Random Thoughts on Chinese New Year 2008
It's the Year of the Golden Rat - so I'm told by the many text messages wishing me Gong Xi Fa Chai which I received at about midnight last night. It's been a very quiet new year so far; Leonard, Erin & Yew Yen couldn't come back this year because he couldn't take time away from work, which sucked. Last night, we had our reunion dinner at a little cafe in PJ New Town, just my mom, Amy and me. Didn't feel the same; last year we had all the family around, including Kung & Poh, at the reunion dinner. Kung was always the first person to give me an angpow - so that I could spend it earlier, he said. I don't know of any person who loved giving away money as much as he did.
I don't know whether it's age, or just a sign of our times where traditions get watered down as we go along, but I remember CNY being a bigger deal when I was younger. I remember my grandma making her pineapple tarts weeks before CNY. It was a very time consuming affair - she made her own pineapple jam for the tarts by scrapping the pineapple flesh by hand and then cooking the shredded pineapple in a huge copper wok over a slow fire. I miss the smell of cooked pineapple jam wafting through the kitchen warmed up by an oven full of freshly baked tarts. No matter how many she made, grandma never seemed to make enough tarts....as soon as they came out of the over, they would quickly disappear into Leonard's mouth. Because of this, she had to hide some tins of tarts away from the resident cookie monster's sight, so that we had some left to offer to guests who visited us during CNY.
Maybe the CNY of my childhood seemed more special because I was younger & less jaded, perhaps it felt more special because there were some goodies which my grandma made only during CNY. Besides her tarts, grandma also made sun dried agar agar, which she sunned for about a week before CNY, hardening the sweet translucent jelly into an almost crunchy consistency. The highlight of the reunion dinner was a duck stew - "ta lo ngap". I've never found anything like it served in restaurants & it's one of my biggest regrets that I never took the recipe down from grandma before she became senile.
One particular CNY reunion dinner stands out in memory. My grandpa had a friend who lived a few doors away from us, an old World War 2 veteran Anglophile gentlemen named Yusuf. We invited Yusuf over for CNY dinner because he was alone. We made sure there were some chicken dishes at the table and placed the chicken dish in front of Yusuf & the pork dishes away from him at the far end of the table. Before the dinner started, we told Yusuf abbecaout the different dishes on the table but once we started, Yusuf stood up & reached over to the pork dish at the end of the table. How do you tell a 78 year old man he shouldn't have that dish? After dinner, Yusuf asked my dad if he minded if he had some brandy? It was hard not to oblige the old boy who spoke fondly of a time where things were more liberal & less superficial.
Speaking of superficial....don't have to be psychic to predict what tomorrow's news headlines will be. Smiling pictures of the PM with the MCA president tossing yee sang or painting a dragon head's eye with some schmaltzy we-love-each-other-muhibbah caption. What bollocks. How little does it take for us to be told that if we don't like it we can go back to China / India and that we're second class citizens?
Another random thought.....traffic was fantastic today, the roads were pleasantly empty, more so than a Sunday. Amy & I went to SS2 just to park in front of the Savemart supermarket just because we could. So siau, but it was fun.
