Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

This piece was published in the Straits Times on 18 January 2004:

18 January 2004
Distant Reflections on Reunion
by Colin Goh in New York

If there’s one piece of Chinese poetry we English-ed folks can recite, it’s Li Bai’s “Jing Ye Shi” (Quiet Night Thoughts), mainly because we were forced to memorize it in school.  Yes, it’s the one with the guy on his bed, looking at the moon and thinking of home.

It’s also the one poem I recall when I’m thinking of Singapore, which annoys me because that’s such a clichéd thing to do.

I blame this Pavlovian response on my years of rote learning in school, which are incidentally also responsible for “Semoga Bahagia” (Zubir Said’s Children’s Day song, whose lyrics every non-Malay student can rattle off without knowing what on earth they mean) running through my brain every damn time I see a kid’s choir.

Anyway, I miss Singapore most when I’m stuck overseas during Chinese New Year, which has been the case for 9 out of the last 13 years, including this one.

I’m not exactly sure why. Chinese New Year for me has always been a mundane affair. Clean house, kowtow for money, eat, sleep, play mah-jong, watch a movie (usually Hong Kong or Bollywood), eat again, then sleep again, usually in that order.  And frankly, that pretty much describes my average week now.

I also see my family often enough throughout the year that we can’t really say we’re ‘re-uniting’, which makes reunion dinners more ceasefire than celebration.

And I can’t really say I miss getting ang paos, since my poor mah-jong skills usually ensured I never got to enjoy their benefit anyway. And now that I’m married and have to give the darned things, my reaction to potential ang pao-giving situations is like Neo’s slow-mo bullet dodging in “The Matrix”.

I also can’t say I really miss the festivities. While I always try to attend the Chinatown bazaar, the crowds, heat and general tackiness never fail to make me question why I bothered in the first place.

I guess maybe I miss the food.  Here in New York, the New Year munchies are mostly mainland Chinese, which means a lot of candied fruit and radioactive-looking sweets.  The lap cheong, nian gao and especially bak kua (marketed here as “Malaysian beef jerky”) are pale shadows of those from home.

I probably miss Nyonya new year cookies the most – kueh bangket, kueh bolu, cashew nut cookies, and of course, pineapple tarts, especially my mother’s. How strange, at Chinese New Year, to miss Malay flavours most. I once got her to ship a batch of tarts over, only to receive tubs of pineapple jam balls floating in a sea of buttery powder.  This did not make them any less delectable – it was just weird eating them with a spoon.

So really, it’s illogical for me to feel homesick around Chinese New Year.  I can always Fedex the food, while I’m spared the ang paos, the exchange of insincerities, and especially having to listen to the ubiquitous CT Girls belt out execrable festive ditties like “Xin Nian So Crazy”.  Some might even envy me.

But miss Chinese New Year in Singapore I do, and the weird thing is, I even miss the things I used to find irritating.  Maybe it’s because I see Chinese New Year being celebrated here in America too, but in such an unfamiliar way.  It’s like hearing an old song played in a different key.  Still recognizable, but dissonant nonetheless.

This is no doubt part of the strangeness of coming of age in the global economy, where the crosswinds of trade increasingly force people to seek their fortunes in places they’d never contemplated.

In the process, we cling to, or even sometimes attempt to replicate, bits of our past in order to cement some sense of self as a buffer against the fast-changing environments.

And that’s probably why being labelled ‘quitters’ upset so many overseas Singaporeans.  It implied that our departure was an easy process, when really, any dislocation involves some measure of wrenching.  In touching down on new vistas, we not only have to deal with the excitement of the new, but also with the sadness at the passing of old, familiar things, annoying or difficult though they might have been. Because for a time, they defined us.

We can’t help it. It’s like recalling the lines of an old poem we were forced to memorise.

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