新年 is waking up to fresh sheets pulled taut and smooth under my calves; crisp corners flanked wide by spring cleaned walls; red-hatted gold filled tins strategically sitting where the 7am sun first slant across. It is the comfort of tradition, the kind of joy derived from childish assurance that breakfast would be fried mee sua and clothes would be new. It was also, for me, a chore.
As a child I had always been fraught with social neurosis — I loved people but my interaction with them were crypted within complex, self-constructed rules and principles, especially if it involved a crowd where I am member not performer. In particular, I didn’t like the idea of being obliged to pay respects to elders.
With my compulsion, bolstered by the general brooding of my teen-hood, I went through several bad starts of CNY having my parents coerce me into paying respects to them (tradition dictates this was the first thing we did every morning of 初一). It was rather fortunate that the embarrassing emotional volatility of my teen-hood was also characterized by its transience – I got over my neurosis fast enough if provided sufficiently with sugary decoys in the form of pineapple tarts and kuih bangkits.
This 新年, my first as an adult, all that’s left of that mortifyingly awkward child is an opaque hash of remembered words I’ve just spilled above as a final purging.
I woke up ready – excited even – to go through the whole works. I wanted to recite those once well-rehearsed phrases now thickened with the rust of my unused mandarin tongue, I wanted to offer every house guest at least one round of all our new year snacks with the relentlessness of a Singaporean auntie, I wanted all these not even for the ang pow – although I hoard them with manic delight, but purely to revel in the lunar new year like the shiny-faced enthusiastic Chinese I have been possessed by.
A recent discussion with a friend regarding the absurdity of Chinese beliefs surrounding festivals realized a conclusion: that the Chinese come up with crazy stories to justify their consumption of decadent food all year round. We eat sticky rice dumplings stuffed with pork because we didn’t want fishes to feed on a popular guy who drowned. We have huge, dense cakes because some lady flew to the moon. We need glutinous balls in syrupy soup to affirm our existence as a family unit. We stuff our faces and demand money because the metaphor for Year has taken the form of an ancient, Asian bed intruder.
That aside, though, I’m beginning to grasp the shape and nuances of these festivals. We have them because family, and as an adult one of the few things I’ve come to understand more is the importance of family. This new year I was excited to meet all my relatives, even the ones I’ve just seen the day before. I was excited to have them together, happy, bright, and new. For the Chinese, the new year is everyone’s birthday — in a weird way I can appreciate that: we are celebrating the birth of each loved relative, and celebrating our 缘分 of being streams converging into the same river when we could have easily meandered over to the vast otherly oceans.
Look at me now, using nature as a literary device. Never have I felt so oriental. :’-)
This new year was also special because it was the first of which I’ve brought a boy along. You can bring countless boys home – but the real deal is the one who takes the stage on 年初一. I have to applaud J for handling the intimidating barrage of mandarin and persistent boisterous teasing well. It is sometimes overwhelming for me and I was inducted into this frenzy at birth. I can’t imagine how he survived it armed with minimal conversing prowess, but he did.
初二 初三 was devoted entirely to family visiting, meet-ups, and meals – including a brief one with the motley crew of girls I’ve come to take as my family, because I want to kill them sometimes but I know deep down that I’m stuck with them for life.
Looking into subsequent CNYs has never been easier, although in past years every constant promised by the festival was robustly delivered. But this time round I could almost conceive of myself on the giving end of ang pows eventually. It was rather morbid, but heartening all the same, to realize that every Chinese new year would feature a very subtle difference in people over the decades – because mortals grow and come and go – but that from our vantage point nothing would be broken, just the family, as always.
新年 remains an obligatory duty, yes, but undertaken with much willingness and contentedness in the knowledge that every year it would be the same streams, the same river, the same family.
Q 