As with any dying culture, the inevitable question becomes not a dispute over whether the Peranakan Chinese culture is dying (spoiler: it is) but rather whether the culture that seems to be revived authentically.
Culture is always evolving, but often there are questions as to whether to be traditionalist or take a modern approach to our culture. What gets left out of the traditional vs modern dichotomy is that it’s not all or nothing. Adherence to orthodoxy is just staleness, and to not change is to not accept, let alone embrace, the inevitable.
Policing culture, appropriating culture, cancel culture are all buzzwords flying around at the moment. Cancel culture (like PC or being woke) is just mere consequences for people who have not had to deal with consequences before. But I think the more interesting question is who should be the arbiters of what a culture is? And such a question demonstrates an even more fundamental misunderstanding of what a culture is—something living, breathing, alive.
For immigrants especially, we are forced, not entirely by our own wills, to assimilate, but we don’t necessarily want to be separate from our adopted cultures either. But what we do want is for our cultures to be respected. To not have to deal with people not from our culture profit from our culture (hello, a certain mahjong game – https://www.today.com/tmrw/mahjong-line-apologizes-after-cultural-appropriation-complaints-t205121).
Culture and heritage invites historical context, and what happens when people don’t understand this context is cultural misappropriation. The Nazi symbol is a direct inflection of ancient religious icon for prosperity, while the KKK repurposed the fiery cross of the Scottish Highlanders. And the recent show of Christianity and Confederacy symbols seems to demonstrate this goes far beyond symbols and heroes to the actual mythologising of history.
Asian cultures, and we’re certainly not alone in this, tend to have a deep respect for our elders. But am I romanticising my past? I happen to think not, because we are not a single identity. We are not even the same people over the course of a lifetime, becoming, unbecoming, learning simply how to live and how to be.
Even if I am an old soul, a romantic, a historian, these traditions and heritages are important to me because they are alive.It’s not even just a matter of whether it is worth it. There are physical and emotional ties which stretch right back to childhood, and I tend to think are also passed down the generations. I may not be born in Malaysia or Singapore even, but I can appreciate that we have our own language, cuisine and kebaya (traditional blouse worn by Nyonya).
And so it matters not to me whether the continuation of our culture is authentic or not, because that’s not what culture is supposed to be. The false sense of purity is dangerous, and all cultures, no matter where they are, find inspiration from elsewhere, and especially in a culture like the Peranakan Chinese which mixes Malay, Chinese (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese etc), Tamil, Indonesian, and even the colonial rulers of the Malay Peninsula—the British, Dutch, and Portugese. And modern clothes or food are often cheaper or less effort, which is just a change in lifestyles.
So really, the expression of culture is more about understanding the original first, the centuries-old traditions, and adapting, even taking inspiration from them. It’s a myth to think that traditions have to be done the right way and stay the same. To define culture is to exclude.
We can preserve the past in museums and the historical record, but preventing change means that cultural practices lose their imminent relevance. Modern clothes or food are often cheaper or less effort, which is just a change in lifestyles. Objects too are relevant. The moon cake boxes pictured are what we use for storing cookies and food after eating the moon cakes, in the same way my Mama used graham cracker tins for the same purpose. Do we really want to live in the past, or do we want to live our culture in the present, in whatever unique way we can, being open-minded about who we were, who we are, and who we might become.
