Nine Days
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Nine Days
Nine days, nine days of nothingness awaits me from this point henceforth. Everybody loves a good long holiday without an apparent reason at all. You see, most students in Singapore are going to tell you that their Chinese New Year holidays are going to begin next week, with Wednesday being the last day of school and everybody going home with golden coins in their red packets given out by the teachers, which really are just nasty subpar chocolates wrapped in a golden foil to make it look extra delicious. Chinese New Year is when all the bad food get snapped out at various departmental stalls, simply because it is an important period of time in the lunar calendar, and everybody cannot care less about the quality of their food, so long as they have them in their homes. Everybody queues up for those "Ba Kua", but I have never been a fan of those dried up pork that oozes thick pig lard whenever I look upon them. Neither am I a particular fan of mandarin oranges, they just don't look and taste very appealing to me. What appeals to me in this special period of time is the money, and I am sure that is the case for a lot of people around the world - the Chinese, anyway.
Nine days, nine days of nothingness awaits me from this point henceforth. Everybody loves a good long holiday without an apparent reason at all. You see, most students in Singapore are going to tell you that their Chinese New Year holidays are going to begin next week, with Wednesday being the last day of school and everybody going home with golden coins in their red packets given out by the teachers, which really are just nasty subpar chocolates wrapped in a golden foil to make it look extra delicious. Chinese New Year is when all the bad food get snapped out at various departmental stalls, simply because it is an important period of time in the lunar calendar, and everybody cannot care less about the quality of their food, so long as they have them in their homes. Everybody queues up for those "Ba Kua", but I have never been a fan of those dried up pork that oozes thick pig lard whenever I look upon them. Neither am I a particular fan of mandarin oranges, they just don't look and taste very appealing to me. What appeals to me in this special period of time is the money, and I am sure that is the case for a lot of people around the world - the Chinese, anyway.
As a sort of tradition, my family doesn't actually indulge ourselves in the whole spirit of the new year, taking the subtle route and just spending time with each other for the most part. It's not that we think of the popular tradition as being silly, but rather we do not think there to be such a need. Our relatives are all in Taiwan, none of them are in Singapore, or within any driving distances. I don't get to see the relatives, which also means that I won't need to visit them during Chinese New Year, like all my friends would with their own relatives living just a few minutes away from each other. It can be a good and a bad thing, considering how pretentious and condescending relatives can get in times like these. Those overt questioning and undisguised head-to-toe-to-head appraisals. They stifle not only my breath but my sanity as well, and I more than welcome the fact that I am going to do nothing for the next nine days or so. I don't need to be dressed nicely to meet up with relatives, no need to be courteous or friendly to any of them, and I get my red packets mailed to me from across the South China Sea. I guess it is just fair trade, with myself not seeing there pretentious smiles and them not seeing my black face.
The only thing closest to a family reunion the family has with the rest of the relatives would be those gatherings at my uncle's house every once in a while, especially when my family is in Taiwan. My uncle is a very rich man, owning one in ten petrol stations in Taiwan and lives on top of one of them in Taipei. Oil is a lucrative business, and the family has been at it - including my father - ever since my grandfather started the business. My father used to tell me how he used to spend the majority of his teenage years carrying oil barrels from trucks and into the warehouses, which became a contradictory statement against how he used to date a lot of girls before my mother came along. But anyway, that uncle, who is my father's eldest brother, has probably the grandest of everything on my father's side of the family. His three million dollar car is always parked out in the driveway, and the windows were specially darkened and made to be bulletproof, a sign of a man's importance and wealth I suppose. The whole family would be mustered to his place, everyone from the oldest smokers to the youngest rascals.
His house resides above a petrol station, and next to three giant oil tanks that are taller than the entire building itself. My grandmother, along with his own family, lives on top and beside a time bomb, but they are more like tanks of liquified money to him. The first floor is the petrol station, and the second floor is the office to run the business. The fourth floor is where my grandmother and my cousin lives, while my uncle himself lives on the third floor in his lavish and expensive looking home. Wood and gold are the basic choices of decoration in the house, expensive upholstery and those grotesque looking decoration all about the house. Sitting in the middle of the living room never fails to give me an intimidating feeling, and perhaps somewhat discomforted as well. His home is a typical home of a typical rich man, but it feels more like a hotel room rather than a home, one that is without warmth and life - the life that probably went to his everlasting battle for more money and his own failing health.
So in a house like that on what is the closest to a Chinese New Year reunion, the level of discomfort becomes amplified all of a sudden. We have loud and obnoxious relatives in one room talking about how much they won in the recent mahjong game, or probably talking about politics and other topics not worth for anybody sane enough to sit through. Then there are the smokers, who would be gathered in their small little corners out in the balcony and engaged in their own private conversations like smokers do all around the world. Though, the word 'balcony' really is quite an understatement, considering the fact that it is probably bigger than my house in Singapore, and that is saying a lot. It's more like a front lawn that is on the third floor of the petrol station, with a koi pond in the corner and a basketball hoop mounted up.
This is one of the few places I would take refuge while the relatives barked away with half their dinner still rolling about in their mouths, just taking my time to take in the scenery and the smell of the city. Nobody ever really uses the basketball hoop, judging from the deflated balls thrown in old dirty buckets in the corner of the balcony, not to mention the fact that the hoop still has a perfect netting - a frequently used hoop never has a net to boot. If the weather is good enough, I'd just sit by the stone table next to the koi pond and look up at the hills just on the other side of the road, stretching up into the skies and beyond. The sight of the cars and people down below never seizes to amaze me, and it's just a really great getaway amidst a really awkward case of a family reunion.
Then there is that room upstairs with the drum set, that is where I would go every once in a while to play drums with my fingers, though I hardly have the ability to coordinate my limbs in a proper fashion. I think the fifth floor of the house is used mostly for mahjong or other gambling purposes within the family, and the drum set just exists there for reasons unknown to me. Nonetheless, that is where I would disappear to at times, just banging away all by myself without the disturbance of anybody else at all. There is an empty fridge upstairs and right next to the drum set, and the room has no windows and no proper lighting whatsoever, which gives it a very rustic and rather creepy feel at times, especially if you are up there alone. But I guess being alone and a little freaked out is infinitely better than being downstairs with the rest of the gang that so happens to share the same last name as me. I mean seriously, other than the name, I don't see myself resembling anybody down there, save for my own parents and maybe my sister, who seems to be able to get along with the younger relatives pretty well. She loves my younger cousin, whom she deems to look like VJ Utt from MTV.
My parents tried, they really did. It's not like they really like to be mixing around with the relatives either, but it always seems as if we should be doing so. I never conformed to their constant pleas, and they have given up trying to persuade me over the years. When being asked where I was during one of those reunions, my parents would point to the guest room where the television and guitar is. Sometimes I'd be hammering around on the keyboard as well, making out imaginary pieces and pretending to be this great pianist that I am obviously not. I appear at the reunion to say hello, and then reappear again a few hours later to say goodbye, and most of them should be glad that I bother to say those things to them at all. I like Chinese New Year in Singapore for that reason, because I don't have to be running away from anything, or anybody at all. I just have to be myself for the full nine days, and everything is going to go back to normal right afterwards.
Not a lot of plans personally for the next couple of days, but I am certain that my friends are going to be busy visiting people, or inviting others to their homes. After a lot of bad experiences with visiting the homes of my friends, I am not even sure if that is going to happen anymore. To be honest, there is an inertia in me to even move very much for the next nine days, and the movies I had at home on my iMac is certainly more attractive, if not a more sensible thing to do. There is still one twenty-one year old out there who prefers a quiet time to himself on festive seasons, and that twenty-one year old is yours truly. I do not think the festive season is silly though, not anymore. I think it is pretty cool that the Chinese around the world are still upholding this tradition in their own unique ways, with a time and good reason to show warmth to the people that we never actually cared too much about. I just saw a piece of news on the Taiwanese news channel, about how various charity organizations have been organizing an early reunion dinner for those beggars and old people living alone in the cities, and I think that it really is a beautiful thing to do, at least better than facing up to relatives that we are not very fond of.
I hope when I am fifty, I am not going to end up like Rosemary, losing sight of who I am and where I came from. Even if I manage to get myself the American Express card, I wouldn't want to turn into someone who disses the Chinese culture on a daily basis, as if she doesn't have a yellow skin herself and came from the womb of a Chinese woman. Rosemary made a comment about how silly it is to celebrate Chinese New Year, and how Christmas makes way more sense and everything. Which just proves my point about her being ethnically confused, not appreciating where she came from and where she is right now. She probably doesn't have any forms of reflective surfaces at home to remind her of her Chinese heritage, and she thinks that Christmas trees are more sensible than Chinese New Year decor around the house. She likes turkey, but finds the taste of Ba Gua to be repulsive, which further proves that she is one old and warped bitch.
If she grows old to be one of those old people living alone, I hope charity organizations kick her fat ass out of their venues, and then feed her to the stray dogs out there in the streets. In the mean time, the lot of us have nine days to fully appreciate and treasure our times together with our families, even if there are some families out there like mine, who prefer to have our own mini gatherings amongst ourselves and away from the rest of the world. I guess even in a small crowd, we can still gather a lot of warmth and that fuzzy feeling of a festive season. Too bad they don't allow firecrackers in Singapore, or else Rosemary might find a few sticking out of her fat ass on the morning of the Chinese New Year, that I can guarantee.
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on Saturday, February 02, 2008 at 12:42 PM.
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