Chinese New Year.

Yes, I am inexplicity Chinese.

And like most Asians that celebrate Chinese New Year, I also enjoy the get-togethers which proclaim the tradition of our forefathers before us. Where we can revel with those tiny mandarin oranges and rice wine. (I don’t really drink that stuff though.)

Being the third-generation of an immigrant family in Canada, all this multiculturalism takes away from the festivities just a little. I no longer go to the heritage Chinatown with my parents like I did when I was younger. (This is mainly due to hygienic reasons.) I no longer marvel at the old herbal shops and the family-oriented lifestyle. (“Orient”, haha.) And so this Chinese New Year, the year of the Golden Boar, has become mundane. The ritual of family dinners has been replaced with the risk of giving more money in red pockets (“lai see”) than in receiving them.

No wonder the youths of today, the generation Y, Z, ampersand, etc… feel so lost; they are a mash up of identities and cultural clashings. We have nothing to call our own, constantly warring with Western ideologies and Asian superstitions that lead to nowhere. The sheltered life where parents apply pressure for them to become doctors because that’s the only ‘respectable’ occupation. The result is the relaxed, complacent, and vegetative state of youths, rotting away on the internet, hanging out in malls and movie theatres. This social ambiguity is only fought with depression, distraction, and the formation of gangs. This is evident within new immigrant communities, where they first learn “Chinglish”, and mixture of Chinese dialect with various and random English nouns and verbs, a cacophony strung together.

I don’t know what to think anymore, but I know I’ll never see the color red the same way again.