It’s a totally different feeling in a different country when I ushered in 2017. The last New Year ushered me in to Taiwan, where I have been living for the last one year. My adventures brought me to a place where I could discover my roots as a Peranakan (Straits Settlement Chinese), not knowing any ancestral Chinese practices prior to 5 generations ago. My great great grandpa had immigrated to Malaya (What Malaysia was prior to 1963 when we combined Sabah & Sarawak to form Malaysia) from Fujian (Hokkien, a province in China) in the 1800’s, sent my great grandpa, Peter Lim Teow Chong to Penang Free School where he also became the school captain, and onward to Kuala Lumpur with historical records of him being the first court interpreter in 1901.
I started an intensive Mandarin course that intensified not only my language capability but my own understanding of a culture that was not quite there for me not knowing why things are done in ways that couldn’t be explained by my Western influenced late dad, neither could it be articulated by my late mom for she was always busy making food or going out to play mahjong with her friends. Questions like why do we celebrate Chinese New Year or why do we have to have specific kinds of foods served during then or why do we do things this way and not that way, never really had an answer because the customs and practices were handed down by parents and grandparents and their parents who were educated and taught in English. The culture began to unfold itself from what’s ingrained in the Chinese characters as I will be finishing my 3rd term after Chinese New Year.
Grabbing my monopod (because I left my tripod in Malaysia), a chair and thermal mug of hot chocolate, my housemate and I went up Xiangshan ?? to the lookout platform and made our way through the enthusiastic crowd who had already gathered an hour before to find a place to park till countdown.
Sorry for the vibrations as I had to jostle with the crowd to get that window of opportunity to capture this. Hope you had a great start to the New Year!
