Don't play play ah, Singaporean leh!

This is the first year I celebrated chinese new year without my family. I really expected it to be just another quiet humdum weekend where I wake up at noon and bum around trying to do my laundry. Turned out to be quite the opposite. Friday night was spent at an asian party in Denim. Saturday afternoon was spent shopping for ingredients to make assam curry in reading terminal and chinatown. Saturday evening was spent trying to make assam curry. There were a couple of hit and miss moments. One of them including choking on our own curry because it tasted so bad. But we managed to save it. I guess we underestimated the packet. It's very Singaporean to think.."Aiyah this assam curry paste must be made for ang moh, so must be not spicy la. Come add two stalks of fresh chili, 2 onions and alot of chili flakes!" Yeah that's what Jam and I thought until we choked, spluttered and got chili powder into our noses. Saturday night was spent at Potluck dinner with the Singaporean freshman. Jam and I managed to get pineapple tarts, love letters, rabbit sweet etc. Very happy.

Sunday morning spent with Jam at Chinese Student Association dim sum lunch. Except everyone there was American. Heard firecrackers for the first time. Thought the world was going to end. Had tau hui. Very happy. Sunday night was at Singaporean/Hong Kong dinner in Ocean Habour Restaurant. Bumped into Mike there and ended the night with bubble tea, yu and three chinese americans.

Chinese new year always made me muse about my identity as a chinese and a singaporean. And now especially so in a foreign country, where I'm not just one but three degrees separated from China. Chinese new year with singaporeans is the time to see your very friends who never spoke a word of chinese, listen to matchbox twenty, read shakespeare and drank starbucks fraps before kopitiam coffee suddenly scold you for wearing black on CNY, insist that we must eat fish and tell me not to sweep the floor on the first day. Suddenly the same people who you use to fool around with in chinese class find the need to greet you in four letter mandarin proverbs, drink fanta orange and get anal about why we must give two oranges and not three.

Put a paper bag over a singaporean's and american's head and watch them live for a week. Can you tell the difference? Starbucks, Macdonalds, Dan Brown, Hollywood movies and the occasional ethnic food. How many Harry Potter books have we read compared to chinese classics? How many Sex and the City episodes have we watched compared to Empress Dowager? Do we start our day with cornflakes or century egg porridge? Suddenly our singaporean-chinese identity becomes little snippets of what we remember from our past. The little blue packets of Vitasoy we drink as a kid. Playing with those tubes of sticky stuff that you can blow into a bubble that doesn't burst. Flag raising ceremony. Eating Big White Rabbit sweet and peeling off the rice paper.

I think I feel most Singaporean when I step into a chinese grocery stall in a western country. It's like my memories were all stacked into shelves and are readily sold back to me for double the price I would pay in singapore. Wang Wang salted biscuits, little bottles of Yakult, yellow hicks sweets, yeo's chrysanthemum drink, Khong Guan biscuits, Holicks, Ovaltine etc. They each inspire a story which you readily want to share with your non-singaporean friends. I love walking along the aisles of the chinese supermarkets, watching people tell their white american girlfriends "Oh back in Singapore I use to drink this as a kid!"

The Hi-chew sweets merge with sea coconut chinese medicine, merge with vegemite, merge with meat pies, and bakwa, and pork floss and cheerios and pokka green tea and planta and kaya and philly cheese steaks and mac 'n' cheese and sushi and the list goes on.I'm glad that this new year, I had the opportunity to celebrate it singlish-style with fellow singaporeans and american-chinese who can't speak mandarin. It stretches the tension within myself, as a Singaporean, who studies in Australia, who is studying abroad in America and who is dating a Malaysian. I am still every bit Singaporean. I still feel the overwhelming need to pile my plate during a buffet because I can. I'm still shameless rude in subways and I can't litter even if I'm standing in a cesspit full of rubbish. I still have to buy chewing gum when I cross over to JB although I don't eat it out of habit. I don't know how to bribe a policeman. I still lower my volume into a hush when I'm saying anything about the government, whether good or bad. Yes, that happens even when I'm overseas. I still watch the National Day Parade and I'm still moved when they say the pledge. I still believe in the pledge, I still try to defend my country from criticisms, I'm still proud of my passport and I still have high hopes for Singapore.

So if I were the Singapore government in charge of reinforcing the Singaporean identity, here's a new strategy. Post students overseas, and make them eat one month of french fries and lagsana. And then open a chinese supermarket next to where they live and charge them three times the price for a packet of hello panda chocolate biscuit. There is no better way to build patriotism than through food.