Chu San

Every new year, we have the once-a-year meeting with people that we're told are part of the family. It's telling that, even after 21 years of the same rounds of visiting, I can still meet strangers at family reunions. I guess, on one level, you can see this as a woeful state of affairs, how those of the youngest generations always get hopelessly entangled in the complex honorifics and designations of a Chinese family tree, and get lost among the boughs, and have to resort to the brutal English contingency of slashing away the intricate webs of relations with the scythe of "uncles" and "aunties". But then, if you accept that your orbit should take you out of your family circle, and that is how you avoid growing to be sheltered from the real world, then you would necessarily hardly come into contact with the more obscure branches of your relatives. Then they are just friends and acquaintances, and they bring the same magic and surprise that random encounters on the street with strangers can bring. And as you look across over the landscape that is created by your family tree, you see them blending into the general flow of humanity at the borders, like sky and sea coming together in the distance, and you realise that families don't necessarily need to be so exclusive. I find this to be a hopeful thought.

Anyway, this year, the new year has revolved around two main topics: travel and the Army. This has, of course, been quite fun for me, seeing that the latter is now safely behind me and the former lies tantalisingly ahead. But I daresay that it can't be much solace for Greg, facing as he is a book-in on Tuesday followed by a weekend burned for a live range. It is ironic that our two-year age gap has coincided so uncannily with the two-year Army period, meaning that just as I leave, he enters, and that I see in his experience shadows that are so poignantly familiar even as I try to peer ahead through the shrouds of time. When I see all the cousins in NS now, an impulse towards gloating collides with the awareness that they want sympathy, or rather, space in which to bear their burden with dignity.

But at any rate, getting together with family this year has been more meaningful for me. I guess partly it is the influence of time, and as I grow older, I find my interests and experiences aligning themselves more closely to recounting, and lending themselves more willingly to nostalgia. The stories I have to tell are becoming increasingly, I feel, stories that other people actually want to hear. And what better arena for storytelling than the yearly reunions at the new year?

And of course, there is also the realisation that next year, and the year after that, I probably wouldn't be back for this festive season. This makes this present season something to be cherished, and in some ways, also a chance to tie off loose ends, to leave a good impression this year that will last over the next few absences. The prospect of this not happening year after year with numbing familiarity adds a certain piquant flavour to the proceedings, and what you used to take for granted becomes significant again because of the imminent prospect of it being taken away from you. And so, around the various coffee tables and dinner tables, I have found myself listening more acutely, and engaging more willingly, and savouring the warmth and easy comfort of familiarity with a certain reluctance to let it go.

I wonder what it'll be like next year, somewhere colder, with no family around, and perhaps only a dinner in some unknown shop in a mythical Chinatown in lieu of the great reunion dinners of tradition. I wonder if the immediacy of a novel experience can overpower the homesickness that I feel certain will settle over me. Because, no matter how outward-looking I may make myself, no matter how much I smother myself in the glamour and novelty of Manhattan, no matter who I may find over there to confide in and lean on, there is no denying that fundamental fact, that nowhere else is the same as home.

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Somehow, I am reminded this morning of a princess walking alongside an officer, the puffy glittering gown clashing so riotously with the camouflage fatigues that it formed an outrageous, absurd situation, transporting one beyond the boundaries of the ordinary, and casting drudgery in a new, liberating, compassionate light. To be at the confluence of such a delightfuly blatant contradiction...

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And we're planning to go back to KK this holiday in March. Hatching the plan in the midst of visiting, we found that my school holidays coincide nicely with Greg's upcoming post-BMT block leave, and we and my uncle are throwing about the idea of scaling the mountain again. It is very tempting, to go back and complete something that I had not been able to do in January. And to go somewhere else is always attractive. If this actually happens, this will be the most immediate return I've ever done; something that, up till now, timing and finances had rendered impossible.

And in July, the Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia circuit is flirting with ideas of going to Tibet instead, of trundling up into the clouds on the highest railway on Earth, and to visit mystical Lhasa, and to look on the Potala Palace, and to let the imagination roam free in the thin air on the foothills of the Himalayas, and to search for a glimmer of truth in the streets of that ancient city, and to play with the idea of living closer to the sky than ever before.