As we're slowly approaching the last day of Chinese New Year, and as I'm adjusting back to life back in Hong Kong without parents or GGs or a YA ministry backing, I think back over the last two months and how I feel I've changed somewhat. Not in terms of my personality or the way I look, but how I've grown to learn more about myself when I survive without my pillars of support. There are days where I feel I can't cope at all, days when I want to curl up in bed and not think, but then there are the liberating days where I feel independent walking alone in the streets with music my best friend and the shops my comfort. Shopping is constant worldwide, the feeling you get with a fantastic new buy doesn't change, thank God.
This is my twentieth Chinese New Year I believe, since I was born after Chinese New Year in 1986, and the years are just fleeting. Twenty reunion dinners, twenty years of receiving red packets, eating Chinese New Year goodies, going from house to house for two days straight, singing Chinese New Year songs and being up to mischief. There was that year when I was eight and Mark and I stole the most beautiful marbles from some random relative's posh carpeted house. Then three years later when we flung the remaining oranges into the air and watched as it smashed to the ground, spilling open with a satisfying thud. And the yearly tradition of breaking at least one umbrella, getting lost in the columbarium and finding joy in the pink coconut candy in that house along East Coast Road. My dad gets that air of nostalgia every Chinese New Year, as he drives along the road to the columbarium, taking his own sweet time, with us blasting Hillsong in the background and singing at the top of our lungs. And every year Mark and I will muse how in the next thirty years, the only place we'll have to visit every Chinese New Year would be the columbarium.
But of course things have changed, with the addition of so many new nieces and nephews now running around the big mansion at Bukit Timah, lion-dancing and playing Playstation all at the age of five and being followed around by adults desperate to get a photograph out of them. When I watch them I feel old, that used to be me not so long ago, where the adults would fawn over my cute little cheongsam or smooth pigtails. Now I'm simply watching the scene from afar, a transition phase in between, when the questions about marriage will start coming in a few more years.
I like it though, I still love the age-old tradition of Chinese New Year. For all it encompasses and means to me, and how it has evolved over the years, I look forward to the next one and I wait to see how it will change. I want many stories to tell one day to my grandchildren.
