Today’s Drifting Thoughts: Chinese New Year 2006: Crossroads

Hmm… summarizing a whole 9 days into one entry…

Anyway.

This Chinese New Year has been a very relaxing and peaceful one, without much events, drama or excitements. But going back to my hometown is always a nostalgic experience as if I have returned to the times when I was a kid. It’s very hard to describe those feelings actually, but as the saying goes, “home is where the heart lies”, living with my parents always has a special significance in me.

Nothing much to shout about, really, as my Chinese New Year is almost all about spending time with family and friends, having a good time with friends playing Mahjongg, catching up with the latest news and gossips as well as spending more time relaxing. Through these simple things, it does give me a sense that time does flies: almost two and a half decades has past and as we started to recount the years back in school, it does came as a surprise that those memories in the past seems just like yesterday.

A lot of changes have occurred, the way how our old friends looked and behaved, the environment we are in… This is more apparently visible to me as I attended our classmate reunion on the third day of Chinese New Year (30 Jan). Seeing everyone taking different directions in life and leading completely different life than mine. Most of them are going to graduate from public university soon, that really made me wonder how their lives will be a few years from now? Maybe yes, maybe no, probably time will tell.

Apart from that, being back in my hometown also means that I was temporarily isolated from my current working routines. This pretty much gave me a gap and ponder a lot of things in life. Call it soul searching, if that fits the description. It seems that a lot of changes have occurred during the times since I lived under the same roof with my aunt, a lot of pain and anguish, and through different kinds of experiences, good or bad, have gave me the courage to resolve and let go a lot of things.

However, somehow, coming back to my own hometown, the environment and people around me made me feel a bit anxious: It does seems that I felt as if I’m either stuck with my old self, or that I’m finding some difficulty in expressing myself, especially to my parents. But thinking about it, it wasn’t much more of a big problem that I used to think of a few years back, it’s like… during my stay I find every opportunity in expressing what I actually feel, starting from the small and trivial. Well… starting one step at a time… learning how to actually live up to what I believe and integrate every little thing in what I do.

Love and relationship is pretty much the theme of this CNY in various forms: Constant enquiries from family and friends, casual discussions and pillow talk as well as some soul searching (again). Funny that I have always managed to give a flat “no” to all enquiries about “whether I had a girlfriend or not” without a single thought, and this always typically followed up with “nags” about “it’s about time you should find a good girl in life”. I wonder what will happen if they happened to know the truth 😛 — But then again, they don’t need to know about it until the time comes ;).

I did managed to be truthful to my family (by making it clear that “either the best or being single”) and some closer friends (by giving a true account to all my stories told… at least from my point of view). This is pretty much a small step for me to take, but it held quite a good starting point to me. All I can say is that I’m still working for it and that I can’t be certain with how it ends… I can only believe in what I do and learn to accept as things comes by and goes away.

Well, that’s pretty much it. 😊

And yeah, photographs :). It’s not a lot, as I didn’t took much of them, but I hope you’ll enjoy them :).

This is my family :). From left to right: Myself, Seh Tat (Younger brother), dad, mom and Sue Shyen (Youngest sister)

Picture taken in front of our family hotel, which is passed down through generations

Cool photo shot collage of brothers and sister(s) 😊

Picture taken in the living room of our “temporary shelter” 😛

Pose! Pose! Pose!

I have no idea about the idea of having a lion dance “worshipping” a cool sports car :p. Probably it’s about the Chinese modern mentality of prosperity (i.e. BIG house, EXPENSIVE car and TONS of cash) Picture taken Zhao Hui Miao Chinese temple

Lychee on the tree. It is claimed to be the first lychee tree planted in Malaysia which actually bears fruit (it is said that lychee trees does not grow in a tropical climate, and hence it’s a very rare occurrence of being able to grow one in Malaysia) It was planted by my great-grandfather and is one of our prized treasures in the family, the tree, as in 😊

The fun during our classmate reunion

Group shot. Mostly classmates when I was in secondary school 😊