Just because I’ve done this a number of times doesn’t mean that it gets better with time. It is always hard being away from family in times of celebration.And there are no bigger celebration than the annual Chinese New Year. As much as I hate the yearly trek of traffic jams in the name of celebration, I love all the fuss really. I love scoffing down all the food in name of celebration, the laziness of the whole celebration, the yeesang and the reunion dinner that is always held at a hotel – the last time my family cooked a reunion dinner was nearly 20 years ago.

It’s not often that we (as a family – I do it all the time hee hee) go for buffets, so that once a year occasion is usually met with whooping joy even though the food is usually bad and they sometimes have lameass competitions.I miss the day-before rush to get the freshest fruits and the best meats from the wet market and the tradition of visiting ancestral gods at the ancestral village at the stroke of midnight. That is the one day in the year I feel close to my roots and what it is to be a fourth-generation malaysian chinese of the fisherman stock.The smell of burning incense, the loud incessant karaoke blasting through the village complete with mahjong tiles clucking always makes me feel like I belong, if only for a moment. Beer cans are pushed around in truckloads like a carlsberg sponsored event. The females are forced upon bottles of mineral water.And all the while, the karaoke continues blasting like crazy frog on heat.

And the next moment it is gone. I will never be able to connect with the karaoke-blasting sunflower seed-cracking people sitting around every year at the ‘community centre’ awaiting the dawn of the new year. They call each other pighead and smelly teat (not kidding) and treat me like the urbanite I am; gawking at my mannerism and my false airs. The flailing ties that connect us as the same family ( we’re all connected by surname) will end with my father being recognized as the cheeky 3-year old who ran up and down the village in his diapers ready for a game of cards. Me and my brother do not belong here, with the scary-looking ancestral gods and ruddy faced fisherman pushing beers into our hands. We belong in the Starbucks generation, but has Starbucks ever believed that we were one of them,urbanites so completely influenced by commercialization that we do not belong to the people that is part and parcel of a huge family?Of our huge family?

The first day of chinese new year will always start with a vegetarian meal and then off to my maternal grandmother’s. Now here is when it gets even more confusing. Both maternal grandparents are adopted, which makes roots tracing a bit of a problem. Am I 100% chinese? I have no idea. Am I part of another culture three generations removed? Both my grandmothers follow the tradition of the Straits Chinese of beautiful frilly kebayas and living in sarongs all day long. My childhood food is a classic representation of the Straits Chinese food of Penang. We do not only have classic chinese foods like steamed fish and double-boiled soups, we have creamy curry chicken, tamarind-flavoured curried stingray and all sorts of kuihs ( sweetcakes)

But who am I, really?

This year’s ‘reunion dinner’ included a wide spread of hotpot/steamboat assortments and a chinese white fungus desset in my attempt to grasp at the straws of my heritage.It is as chinese as I can get without blasting karaoke, but somehow, a family of two is never the same with the frustration with dealing with a family of 100.

If you are celebrating this year of the Golden Pig with family, rememeber, no matter how painful it is (when you getting married ah?When you having children ah?) or how boring (eat eat eat gamble sleep), you choose your friends, but not your family, because they are and always will be what you are made out of.

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