Zuraidah Ibrahim looks back at what CNY meant for her and her family.
IT IS Chinese New Year and I am feeling nostalgic. Um yes, I know, I am Malay. This year, though, I bought kumquats and hung Chinese couplets on one wall. On New Year’s Eve, we came home late after dinner and heard the clatter of mahjong tiles. I felt strangely comforted knowing that the traditions I remember from childhood are still being practiced today.
My father is the reason I have been reminiscing about Chinese New Years past. He had Chinese friends, some of whom were rich contractors and businessmen, and others who were country bumpkins. They walked into our lives because they could hardly speak or write English and they needed father's help with writing their letters and other documents for various official or legal purposes. Some of the men were clients of the law firm at Winchester House downtown where he worked as a legal clerk. By visiting our house, they avoided Shenton Way prices.
My father would type away on his trusty Olivetti while these Chinese men hung about drinking black coffee. Most conversed in bazaar Malay but a few could speak only dialect and so they had relatives or friends in tow as translators. We would see some of them for weeks before they disappeared, never to appear in our lives again. But there were others who maintained ties with my father over the years for assorted legal wrangles. They were the ones who made Chinese New Year come alive for my siblings and me.
I remember a Mr Lee, a small, bald man with a wide smile who ran a concessions store at Roxy cinema in Katong. This was in the early 1970s. He was grateful for my father's help and visited our house every New Year, bearing oranges and packets of nuts and snacks from his store. He also gave us hongbao, causing an outburst of joy and familial feeling: my older brothers who ordinarily would not give me the time of day were suddenly brimming with offers to help me spend my newfound wealth.
Mr Lee also gave us bags of firecrackers, which my brothers would set off almost the minute he left. They were fun, but no match for the bamboo poles of firecrackers that shopkeepers in my neighbourhood showed off in the evening. Our street was called Jalan Lapang, or Clear Street, but on the eve of New Year, it was anything but that. Loud pops and crackles filled the air, kids would be out in their pajamas, some in awe, others limp with fear as they hid behind older relatives. After the ban in 1972, our street never had these shows of light and sound.
The next day, you could hear the gambling in neighbours’ houses. Our neighbour on the left celebrated Christmas and Chinese New Year with equal gusto and we would receive plates of tarts and kueh bangkit twice a year. On each occasion, my mother would be assured that they used pots and pans reserved strictly for cookies, not meats. Then, there was Baba Tan, a rich elderly Peranakan who bought kueh from my grandmother’s stall on the street outside our house and hung about with other patrons (he was the first person I heard the words 'Tuan Allah' from, except he said 'Ala', his Hokkien-trained tongue could not wrestle with the double L in the Arabic word). He would also give me hongbao, sometimes twice, because he was forgetful.
The best part of the New Year would be the visiting with my father. I remember going to the houses of two men in particular, Yam Peng and Mr Tan, somewhere in Siglap. Both were businessmen whose fortunes seesawed over the decades. Yam Peng died a few years ago, I saw in an obituary, his real fortune a large extended family that mourned him. One visit to Mr Tan’s house was memorable. His New Year gatherings were lavish and, sometime in the afternoon, a troupe of lion dancers appeared at his front gate, cymbals crashing, drums thumping. The fiery-eyed lions looked very menacing and the sounds were just too much. I ran and hid between the fridge and a cabinet counter in the kitchen. But fear gripped me all over again as I turned to look at the counter. A bowl of blackened sauce and chunks of what must have been pork stood inches away. So deeply ingrained - even at that young age - was my aversion to pork, I felt sure I was going to faint. But children are resilient, and soon I was back playing, tucking into loveletters and, I left patting my pocket full of hongbao. The horror of leaping lions and stewed pork was forgotten.
My father embodied what it meant to be colour blind. He had friends from all stations in life and all races. His friends took him for what he was and he, them. Questions of religion did not quite enter the picture and even if they did, they were elided with grace or accepted with commonsense. Some cynics say the reason the older generation was more accepting of difference was because people were not very particular then about their religious practices. You could take the easy way out and blame that, or you could try. Yet, I recall that Muslims were strict about their food even then. At Mr Tan’s, a Muslim cook brought in the Muslim meals, with minimum fuss.
Perhaps it was easier for my father’s generation to forge friendships across racial lines because class distinctions were less apparent. People lived in more mixed housing. The street I grew up in had bungalows as well as kampong houses. The kampong we moved into later had bungalows and even a tiny block of low-rise flats. The middle and upper classes were not ensconced in their private enclaves. They had to go out beyond their charmed circle often enough for daily interactions and for business.
Back then, you never knew who you could end up being friends with.
