My family is not necessarily one for traditions, but we do celebrate traditional festivals (mostly through food) as a way of keeping our culture alive while living in Australia, while also adapting and even questioning Australian ones. We celebrate Christmas and New Year, think of sacrifice on Anzac Day, think of sovereignty and mourning on Australia Day, think of animal rights on Cup Day.
The most important event in the calendar, which follows the moon cycles of the Lunar Calendar, is the Lunar New Year, or the Spring Festival. Each Asian culture celebrates Lunar New Year differently, and so too does each Peranakan Chinese family.
Traditionally, we clean the house, change the curtains, cushions, and covers, go shopping for new clothes and get a haircut before the Eve. On the Eve itself, we have a Reunion Dinner, when everyone will return to “home”, particularly for those of us who are married and moved out. Some families (though not ours, being Christian) will cook special dishes for their ancestors and burn joss sticks. Then we lay out the food on the table tok panjang and feast.
Actually, in recent conversations with my mum, I discovered a few things that we do in Australia that were not done when she was growing up in Melaka, Malaysia. For instance, many of our Malaysian friends with a Cantonese background will loh hey (toss for prosperity) the yee sang (raw fish salad). Let’s just say businesses profit from prosperity. Our Singaporean cousins now have hot pot for Reunion Dinner; our Malaysian cousins now go out to restaurants. That’s more out of necessity, because there’s no one who has enough time to be able to help out (and my Mama has probably done enough cooking and baking in her lifetime to outlast the rest of us put together!).
The Chinese New Year lasts for sixteen days, but in Australia, while we have our own Reunion Dinner with the four in my immediate family, we may go out to restaurants with friends (yum cha is a favourite), or we may be invited to some friends’ homes for lunch or dinner. In a Church community like the one I grew up in, with many Malaysian families, that feeling of having an adopted family gets stronger at this time of year.
Especially because Australia doesn’t have a public holiday for New Year, and in fact because of school dates, we generally don’t get to fly to Malaysia and Singapore. I suppose that’s one of the things about the pandemic and our realisations of the brevity of life—this year we had a family Whatsapp call, while all spread out geographically across Malaysia, Singapore and Melbourne.
Like Christmas, New Year is a time for gifts—we give out Mandarin Oranges, as the word for mandarin is kam, which sounds similar to the word for gold. In fact, traditionally on Chap Goh Meh, the 15th day of the New Year, young girls will throw the mandarins into the river to gain a husband by honouring the full moon (definitely not something my sister and I have done).
Then there are the ang pao (red packet)—red for good luck and to ward off evil spirits, given by elders to younger people or by married people to single people, for New Year but also at weddings. The amount is not what matters, but 8 is a lucky number, and 4 is not (Peranakans can be very pantang larang or superstitious). My parents usually give money to all the children in our Church community, and even the Anglo Australians will join in. But it’s an interesting debate to have—it’s not particularly nice to give ang pao to friends just because they are unmarried. My mum’s general rule is when they start full time work, then the ang pao stops. But that’s complicated when it’s a family who we are particularly close to, or when say the older sibling has started working but the younger siblings have not.
Ah, the intricacies of reality. It is a comment on the ritualism of traditions that we think that there is only one old school way of celebrating. (With the pandemic, it has become de rigueur to send money through an app, which I cannot imagine my parents ever doing.) And I should add that this practice has also been adopted by the local Indian Hindu populations of Singapore and Malaysia for Deepavali, in the way that countries with many ethnicities allow.
New Year is when we bring out the red or pink dresses, to be a little more subtle. Or we bring out the cheongsam, also known as the qipao, is a type of figure-hugging dress of Manchu origin. It is a high-necked, closefitting dress with the skirt slit part way up the side (it’s most well-known in Western culture for its use historically amongst the Shanghai socialite elite).
Nyonya women actually have a different kind of dress, however. The Nyonya kebaya is a beautiful, translucent, figure-hugging (do you see a pattern? hah) embroidered blouse worn with a batik sarong, a loose-fitting (!!) skirt with a wax-dyed pattern. But clothes, as with food, is much more than a piece of cloth. A kebaya is art, love, and heritage; a traditional costume that is timeless.
There are a host of other festivals—Lantern Festival, Qingming Festival (for non-Christians but similar to All Souls Day), Dragon Boat Festival, Hungry Ghost Festival (again with the ancestor worship and superstitions), Mid-Autumn Festival to name the ones we tend to celebrate.
Weddings and birthdays and babies have other traditions, including that of kamcheng, an elaborately-decorated, traditional Peranakan storage vase for tang yuan (sweet dumpling soup); kamcheng also means friendship.
At first glance, these festivals and the rituals that accompany them are mere traditions. But they signify something much more than that. They are an explicit way for our communities to express ourselves, to celebrate our heritage and ethnic complexity, and to return to our family roots.
