Chinese Whispers

*Warning* Sentimental puddles ahead. May splash.

For whatever reason, it seems as if it was just last year that we were all in grand old 538 in Penang. Our grandparents' dilapitated colonial mansion has no other name but 538 (think Jean Valjean's - 24601), and 538 it shall stay.

I have no other memory of Chinese New Year apart from the painful 4 hour ride to 538, in a car filled to the brim with mandarin oranges, abalones, lap cheong, kuih kapit, fresh fish and children. Three children to be precise. One who would swallow books whole, one with an endless amount of (not always politically correct) jokes, and one who always complained her siblings were taking up more than their share of the back seat.

4 hours later the children, oranges, abalones, lap cheong, kuih kapit, and fresh fish would be spit out onto the driveway of 538, not necessarily in that order. And then Operation Spotless would begin, and in military fashion aunties would bark orders:
"Who forgot to clean behind the aircond vents?" "Grey is unacceptable, I want the fans white!" "What do you mean you can't reach that cobweb? What do you think the ladder is for?" "A scout helps at all times, including Chinese New Year" "No one gets angpows without working for it first!"

And just like an Etopian shoe factory, children of all ages could be seen working their little hearts out - climbing on chairs atop tables, wielding vacuum cleaners and rags or beating mattresses in the scorching sun or drowning nasty coloured cushion covers in buckets of soapy water.

But as soon as the sun sets and 538 is gleaming as much as its old walls can bear, it's time for the feast of the century (if we don't count Christmas, and popiah parties and laksa parties and the obligatory celebration when someone comes back from overseas). 3 generations crowd around the old dining table with just enough space in between to raise a chopstick and poke the person next to you.

And then we tuck into the only dinner my grandmother ever cooks each year. Don't ask me what she spends the other three hundred and sixty four days doing, but when grandma only cooks this rarely, you shut up and enjoy the overflowing plates with fancy names that are a mumbo jumbo of prosperity and happiness and fortune and luck and buddhas.

As soon as the plates are cleared and the mandarins have been passed out, then begins the great kitchen war. Too many women in one kitchen is just a bad idea. My grandmother knows that too and leaves it to her vocally expressive daughters and daughter in laws to plan the New Year's day meal. The children too are no where within earshot, for if caught it could mean an evening of chopping shallots or shelling peas.

Instead the young cousins lounge about in the massive lawn that stretches an entire football field with room to spare. They'll sit on the swing and tell stories of yore, of love bourne and lost of dreams yet to unfold. And when the authorities still allowed it, they lit up the sky with a display of fireworks and red fire crackers that gave the little ones nightmares.

But it's all for a good cause. Because when the morning comes, nightmares are forgotten and little red packets have mysteriously appeared under our pillows. Everyone fights for the one and only bathroom in the house. New, shiny red clothes appear in abundance and the children recite New Year phrases, the rare bits of Chinese that has been drummed into their heads a week beforehand. There is plenty of tea to go around and a cup of tea to an elder is a password for receiving an angpow.

And the children know they'll never get more than a few dollars in their ang pows, but its the excitement, the totalling up of accounts and the feeling of new crisp notes in their hands. And after a hearty breakfast of radish cake and in more recent times: hong bak with gee niah kuih, the door bell rings and guest after guest comes pouring in. Our grandfather being the eldest in the family and a respected court interpretor, sits like a grand duke in his chair as friends and relatives come to pay their respects.

The girls like young maidens flutter in and out of the guestroom with tea and sweet trays and coequettish smiles in hand. The boys just try not to break anything, because the brooms have been hidden and grandma's long drawn scoldings just aren't worth it.

There is no gambling in 538. The governor and governess run a respectable Cantonese family where the young ones should be seen and not heard, and when seen should either engage in the most intelligent of conversations or else be seen reading a good book. But when their backs are turned, away run the children to an afternoon of Hong Kong movies on tv. No one ever gets tired of Kungfu reruns. Certainly not us.

And before they know it, it's dinner time and again three generations try to squeeze into one table. Voices grow louder and drift into the night and one more family has ushered in the new year.

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I start to hallucinate terribly when the withdrawal symptoms of spending three years away from home begin to kick in.