gone are the days when my family and I would travel back to taiping to celebrate chinese new year. okay… i look malay but don’t forget that i am half chinese. looking back at the years that has came and gone, i notice that year after year the traditions of the past have weathered away. i mean, take hari raya for instance, i long for the days when we used to spend 3 hours in the car with the boot full of luggage heading towards pusing. where we used to stay in this wooden rumah kampung behind the mosque. i miss feeling afraid to walk down the dark corridors on the second floor of the house in the middle of the night to find my way to the toilet..( which was downstairs ) …. a few years ago i could easily step in to the house, and feel at home even though to some people who live in the city, the kampung house may seem to be abit run down, with the old school toilets which had rough cement flooring, and the giant “pool’ sort of thing to keep water in for bathing purposes. i guess after all the years of living in the city, we are get too used to the modern amenities we have here, that when we do go back to something old , somethign that we were used to using before these, we feel out of place.
anyway, this chinese new year isn’t much different from the hari raya that has just past recently. since my grandmother has shifted from Taiping to somewhere around here. i don’t really have a ‘kampung’ to go back to. my family however, still had a reunion dinner amongst ourselves at home. just my imediate family members and my brother in-law. dinner was good, we had a steamboat , salted chicken, roasted duck…etc. but that was about it. my parents left for a holiday in langkawi, and well i’m left home alone.. so i just spent my days hanging around, sleeping at the wrong times of the day, trying not to think so much of the problems that i’m facing.
but on the bright side, my friends are back from overseas for Chinese New Year , which is great i suppose. spent my nights gambling till the wee hours of morning, then heading back for a game or four of dota then finally falling asleep at 4 to 5 pm.
hope things do turn out better soon.
