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I shall skip my yearly grousing about the chaos of my home when it's Chinese New Year. And hence have nothing much to say except wonder if our generation will carry on with these customs... all the visiting and decorating and quirky things like bringing mandarin oranges around (do people even do that now?) or staying up as long as you can past midnight in the early pre-dawn hours on the first day of New Year so your parents will live to a ripe old age... things like that. What about the next generation? The generation after that?
It's not about "preserving our roots" or whatever crap it is that the govt throws at us, because frankly, with my horrendous mandarin, I'm not in any position to go start being ambassador for Glory of Chinese Culture. I will not be overly sad to see some things fading away into oblivion, like all the rubbish about having male children to pass down the surname, etc. But then we give up all these to celebrate those Western things like Christmas (why even bother if you're not Christian/Catholic? Anyway Xmas is pagan, people - they used to burn people at stake for celebrating Xmas) and throwing countdown parties on New Year. What happens to us when burning those paper-and-bamboo figurines for the dead becomes something that seems to come from some other exotic and primitive culture?
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