively seek what I do not have? Should I spend recklessly or should I save for a cause, should I earn or should I gallivant, can I ever be a sly hedonist, despite all my self-righteous pompousness about my sensibilities, my noble aspirations and my measured life? And at the heart of my questions- what and how to pursue remorselessly?
Mood swings. These days I am indulgent and greedy of creature comforts: sleeping in, wolfing food I never craved for, lounging, waxing lyrical, delaying, it is a languid and buoyant self at best- and at other times- I am a bundle of nervous energy: I draw lists, make plans, read books thoughtlessly as if to devour the book in my need for accomplishment, I am of criss-crossed wires of conflicting priorities, raw, angry at times; bouts of self-loathe and self-love co-exist, I must have mentioned too many a time.
Perhaps I shall dress for the library. I shall come every day and set my thoughts straight like that every other day. Yes. Perhaps I shall write.
Filed under: places, quirks, written word
