in-between cultures
Chinese New Year for us this year was understandably low-key, and life went on as usual although J and I did try to keep up with some of the traditions like the reunion dinner, having the kids 拜年 (bai nian) in the morning, red packets, and some festive treats. We also called home to talk to our parents and to wish them a happy new year.
Although I'm undeniably glad to be away from all the noise and fuss, I felt quite bad for my parents who are experiencing a bad case of empty nest syndrome. Their precious grandchildren are not around for them to spoil and even my sister has been away on holiday, so there was no one to eat reunion dinner with and they didn't do much on the first day of the new year, either. They're both still missing my grandmother who passed away last year so in keeping with Chinese superstition they're not doing any big celebrations for at least a year.
I sent that photo to them in the morning and I think it helped to cheer them up loads. They miss Bao most, I think, because the last time they saw her she was about seven months old and crawling, and now she's a toddler with all sorts of funny tricks and a cheeky personality. My mother does plan to come visit in April, though, and we're planning a trip back to Singapore in the summer, so that's something to look forward to.
Today in school The Bun, along with one of his classmates (who is half-Chinese), presented a short show-and-tell about Chinese New Year to the rest of the class. I sent in some pineapple tarts for everyone to try, too. He reported that they listened to a story about the festival, did some sort of artwork that involved the animals of the Chinese zodiac, and that everyone enjoyed the treats. I'm glad his teachers decided to have this small celebration in school because it reinforces the importance of the festival to him.
Being away has made me think about culture and heritage in our family and what sort of memories, traditions, and values I'm passing along to my children. Making those pineapple tarts this year highlighted it for me. As a child, I helped my mother for years and years with these tarts, resenting the fact that I had to waste hours of weekend or school holiday time to devote to this repetitive task. I never bothered to learn the recipe properly and when I did decide to make them on my own over here, I had to google for a recipe so that I could get the proportions of flour, butter, etc right. But once I actually began making them, everything fell into place. I may not have made them on my own before, but my hands still had enough experience in them to get the recipe right on the first try, because I already knew what the textures had to be like, what the pineapple jam or the dough had to feel like. It was like a family tradition lying just beneath the skin of my hands.
Leeks for reunion dinner - a must in our families.
I think that although I will never enjoy the fuss and noise and gaudiness of the festival, the older I get the more I appreciate its significance in our family. I've been wondering what will happen when the older generation eventually passes on and we don't have any elders to visit and pay our respects to. I have a feeling most of us will just get together for a meal and some red packets and skim over everything else. If this happens, this means that my children will grow up just thinking that the Chinese New Year just involves a big meal and some monetary gifts, something like a Chinese version of Christmas, sort of.
I know that I won't be like my mother and grandmother, slaving away for weeks in the kitchen to make enough cookies to sell in order to cover their expenses. If I do make those cookies, they will be for tradition's sake. My grandmother still makes these traditional cookies from scratch all by herself in her kitchen - kueh bangkit, sugee, lik tao go (green bean cookies) and more. Even her daughter, my mother, is loathe to learn these cookie recipes because they involve so much work. Having eaten them for decades, I know my sister and I take their presence for granted. Our family doesn't buy any festive cookies from the shops because we have never needed to. I am ashamed to admit that I have only just realised how lucky we have been.
The Bun can barely say 恭喜发财 ('gong xi fa cai') with the correct intonation and this makes me worry that we are raising a child with a spotty understanding of his cultural heritage. As it is he is now very resistant towards speaking Chinese or even hearing it if J and I speak it to each other. He claims he only speaks English and French, and to tell the truth, his rudimentary French is better than his Chinese. We really need to work harder with the language, and even though my own command of Chinese is poor, at least some is better than none. One step J and I can at least do is to speak Chinese to each other and to let him (and Bao) absorb it via osmosis. After all, this is how we learnt to speak and understand dialects like Hokkien and Teochew and no one ever sat us down to teach it to us.
The truth as I'm learning it is, living abroad and becoming a 'global citizen' is a double-edged sword. What you gain in your broadened experience of the world, you also lose as the person you were in the past. For adults like J and I, it is easier for us to remember traditions and to actively reconcile contrasting experiences within the overall global context. For a child like The Bun, he has already forgotten things like the names of his favourite hawker food, the neighbourhood mall across the road from our flat which we visited nearly every day, and some of the other places we used to frequent when we lived in Singapore. Tonight, while eavesdropping on J and I, he asked 'what's a papaya?' and my heart dropped for a moment. It has only been half a year since we moved.
I am not sure if I should continue to let him embrace the new life we have here; but what is the alternative? The biggest influence is no doubt, school. He's been correcting our language - 'satsumas', not 'mandarin oranges'; 'crisps', not 'potato chips' and he automatically greets strangers in French. But these are his friends and his teachers and he interacts with them more than he does with us because he's in school seven hours a day. He knows that he is Singaporean and that we used to live in Singapore and most of our family is still there, but like many kids he lives in the present moment and what he knows is simply life the way he lives it. I have conflicting emotions about all this - on one hand I feel guilty that I didn't keep up with the Chinese practice and all, but on the other hand I don't think it does us any good to be constantly harping about 'back home' when the stark reality, for the children at least, is that where we are now is, quite simply, home.
The wonderful thing about an overseas posting is the opportunity to experience a different way of life, and even though life is sometimes harder without the usual support network that you'd have at home, I never forget that it is a privilege for me to be here, and for my kids to be growing up here. Every afternoon the kids and I drive home from school and along the way we pass fields of sheep and gorgeous forests, with the Alps looming in the horizon. As mundane a drive it is, it still manages to lift my spirits because I deeply appreciate being here. I may make fun of Geneva and complain about how boring it is, but I do see the pockets of magic in it. I don't want to spend our time here continually comparing our lifestyle with Singapore's, because it's counter-productive, especially for the children.
It's a balancing act, this push-pull wobble between cultures. That's why as a family abroad it is even more important that we upkeep traditions, food, and language. We may live overseas but we will be returning to Singapore someday, and even if J and I don't need an anchor, The Bun definitely does. I'm quite inspired now to do some sort of photo project when we are back in Singapore for the summer. Visual memories of all the places, people, and things that form the wider part of his life.
Anyway, this is us at the seventh-month mark and we still have a long way to go. Let's see how things change in a year or so.
Although I'm undeniably glad to be away from all the noise and fuss, I felt quite bad for my parents who are experiencing a bad case of empty nest syndrome. Their precious grandchildren are not around for them to spoil and even my sister has been away on holiday, so there was no one to eat reunion dinner with and they didn't do much on the first day of the new year, either. They're both still missing my grandmother who passed away last year so in keeping with Chinese superstition they're not doing any big celebrations for at least a year.
I sent that photo to them in the morning and I think it helped to cheer them up loads. They miss Bao most, I think, because the last time they saw her she was about seven months old and crawling, and now she's a toddler with all sorts of funny tricks and a cheeky personality. My mother does plan to come visit in April, though, and we're planning a trip back to Singapore in the summer, so that's something to look forward to.
Today in school The Bun, along with one of his classmates (who is half-Chinese), presented a short show-and-tell about Chinese New Year to the rest of the class. I sent in some pineapple tarts for everyone to try, too. He reported that they listened to a story about the festival, did some sort of artwork that involved the animals of the Chinese zodiac, and that everyone enjoyed the treats. I'm glad his teachers decided to have this small celebration in school because it reinforces the importance of the festival to him.
Being away has made me think about culture and heritage in our family and what sort of memories, traditions, and values I'm passing along to my children. Making those pineapple tarts this year highlighted it for me. As a child, I helped my mother for years and years with these tarts, resenting the fact that I had to waste hours of weekend or school holiday time to devote to this repetitive task. I never bothered to learn the recipe properly and when I did decide to make them on my own over here, I had to google for a recipe so that I could get the proportions of flour, butter, etc right. But once I actually began making them, everything fell into place. I may not have made them on my own before, but my hands still had enough experience in them to get the recipe right on the first try, because I already knew what the textures had to be like, what the pineapple jam or the dough had to feel like. It was like a family tradition lying just beneath the skin of my hands.
Leeks for reunion dinner - a must in our families.
I think that although I will never enjoy the fuss and noise and gaudiness of the festival, the older I get the more I appreciate its significance in our family. I've been wondering what will happen when the older generation eventually passes on and we don't have any elders to visit and pay our respects to. I have a feeling most of us will just get together for a meal and some red packets and skim over everything else. If this happens, this means that my children will grow up just thinking that the Chinese New Year just involves a big meal and some monetary gifts, something like a Chinese version of Christmas, sort of.
I know that I won't be like my mother and grandmother, slaving away for weeks in the kitchen to make enough cookies to sell in order to cover their expenses. If I do make those cookies, they will be for tradition's sake. My grandmother still makes these traditional cookies from scratch all by herself in her kitchen - kueh bangkit, sugee, lik tao go (green bean cookies) and more. Even her daughter, my mother, is loathe to learn these cookie recipes because they involve so much work. Having eaten them for decades, I know my sister and I take their presence for granted. Our family doesn't buy any festive cookies from the shops because we have never needed to. I am ashamed to admit that I have only just realised how lucky we have been.
The Bun can barely say 恭喜发财 ('gong xi fa cai') with the correct intonation and this makes me worry that we are raising a child with a spotty understanding of his cultural heritage. As it is he is now very resistant towards speaking Chinese or even hearing it if J and I speak it to each other. He claims he only speaks English and French, and to tell the truth, his rudimentary French is better than his Chinese. We really need to work harder with the language, and even though my own command of Chinese is poor, at least some is better than none. One step J and I can at least do is to speak Chinese to each other and to let him (and Bao) absorb it via osmosis. After all, this is how we learnt to speak and understand dialects like Hokkien and Teochew and no one ever sat us down to teach it to us.
The truth as I'm learning it is, living abroad and becoming a 'global citizen' is a double-edged sword. What you gain in your broadened experience of the world, you also lose as the person you were in the past. For adults like J and I, it is easier for us to remember traditions and to actively reconcile contrasting experiences within the overall global context. For a child like The Bun, he has already forgotten things like the names of his favourite hawker food, the neighbourhood mall across the road from our flat which we visited nearly every day, and some of the other places we used to frequent when we lived in Singapore. Tonight, while eavesdropping on J and I, he asked 'what's a papaya?' and my heart dropped for a moment. It has only been half a year since we moved.
I am not sure if I should continue to let him embrace the new life we have here; but what is the alternative? The biggest influence is no doubt, school. He's been correcting our language - 'satsumas', not 'mandarin oranges'; 'crisps', not 'potato chips' and he automatically greets strangers in French. But these are his friends and his teachers and he interacts with them more than he does with us because he's in school seven hours a day. He knows that he is Singaporean and that we used to live in Singapore and most of our family is still there, but like many kids he lives in the present moment and what he knows is simply life the way he lives it. I have conflicting emotions about all this - on one hand I feel guilty that I didn't keep up with the Chinese practice and all, but on the other hand I don't think it does us any good to be constantly harping about 'back home' when the stark reality, for the children at least, is that where we are now is, quite simply, home.
The wonderful thing about an overseas posting is the opportunity to experience a different way of life, and even though life is sometimes harder without the usual support network that you'd have at home, I never forget that it is a privilege for me to be here, and for my kids to be growing up here. Every afternoon the kids and I drive home from school and along the way we pass fields of sheep and gorgeous forests, with the Alps looming in the horizon. As mundane a drive it is, it still manages to lift my spirits because I deeply appreciate being here. I may make fun of Geneva and complain about how boring it is, but I do see the pockets of magic in it. I don't want to spend our time here continually comparing our lifestyle with Singapore's, because it's counter-productive, especially for the children.
It's a balancing act, this push-pull wobble between cultures. That's why as a family abroad it is even more important that we upkeep traditions, food, and language. We may live overseas but we will be returning to Singapore someday, and even if J and I don't need an anchor, The Bun definitely does. I'm quite inspired now to do some sort of photo project when we are back in Singapore for the summer. Visual memories of all the places, people, and things that form the wider part of his life.
Anyway, this is us at the seventh-month mark and we still have a long way to go. Let's see how things change in a year or so.