Tradition and Culture and Us

Perhaps the familiar anthem of banging Gongs during Chinese New Year or the picture-perfect lights littered across the conically green shaped canvas every end-of-the-year or perhaps something more secluded or intimate, a visit to NaiNai's house perhaps; every Sunday as she forcefully shoves love and affection through the many mediums of food and conversation. These are just some of the many traditions I had thankfully appreciated all through my childhood, which have often made me often ponder on the semiotical, cultural and personal meanings of traditions. Traditions are practices or behaviours that have been transmitted from generation to generation, started by our ancestors and fueled by the contemporary. Which evidently raises the conundrum on whether we, the current generation, are breathing life into this culture flame or simply blowing it out.

The human mind is capable of distinguishing memory equivalent to 2.5 million gigabytes of digital information and identifying 1 trillion different kinds of smell. It's a pretty great feat. Traditions make up so much of that 2.5 million gigabytes, encapsulating so many of those fond memories, saving, downloading and never deleting. But as the world modernises, we can't help to wonder if future norms require the abolishment of old traditions to make way for new ones, and we worry, so deeply for the future generations if they will ever be able to have the chance to download these fond traditions that our ancestors so painstakingly forged and endured. Each year, westernisation had led so many of our Chinese blood relatives away from our deep-seated culture, rooting them out and luring them to the West with illusions of better and more wholesome culture, a whitewashed one. Cultural roots are dying, yet dying at a rate so slowly that may be more harm than good; so slowly that our people don't even realise the deteriorating nature of them. The world is changing, and so are our cultures and practices and beliefs.

As generations go by, so does the feeling of entitlement and the sin of privilege. Looking around us now, we see how fortunate and arrogant we are. So much of our time has been dedicated to the superficial idea of success and wealth that we choose to concentrate our time and effort on materialism instead on the preservation of our culture's beliefs and ideas. Many of our Chinese traditions are created to honour hardship or perseverance, such as rice dumplings or 'Ba Zhang' which was created to honour the beloved Chinese poet and Minister, Qu Yuan, who had committed suicide after his futile attempts to annul corruption in the Chu Dynasty or the eating of mooncakes that were once used to pass around hidden messages that rebelled against the tyrannical Mongols. Traditions as such were created to honour strong values, values that seem alarmingly absent in our present-day generation. So how then, are we supposed to produce traditions and incorporate them into our society when we simply don't have the right values to do so. Our spoilt generation, nurtured by heavy modern influence and a mismatch of cultural values may be the first domino to topple down centuries of deep cultural practices and beliefs.

But within this metamorphosis of culture, a walk away from the bustling atrocity of the city to the more humble outskirts of HDBs reveals to us the retaining cultural beauty of a modified Kampong spirit. An adventure to seek out a basketball court had once led me out of the comfort of my home to the beautiful flats at Macpherson. It was there where I was awed out by the beauty of a vibrant and lively community, void decks beautifully lit with feelings of community and culture, groups of elderly greeting one another playing simple games of Chinese Chess, children engaging in different games of Chapteh, badminton and basketball; a place to laugh and have fun and a community to depend on. Of course, as an outsider, I was treated rather roughly with murmurs and mumbling, a few giggles here and there, but I did not mind, I was an outsider and I respected that fact. But there, I had experienced the warm exchanges among themselves and a kind of beauty within. These were the communities that were responsible for keeping Singapore's dying flame of culture alive. Of course, change existed but the original core values of the kampong spirit still remained, modifying this culture instead of completely abolishing it. But these places rarely found reveals to us the degree of damage inflicted upon Singapore's culture. Seemingly trapped in a blissful bubble of ignorance, such communities hold the core of Singapore's endangered culture and tradition.

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters", a quote by the late Antonio Gramsci, a quote that shattered that bottled illusion of hope in me. Slowly but surely, the world will change, change is the only constant, after all, we are all part of this manipulative and chaotic society, where change, omnipresent, will always dictate the simple, blissful traditions we hold ever so dear to our hearts.