Before the advent of television, kampong folks sat outdoors to chat, sing songs, recite poems and tell stories, nurturing our creative selves. It is this sense of closeness and community that needs to be fostered again. -- Josephine Chia, in Goodbye My Kampong!
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when i was younger, my father would frequently bring home different types of kueh. they came in all sorts of colours: green, yellow, red. “come and eat!” he would say genially, and i would shake my head, munching instead on Oreos and KitKat.
as a teenager he continued to bring them home. and i continued to shake my head dismissively, for different reasons. so unhealthy, i shuddered, thinking of all the calories that we were warned about. i remember my friend telling me that nasi lemak rice was ‘the worst thing you could ever eat’, so for the next five years i dutifully stayed away from it. i skipped my neighbour’s Hari Raya gathering for the sole reason that i was afraid to eat unhealthy food.
yet i also remember, the crestfallen expression on my Malay neighbour’s face, after i politely declined their kueh and my other Chinese neighbour saying, “Nowadays ah, young people want to be skinny, don’t like this kind of food ah!”
i had my first ang ku kueh at twenty, a red tortoise shell-shaped kueh. and i only bought it because my friends were all ordering it online and i wanted to join in.
but now i'm wondering about the part of me i've lost touch with, the part of me that i never knew. i was feeling a little mangled with my own identity.
i am a Peranakan, but i can barely tell you about the culture, food, and clothing.
i am a Hokkien, but i can’t speak a word of the dialect.
i am a Singaporean, but at age nine i was busy memorising all fifty states of the US.
i am a Chinese, but everyone calls me by my French-pronounced name.
i didn’t really know who i was: perhaps a true banana, a slang used to denote Chinese who have been westernised.
why the sudden cultural revivalism? throughout this year's conferences and ground conversations, the message i learnt was consistent: we need local voices in enacting local climate solutions. we need Indigenous knowledge in teaching us how to reconnect with this land, this air, this water. i can't believe that for so long i'd known that, and it was only very recently that i started thinking about my own Indigenous personhood.
perhaps because i've always identified as a city girl. i know i do not qualify under the UN definition of Indigenous Peoples. and yet, that desire for a sort of spiritual connection with the earth made me yearn to have some sort of Indigenous identity. after reading Kampong Days by Josephine Chia, a Peranakan, i find myself running back to my Peranakan roots.
***
for centuries, we never spoke about our ‘carbon footprint’; today, we need to fret about it all the time: use less plastic, don’t buy fast fashion, recycle as much as you can. i wonder which is more significant: the mass industrialisation that is driving destruction, or the people's consumerist habits?
for decades, we ran after chickens and ducks and ate their eggs; today we are being told that is unethical and violent to animals. our cultures are being put into question. the practices that symbolised love and family piety are now rejected; the food that has given generation after generation life and nutritional nourishment are being cast as ‘unhealthy’ and ‘unsustainable’.
cultural practices are neither entirely good nor entirely bad. to some extent, it’s important to question long-standing cultural practices, such as child marriage, feet-binding, and preventing education for girls. but at the same time, is it a coincidence that as ‘backwards’ (who defines backwards?) traditional beliefs erode, subsumed instead by bewildering images that signal our global metropolitanism, our lifestyles have become increasingly unsustainable? preserving the diversity of local cultures, remembering our identity, our traditional beliefs, our Indigenous roots — it’s all part of decolonising ourselves; from mindsets of how we should lead our lives, from the very interior to the exterior.
so i'm on a mission: to rediscover what was olden day Singapore like.
what was the ethos of Singaporeans back then.
what did they believe in.
understanding all these will help me fit a larger piece of the puzzle:
how did we get here today? how have our values changed? why did our values change? how can we reclaim the kampong spirit that was once lost?
so now, at twenty-one, i’m finally coming home. i'm coming back to me, to the Hokkien, the Peranakan, the Chinese Singaporean that i was born to be.