Tuesday, February 28, 2006

REVIEW: Brokeback Mountain

I went into the theatre 2 days after Brokeback Mountain made a clean sweep (or almost) at the BAFTA, picking up accolades for Best Picture, Direction and an acting award for Jake Gyllenhaal. The BAFTA affirms the rave reviews it has received since it opened to an enthusiastic American audience in December (NY/LA) / January and signals a similar triumph at the Academy Awards come March 6.

Critics and moviegoers alike hail this controversial tale of gay love in an era where homosexual relationships are persecuted with no recourse as anything from “the love story of the year” to “a cinematic landmark”, resulting in Golden Globes for both the film and its director, Ang Lee.

Well, I can’t exactly say I am one of them.

Perhaps, the mountain heaps of critical acclaim, public applause and industrial accolades have raised my expectations too high and as always, the higher you go, the harder you fall. I find the story extremely ordinary. It fails to move me until the final few minutes of the film; when I begin to feel something stir in the depths of my heart, it’s all over.

The leads, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, are only two of the thousands of homosexual individuals in this world, even back in the dark age of the 60s, who engage in similar dangerous liaisons, some more courageously than others. It is merely putting onto the big screen something that we all know. A few times throughout the movie, I find myself saying, “Enough already, we all know that. Let’s move on.”

That said, Brokeback does raise an issue, as deliberated in author Annie Proulx’s short story, upon which the film’s screenplay is adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, that people who are thrust into a position of sexual disorientation, either by birth or circumstance, reserve the right to humanly feelings. That includes love. It is an issue that the most conservative of us still refuse to acknowledge today so at its best, Brokeback Mountain can cause hairline cracks in long-standing prejudice against homosexuality.

The film also lives up to its genre as an epic western. Abundantly featured are sweeping shots of expansive prairie land and rugged mountains under clear blue skies, summoning a feeling of intense loneliness and longing, a prelude to the story that follows.

The scenery is certainly awesome on the big screen but alas, the story trudges along a bit too slowly, as if to let the audience take in the picturesque country as they would on a holiday and witness a robbery of the freedom to love in extended moments of solitude in a dark theatre. The one redemption to this film for me is some great performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as the ill-fated gay lovers and Michelle Williams as Alma, the estranged wife who discovers her husband’s sexual orientation too late to live in humiliation forever.

Alma has been engaged to Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) even before he meets Gyllenhaal’s character, Jack Twist, in a herding assignment out in Wyoming’s Brokeback Mountain. Up on the lonely slopes, Ennis rediscovers himself. Ennis is a taciturn man, who speaks with a drawl that hinges on incomprehensibility, either by nature or in a bid to suppress his true sexual identity after witnessing the torture and mutilation of a queer. Jack is quite the opposite. An aspiring rodeo rider, Jack is an exuberant youth, unafraid and totally frank about his sexual orientation, at least to Ennis. Jack seduces Ennis, drawing him into a tragic romance that spans 20 years.

They are prematurely recalled from the mountains due to a brewing storm, probably just an excuse of the owner who glimpses the boys’ travails as he delivers news of Jack’s ailing uncle. That explains the increasing number of coyote attacks on the herd, clearly due to the absence of the shepherd who is babysitting his new lover rather than sheep. Ennis goes on to marry Alma and fathers 2 daughters in Riverton, Wyoming while Jack settles in Texas with rodeo queen, Lureen (Anne Hathaway), the daughter of a wealthy farm equipment dealer, and promptly takes charge of the family business.

The memory of Brokeback Mountain lingers on for both men. Jack’s postcard arrives unexpectedly one day. Alma questions her husband, to which Ennis replies that Jack is his longtime fishing buddy, a lie that will quickly come to light with Jack’s arrival.

The passionate embrace shared by Ennis and Jack below their apartment stumps Alma, reeling her into the chasm of humiliation. Quietly, she examines Ennis’ fishing kit upon his return from a weekend with Jack and finds no trace of a consummated fishing trip. No surprise.

For several years, Jack and Ennis meet in the wilderness of Brokeback Mountain. If Lureen never discovers the truth, she is certainly displeased with Jack’s frequent 10-hour drive north. Ennis and Alma drift apart, a divorce is inevitable. An ecstatic Jack arrives at Ennis’ door the instant he receives news of the divorce, with hopes of a new life with Ennis at a ranch he plans to buy. Ennis, always the more reserved of the pair, rejects the idea. Infuriated, Jack heads back south, their regular rendezvous at Brokeback Mountain ceases in the aftermath.

The years roll by. Ennis meets a new woman whom he is unable to accept for fear of inflicting the same hurt on her as he did Alma. Jack, on the other hand, begins sexual pilgrimages to Mexico to fill the void that Ennis leaves behind. The couple meets again at Brokeback Mountain as thirty-somethings, Jack sporting a moustache and beer belly, a somewhat ridiculous and clearly unsuccessful attempt at adding 15 years to Gyllenhaal’s own 24. Ledger’s aging makeup is more convincing, with graying sideburns, a weathered countenance and if I heard correctly, a voice more gruff than young Ennis’. With his face always in the shadow of his cowboy hat, it is hard to tell.

Jack has not given up on his dream of a new life with Ennis. But after all that he has been through, Ennis is resigned to his fate – perpetual estrangement from the love of his life. That would be the last time he sees Jack, who dies at age 39 in an unwitnessed accident back in Texas, drowned in his own blood … or is it an accident after all?

Here is the sad part, the part where I feel my heartstrings tug a little. The only way to dissolve a homosexual relationship is by the death of one of the partners who brings the deadly secret to his grave while the living partner mourns. It is also apt that Jack should be the one passing, for tight-lipped Ennis will never ever tell, the final scene a symbolic closing of the closet door where Jack’s shirt, worn on Brokeback in their happier days as young ranch hands, now resides – the closet affair that must never see the light of day.

I love Heath Ledger as the quietly suffering Ennis del Mar. Here, the Australian actor demonstrates acute empathy for closet lovers living in 1960s America, when much of the country’s sociopolitical landscape is marred by bigotry. In a long time coming, Ledger, who has always been cast in roles that belie his potential, finally proves himself as an actor to be reckoned with, his outstanding performance as Ennis duly recognized by the Academy with a Best Actor nomination.

Jake Gyllenhaal who already bags a Best Supporting Actor BAFTA for his role as Jack Twist, is a tad bit pale in comparison to Ledger’s strong characterization of Ennis. Nevertheless, his wide-eyed exuberance and sheepish grin brilliantly personifies Jack Twist, whose waghalsig, devil-may-care approach to homosexual relationships (and Ennis) in an age that forbids it breeds dire consequences.

Michelle Williams, who is incidentally Ledger’s fiancée, puts on an amazing performance as Alma, a stereotypical woman of the 60s in small mid-western towns who suffers the cruel blows that life deals her in silence. No one can forget her stunned revelation at Ennis’ passionate welcome of his “fishing buddy”.

The trio is indeed the saving grace of this over-stretched drama.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

The Happy Place

My best friends will know that I affectionately refer to the hypermarket Carrefour as The Happy Place. Simply because my spirits get mystically lifted everytime I step foot in there.

I am one that craves space, an incorrigible claustrophobic. Plus the multitude of merchandise that come under those two floors of well-spaced racks means I can spend hours there without a single second of boredom.

Enough to kill all blues. Enough to make peace with myself, to purge all inequities I feel about life outside this cheery kingdom, to simply shop and chatter away with family and close friends. When all other places fail to incite unanimous agreement for a rendezvous, there's always The Happy Place.

Many years ago, we would receive word from one friend or another updating everyone on our chum's BGR because he/she had been spotted at The Happy Place cozying up to the significant other. It's not just one odd couple but many of my dating friends seem to pick The Happy Place as their dating ground. And aptly so, it being the Happy Place, only it's not so advisable if one hopes to keep the BGR under wraps because EVERYONE, dating or single, is on the prowl there like a pack of hungry hyenas!

So yesterday, two friends bumped into each other again after more than a year of disconnect, at The Newer Happy Place down at Plaza Singapura. SS was busy shuttling the skies while I was preoccupied with trying to stay grounded. Welcome home, SS. We have lots to catch up on. But it was delightful seeing you again at The Happy Place ... where else.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

REVIEW: The Constant Gardener

Finally! The Constant Gardener hits local cinemas almost half a year after it opened in the United States. Even Malaysia released it 3 months ago. What is the cause of delay? Is it the guileless exposé of postcolonial high-level corruption or the blatant stab at modern capitalism that entail a closer scrutiny from the axe-wielding censors? Whatever it is, I am glad the movie finally makes its way to our shores. Perhaps we have the Awards to thank, for bestowing a Golden Globe on Rachel Weisz even before her nomination for the Oscar was announced. The movie itself is up for 4 Oscars and receives a whopping 10 BAFTA nods!

The Constant Gardener is no chintzy prate. Very clearly, this is a message-ridden masterpiece. To Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, whose own country is nonetheless an underprivileged cousin of one of today’s political superpowers, The Constant Gardener probably echoes his own views on the cruel exploitation of third world countries, in this instance, Kenya in Africa. Bringing on board Jeffrey Caine for screenplay, Mereilles picks up the John Le Carré book and gives it a voice in the medium he knows best – poignant, albeit fragmented but very effective, documentary-style story-telling with stunning cinematography and some truly outstanding acting.

I was first attracted to The Constant Gardener for 2 reasons – Ralph Fiennes and the magnificent African landscape. Then came the story. John Le Carré writes deeply intellectual fact-founded fiction that lacks the mass appeal that is necessary for the message within to propagate. For this purpose, The Constant Gardener, the movie, is the vehicle. It is a timely release, too, in an age when pharmaceutical companies come under fire for introducing inadequately-tested drugs, the most notable of which is the Vioxx saga in 2004.

The Constant Gardener delves deeply into the essence of humanity, pulsating with righteous preach lines in the voice of impassioned activist Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz) for the people of the Kenyan slums. It is also a story of unconditional love and mutual respect that comes with the genteel character of Ralph Fiennes’, Justin Quayle, an English diplomat who works his hands at his quaint garden so he can keep them off the life of his lovely wife. Sad to say though, his hands-off policy gives Tessa the diplomatic passport to places that would eventually bring her damnation. Justin’s hands-on approach in the aftermath of her death, in turn, triggers a plethora of intriguing discoveries that send him racing across Europe and Africa, turning over unsolicited rocks and gardening for the ugly truth.

Perhaps it’s the essence of an archetypal political thriller, or perhaps it parallels the elusiveness of real world high-level conspiracies, Meirelles’ fragmented narrative style seems to be the best way to tell this twisted tale of government malfeasance and the moral quagmire that arises when corporate greed supersedes the value of humanity. The story telling comes in diverse layers, alternating between the past and the present in a series of flashbacks which explain why things happen and to pick up where a crucial narrative gets interrupted. This, coupled with hand-held, fast and frantic shots plus razor-sharp editing, create a sense of beleaguered logic as we watch the events unfold through the eyes of confused Justin Quayle. Justin is such a heart-wrenching sight to watch, simultaneously crumbling under his grief and upholding the very noble and very dangerous secret causes of his murdered wife that the director slowly lets on.

The film begins mysteriously with the ecstatic chatters of a woman as the opening credits roll. As the images kick in, we see an exchange of longing goodbyes by a loving couple, the Quayles. She says, “Bye bye, sweetheart” … He hesitantly replies, “See you … in a couple of days”. And then Justin receives news that Tessa has fallen victim to a fatal bandit attack.

In a stark comparison with Meirelles’ earlier internationally-acclaimed work, City of God, this film is violence without the blood and gore. At the morgue, Justin’s superior, Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston), the Head of the British High Commission, leans over the sink, puking at the sight of the mutilated body of Tessa Quayle. The eyes that remain fixed on the nauseating remains of Tessa are Justin’s alone.

Is this lack of visibility of the apparent violence an insinuation of what is happening in the world today, as will be appropriated in the film as the story progresses? Is this the ‘bloodless’ violence of profit-taking and blood-sucking corruption in the very places where the ailing public pins its hopes on? Is this the ‘goreless’ violence in which the lives of the poor and the destitute don’t count, where cover-ups of their gory deaths as guinea pigs are rampant and immaterial in the thick of material pursuits?

There are answers that Justin seeks, especially when Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Kounde), a local doctor with whom Tessa works closely, goes missing. This is where Justin gets a little side-tracked. How can he not, when he had accidentally retrieved an email message addressed to Tessa that read, “What were you and Arnold doing in the Nairobi Hilton Friday night? Does Justin know?” Even before he solves this mystery, another letter that points to Tessa’s infidelity turns up. It is a note from Sandy Woodrow, who, among words of affection, mentions a report and an incriminating letter that must be returned immediately.

Justin starts digging. Dypraxa, the ‘wonder’ drug for tuberculosis (TB) developed by Canadian pharmaceutical giant KDH and distributed locally by Three Bees, which also provides free AIDS drugs and TB testing to the Kenyan slums. It sounds like a genuine philanthropic effort and corporate citizenship on the part of the drug companies, or are they using these programmes to mask the testing of other drugs? Lab tests would have cost millions and considerable delays with opportunity costs that run into billions of dollars. Human trial and error cost much less, and furthermore, these lives are worthless anyway.

Justin’s transformation from a quiet diplomat who is detached from issues to one who pursues the truth with astounding fervour does not escape the eyes of his superiors. He suddenly finds his diplomatic passport confiscated. Woodrow tries to convince him that Tessa’s death is nothing more than an unfortunate robbery gone awry. Sir Bernard Pellegrin (Bill Nighy) who heads the Foreign Office back in London, wants him to return to Kenya, resume his diplomatic post and stop the senseless questioning of his wife’s accidental death.

Justin’s incessant probing turns up more truths about the wife that he never really knew. Tessa did not have an affair with Arnold because he was gay. However, she had never really loved him. She had ‘cold-bloodedly led him on’ for her own mission. She had used herself to get into Africa and into places where she would otherwise be shut out of had she not been the spouse of a diplomat, just as she had no qualms about offering herself to the lustful Woodrow in exchange of the top secret letter.

Tessa is a beguiling, unforgettable character; her presence is ubiquitous despite having only appeared in the first half of the movie. While I am trying to decide if I should admire her valiant pursuit of human rights for the African people or detest her conniving ways of achieving these motives, it is clear that Justin’s love for her is unwavering. The scene where he breaks down at Tessa’s house is heart-breaking. When he sternly forbids concrete from being poured into her grave because “it is Tessa’s wish to be buried in African soil”, I thought, for someone who never really loved this man here, Tessa is one hell of a lucky woman.

Needless to say, Justin stops at nothing until he gets to the bottom of Tessa’s murder. Not when he is brutally beaten up in his hotel room in Germany, not when he is fleeing the marauding horsemen of a Sudanese tribe, not when every face around him seems to have a hidden agenda, every car seems to be hot on his trail, every friend could turn around and be the foe. When he finally puts all the evidence in a package that he entrusts to the UN aid pilot to mail to Tessa’s cousin, the one person he trusts to bring to light one of the darkest conspiracies involving the British and Kenyan governments and well-respected corporations, Justin has Tessa on his mind. He asks the pilot to fly him to Lake Tenaka, where Tessa had been headed. In a gripping final scene, Justin speaks constantly to Tessa in the land of nothingness, as though to the end of time.

Somewhere, far away in London, the truth comes to light.

And I dig it. Really, really dig it.

Monday, February 13, 2006

BOOKS: The Imagineering Way

I spent a fruitful Chap Goh Meh reading 'The Imagineering Way' by The Imagineers. I'm still on it but I feel such an inspired rush to share some of what I've read, which I think could be the guiding light of many in pursuing their dreams. Oh, for those who are still in the dark, The Imagineers are the mysterious creative team behind Disney theme parks across the world, the ones who build the worlds they live in in ours so we could be Peter Pan and Wendy once more.

I am such a huge Disney fan, first because of just how cute Mickey & friends are, and then of how true, and truly inspirational, the Disney philosophy is - Dream. Believe. Dare. Do.

I have always wondered what working for such an immensely creative corporation would be like. The creative thoughts, process, implementation. The relationships. The clash of creative minds. All of these so completely focused on the end products that have transcended generations for close to a century, and still well-loved to this very day. I dream of being part of the creative engine at Disney (hear ye! hear ye!). After glimpsing the animators at work at the Walt Disney World and now this, an intimate look into the minds of the Imagineers, I am keeping my dream alive.

"When I was about twenty-one, I went broke for the first time. I slept on chair cushions in my 'studio' in Kansas City and I ate cold beans out of a can. But I took another look at my dreams and set out for Hollywood. Foolish? Not to a youngster. An older person might have too much 'common sense' to do it. Sometimes I wonder if 'common sense' isn't another way of saying 'fear'. And 'fear' often spells failure." -- Walt Disney, Animator, Dreamer, Father

"Take a chance."

"Always say 'yes' first, then go off and figure it out."

"Don't try to solve a problem too early ... let the problem evolve so you understand it. The stew needs to simmer. Let the idea tell you where it wants to find its own balance."

"Sometimes a doodle on an index card has advanced an idea further than mere yakking around a conference table ever could. You can judge a brainstorming session by how many cards are plastered on the wall at the end of the meeting. Blank walls are your enemy! We like our walls covered with artwork and photographs, thank you very much. All the better to inspire creative thinking" -- Steve Spiegel, Senior Show Writer, Theme Park Productions

"Every time someone challenges me with a blank sheet of paper, I'm overcome by an uncontrollable urge to wrap his next gift in it. Blank sheets, if taken, must always be returned in full." -- Mike Morris, VP Theatrical Design and Production

"Every sorcerer was once an Apprentice." -- Steve Silverstein, Principal Developer, Animation Programming Systems, Show Animation and Programming

"When we fail, we don't stop. Sometimes you have to go backward in order to go forward, but we never stop."

"How many Imagineers does it take to change the light bulb?"
See if you're on the same wavelength as the Imagineers. Highlight the next line.
"Does it have to be a light bulb?"

Stay tuned ... as I finish the book :)

Saturday, February 11, 2006

FEATURE: The Real Meaning of Chinese New Year

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Welcome to the 4704th Lunar New Year observed by the Chinese and many other Asians. It’s the year of the dog, one of the 12 animal zodiac signs in the Chinese horoscope that predicts the person one becomes based on the “12 earthly branches” and the 5 elements – wood, earth, metal, fire and water. Food for thought and some serious snooping just to tame that curiosity cat, eh?

It is certainly humbling to declare that despite its long and intricate history, this is only the 30th Chinese New Year I celebrate this year. Well, that is if you don’t count the time I was battling the amniotic waters of my mother’s womb to make the 1976 celebration but alas, still missed the finish line by more than a month. That made a Dragon out of me though, for which I consider myself truly blessed.

Umm… 30 may sound a tad bit too many in human years but hey, look at the big picture, folks. For almost 5000 years, people have been celebrating the Spring Festival, another name by which the Lunar New Year is known as (more so in Chinese-speaking cultures than the Banana Republic where its people are Chinese by birth but have a Western outlook).

In as many ways as the festival is known in different parts of the world, so is the Lunar New Year celebrated differently. Although all of them last exactly 15 days, the significance of each day blurs across geographical, cultural and generational borders. Likewise, legends, folklores and superstitions handed down the generations are caught in the tide of time whose ebb and flow erode the storytelling as new versions spring forth but the essence of these ancient tales is never once lost. They have triumphed to found the Chinese community’s unique identity as one of the oldest cultural civilizations in the world.

With the many tales and their numerous versions, so what, then, constitutes the real meaning of the Chinese New Year?

Growing up, Chinese New Year was the one thing I looked forward to the whole year. To a certain extent, I still do. For obvious reasons – the new clothes, the holidays, the never-ending and mostly great food, drinks, cakes and snacks, AND above and beyond – the ‘ang pows’! It’s no wonder that even on New Year’s Day itself, I was already wondering just how far ahead was the next one…

Many of my fondest memories of the Chinese New Year are not of the holiday itself but of the preparation for the big day. Even a boring, dirty, tiresome whole-day-wasted task like Spring Cleaning holds some cherished memories. I don’t know if ‘spring cleaning’ is an original word in the English dictionary or borrowed from the Chinese initiative of ‘cleaning for the Spring Festival celebrations’. We believe that discarding old things and clearing the dust signify a change in fortune – done with the bad, hail the good. Don’t ask what happens if the year has been a good one, and if spring cleaning might inadvertently turn up … worse fortunes? I don’t have the answer because when I asked the same question in an attempt to talk my mom out of spring cleaning, the only answer that I got was to keep the day free and say no more.

Spring cleaning was a family affair. Even my grandmother, at more than 80 years of age and then well into her 90s, chipped in. That, in itself, has a charming quality to it because it’s not very often that the whole family gets to come together and… do something. And then there are those precious moments of reminiscence – digging up old photos of the little imps that we were (and the devils that we’ve grown into… hehe) and paraphernalia that we simply refused to throw away for one sentimental reason or another. These ubiquitous moments of nostalgic sighs and hollering laughter are worth the dirt and sweat of cleaning. Besides, it’s really not asking too much to clean the house just once in a year, is it?

When I was very little, my mom would join her colleagues on a ‘baking day out’ closer to the Chinese New Year, every year. Mom was a smart student, learning great cookie recipes from her wonderful colleagues, improvising and improving each year so that now, she makes the best ‘kuih bangkit’ and butter cookies (not the Kjeldsens type) in the world!

Although she makes far less new year cookies these day because her arms and legs (us!) are only home on the few days before New Year’s Day, we used to help her with all the baking when we were still in school over a few days in the month before the festival. Because we did not have an oven, we depended on ‘tao sar bia’ (traditional Chinese green bean biscuit) factories to bake the cookies.

Mom would mix the dough at home and when all’s ready, mother and daughters would take the 15-minute walk to the nearest factory. At the factory, we would quickly get down to business, sometimes with new year songs playing in the background, adding to the festive mood!

It’s usually not till evening that we could call it a day but at the sight of the delicious cookies and oh, how heavenly they smelled, fatigue was completely forgotten as everyone scrambled for a piece of the freshly baked goodies. Mom would usually let us have our way provided we knew when to stop. After all, those cookies were meant for the new year and that’s only when we should feast….

Cookies aside, the real delicacies are sumptuous, important dishes (translated – we never get to eat these at other times of the year, at least at a single spread) which are offered to the ancestors as a connection to our past, inviting our ‘whole’ family to usher in the new year, as a way of saying thanks to the deceased for watching over the living members and providing the good luck which they have enjoyed in the past year and hopefully in the new one too.

It would be quite impossible to list the entire menu here as the food display usually takes up 2 sizeable tables but here are some more significant ones – braised sea cucumbers with pork and shitake mushrooms, braised eggs with pork, “tau kua” (hard beancurd), black fungus and sometime with ‘fa cai’ (a hair-like vegetable that we kids used to confuse with seaweed), white fungus/long cabbage/fish ball soup.

Traditional cakes include the hand-beaten egg cake, ‘huat kueh’ (a must for the Chinese New Year as a symbol of prosperity for the year ahead), yam cake (steamed yams will do just fine too as all this dish represents is abundance in the family line), and my grandma’s specialty and a cake unique to the Hokkiens – a springy rice cake that is best eaten with the braised meat dishes above.

A whole fish, either steamed or fried, is offered for abundance, usually wealth, as the pronunciation of fish in Chinese - ‘yu’ - means leftover and is part of the Chinese adage, ‘nian nian you yu’, which means there’s leftover of the things that matter (money, health, luck) every year. The chicken, usually offered as a whole (including the innards) albeit chopped up, is simmered in fragrant sesame oil, ginger and button mushroom. Boy, just writing about these makes my mouth water!

New year shopping for the family would include procuring these food stuff, especially the dried ones like the sea cucumbers, mushrooms, fungi, etc. The atmosphere was thick with festivity as people throng the stores. It was as delightful learning about the different dried seafoods as watching the women exchanging recipes.

Shopping for new year clothes was definitely one of the highlights every year. Probably not for mom, who very often was dismayed at our fastidious taste in clothes. We would spend the whole day mall hopping and would sometimes end up buying none, rendering a second day of endless shopping necessary. Sometimes, mom would disagree with our choices because we should wear red (for good luck!) but other colours seemed somewhat more fashionable... What can I say, but girls just wanna be pretty, especially on New Year’s Day!

Another feature of Chinese New Year in Melaka is the small but bustling bazaar at Kee Ann Road, off the once-upon-a-time hangout of Jalan Bunga Raya where shops and malls lined the narrow one-way street. Modernization has gradually but surely re-directed the shopping traffic to hipper malls like Mahkota Parade, Jaya Jusco and Tesco, leaving only the most nostalgic of merchants holding onto their stores along this shopping belt of bygone days. Yet, these small traditional businesses are the saving grace of Melaka, reeling the historic city from the vacuum of modernization.

Kee Ann Road comes alive every night for a month, up to New Year’s Eve, for as long as I can remember. We would take casual evening strolls to eventually end up amongst the crowd, savouring samples of cookies and candies of myriad flavours and colours. Undoubtedly one of my most cherished memories was that one year, when I was still real little (below 10, I believe), the whole family went out together (dad would usually prefer to beat the crowd) the evening before New Year’s Eve and ended up having duck noodles at one of the hawkers along Kee Ann. I love that occasion for 2 main reasons – one, because that’s the first time I had duck noodles (my family is more into chickens, and I don’t mean it in a bad way) and two, because we hardly ate out, especially not with my father who prefers the more hygienic home-cooked meals. We had a blast that night.

Come New Year’s Eve, it is an annual ritual of waking up early when it’s still dark to help with kitchen chores that would eventually give us that sumptuous meal mentioned further up. When Grandma was still around (she passed away in 2003), the first smells of her terrific cooking was the alarm clock. Even if our eyelids were still heavy with sleep, it was quite impossible to drift back to sleep with that wonderful smell stealing its way into our nostrils. Mom would come a-calling anyway, for an early trip to the market to grab the freshest prawns, veges and poultry (the porky dishes had been cooked the previous day to hasten the cooking process on the actual day).

At around 10 a.m., most of the dishes are ready. The tables would also have been laid out in front of the ancestral altar and the red canvas ribbon is up framing the doorway, another of many Chinese New Year decorations that herald vibrancy and good cheer in the new year. This is a day when most of the family will gather and offer their prayers to the ancestors. In a way, it’s thanksgiving, and also to pray for a smooth-sailing, healthy and prosperous year ahead. It is also reunion day; regardless of distance and time constraints, the family will be whole again when all members, young and old, gather for a meal.

Unlike many families who have reunion dinners, we usually have reunion lunch. And no steamboat to boot. Not that I crave it because I’ve always been partial to steamboat meals. Besides, all these great food that have been heartily prepared over 2 days certainly beat the everyday-steamboat!

In the evening, we would give the house a good wash in preparation of another offering at night, this time to usher in the new year with the blessings of the Gods. Fruits and various designated sweets are prepared. The ceremony begins at around 11 pm, with the whole family offering prayers for a good year.

After the clock strikes 12, ‘ang pows’ are handed out by mom, who at the same time blesses us with good fortune in our studies and now, careers, as well as life in general. These are called ‘ya sui qian’, which promise good life and longevity. Traditionally, children would go to bed with these ‘ang pows’ from their parents tucked under their pillows. It is also believed that the later the children stay up (‘shou ye’), the longer their parents live. Although these are just folklore, it is indeed a rare opportunity for children to stay up way past their usual bedtime to just watch tv, chat or have a game of cards.

In the years of growing up, most of these annual rituals remain albeit with marked variations. The holidays during my adolescent years became a show time – a time to catch all the music award shows that all the tv channels seem to have waited a whole year to show them all at the same time. As obsessed as I am with pop music, no one could pluck me out of my seats when these went on air. And then I left home for Singapore for an excruciating 3 years of undergraduate education. Show time traded for study time as the psychotic lecturers and tutors had to have mid-term tests scheduled right after the New Year celebrations. Only when I began working that the holidays were a complete bliss again, but with an expiry date that came far too soon.

Time spent with family and friends in completely relaxed, bonding-conducive climate is over with a blink of the eye. Although I’ve never taken a real liking to relative-visiting, not especially since the ‘ang pows’ diminish with our growing ability to ‘make money’ and the steady rise of nosey questions (come on, I don’t have to spell these out. You must have heard them a hundred times), I recognize the significance of this practice.

It’s the real meaning of the Chinese New Year – a celebration of family ties and friendship.

Medicine for the curiosity cat:
Wikipedia's Chinese New Year
Meaning of the 15 Days of Chinese New Year
Chinese New Year Taboos
Chinese Zodiac Signs