{mosgoogle right} I remember quite vividly how when I was still small, my mother would return from the market and produced a bunch of chopsticks and gave each of my brothers and sisters a pair each. The chopsticks which were sold in a bunch were red lacquered with black designs, the kinds of which were used in many Chinese coffee shops in Melaka. But, because I did not quite like using the same type and design of chopsticks with everybody else, and also due to my individualistic streak, I did not take the pair offered to me.
So what I did was to make a pair for myself, by carving from discarded bamboo poles or galah. In this way I could have a pair of chopsticks which were different from the rest of my brothers and sisters. My own bamboo chopsticks were plain, and they were rougher and could grab the food much better, compared to the lacquered chopsticks which seemed slippery to many types of foods. Especially, when we were not really adopt at using them.
So, on many occasions, all of us would eat using the chopsticks, but only when meddles of different kinds were cocked, including mee rebus, mee Siam or mee goreng.
May be the using of the chopsticks was nothing much, except that it was merely some unconscious attempt at showing our Chinese ancestry. Because my mother’s great grandmother was Chinese. I knew about it such later in life, when there were some small discussions on our ancestry especially on my mother’s side, because my father’s forefathers do not seem to appear in ours everyday experience, and they could not be traced. And we do not have grandparents or granduncles on my father’s side.
My great-grandmother was called Fatimah alias Che Mah binti Abdullah who came from Singapore and married Mohammed Tahir of Jasin. I was still quite small when I noticed her, but because we were few generations removed, there was no filial bonding, as there were too many of her grandchildren and other great-grandchildren to bother her. She only remembered me as Pipah’s son who kuat menanggis or liked to cry…
And because of all this it was no surprise that we also ‘celebrated’ all the major Chinese festivals, and had a fair share of kuih bakul, kuih chang, and oven had each a lantern during the tanglung festival and fired crackers during the Chinese New Year or Hari Raya Puasa when it we not fashionable for the Malays to do so, i.e. before this practice was banned recently.
Being born and raised in Melaka town, one was stuck in a society which was mixed anyway. So, experiencing the cultures of different races was nothing special. My own childhood, however, seemed to be more on the Chinese side, because there was a major Chinese temple in the area close to our house, which was basically a Chinese-style house. Much later, however, we moved to a different part of the area and lived in a Malay house.
And during each major Chinese festival, the temple would organize many shows that stretched for many days. For us kids, seeing the rituals and medium, who happened to be a woman was interesting, and in the nights were the operas which lasted till the early hours of the day. Malay experience was mainly confined to joget lambak during weddings and mandi safar which at that time was held on Bukit Cina, a distance from where I lived.
Cultural assimilation as us know today, was more like a habit or lifestyle by those living in Melaka; it as second nature to eat Chinese food use Chinese words while speaking Malay, although the dialect as Hokkien, a language which I had become quite acquainted with when small, but had almost disappeared from my vocabulary due to misuse.
My Hokkien vocabulary is now very limited, but it was still good enough for me to be able to retain a discussion with the peddlers in Beijing recently. They were not Mainland Chinese, but visitor from Taiwan who spoke Hokkien.
China was the twenty-eighth country I had visited, and I can feel both ways, disappointed or excited. Walking around Beijing and shopping by the roadside and eating baked sweet potatoes in order to keep the body warm, and mixing with the Beijingers, as they are described, felt more like being in other major world city such as Tokyo. Once I felt like I was in Canal Street in Chinatown, Manhattan.
Sure enough over the past decade or so Beijing or China had seen tremendous change. The most obvious is the way the people dress. Not many can be seen wearing the Mao-style jackets, except by the older people. And that the local people, especially the peddlers and shopkeepers and stall-keepers selling their souvenir goods mostly to tourists seemed to smile a lot more. Even without speaking in Mandarin, I could still create jokes with them. This is done courtesy of the electronic calculators. They would show a price on the calculators for certain goods they want to sell, and they press zero to allow me to press a lower rate than that they had.
I was to be happy that I had visited China, the Middle Kingdom as it has been known by historians and Ancient Chinese, and say that I had enjoyed my visit there, however fleeting, end restricting mostly to Beijing and Tianjin which represented about hardly one percent of the whole of China.
Beijing, the city of thirteen million is twenty-four times larger than Singapore or sixteen times that of Hong Kong. This is how the tourist guide in China describes this city.
Nothing here is small, everything is huge, large and immense, like the Tiananmen Square for instance. Or the Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Ming Tombs, or ChangAn Avenue which stretches for twenty-six kilometers, and passing by the Square. Or the Great wall of China outside of Beijing, which stretched for about 1,200 kilometers over the undulating hills. That, strangely, I felt abated somewhat it was not as huge as I had imagined it to be.
I had seen the drawings of this wall even when was in primary school and had drawn it. But, seeing the wall with my own eyes, I felt that the ‘great wall’ was perhaps ‘great’ because it was 1,200 kilometers long. In terms of its height or width, it was quite average, at least, that was what I saw. And the place along the wall which tourists are taken to all the time is perhaps the most accessible by bus or car. And it is only short a stretch of hardly half a kilometer.
Tourists climb up a staircase to a level on the waIl about 100 feet, and if he is confident enough climb a further 100 steps to a landing and walk along it for a while before climbing another 100 steps to the topmost part of the wall. Beyond that it is just the wall going in either directions heading nowhere for 1,200 kilometers.
If you had lived in Melaka town like me, and came across old buildings you can get the same feeling of being there but if you expect to be totally paralysed or over-awed by them, you will feel disappointed. Even the Pyramids, in Giza, outside of Cairo did not overwhelm me when I set eyes on them. Due to the space on which they sit, the pyramids do not seem huge enough.
Since the opening up of China to tourists the country has seen millions of visitors including a major portion comprising of ‘Overseas Chinese’ throughout the world. The country records between five to au million foreign visitors year. These arc mostly genuine tourists and not cross border visitors who make the majority of the visitors to Malaysia, for instance.
Most probably, Beijing will be overshadowed by other major cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou or even Chungking which has just recently become the largest city in the world with a population of thirty million when the city was expanded due to the inclusion of the neighboring cities, to become just one city.
What I miss most about China on this first brief visit was to be able to move about in the subways or sidewalks and mingling with the locals in the small coffee shots. Most probably it I should return to this country, I will do away with the normal tours to the well-known sights, and just restrict myself to the city lifestyle and take in the real life. I would be happy to stay in a small Chinese-style hotel and can just walk to the nearby grocery stores and perhaps catch the latest Chinese film. And later on perhaps end up sitting on the bench by the busy street and let the people pass by, on their bicycles doing about their business.
Can anybody not see the bicycles in Beijing? It is almost impossible. There are almost an equal number of bicycles as there are people. One thing I like about such a big city such as Beijing is that it does not seem congested, or that the traffic is clogged.
For a city with a population of thirteen million or so, Beijing does not seem to be over-populated. And that there is an orderly flow of pedestrians everywhere, and they do not get in the .say of the traffic flow. The sidewalks for one are wide, and they have ample space for the pedestrian to move about apart from that there are wide bicycle lanes to allow the bicycles to pass by without getting in the way of other more mechanized vehicles. And the motorists simply do net speed, and they travel at a constant pace, which discourages accidents. Perhaps, the city folks and the people hero are more courteous and love not been influenced by foreign advertising gimmicks which aim to make them do silly things like driving fact or too individualistic.
Being the end of winter, the city folks put on beautiful clothes and sometimes seem fashionable, without the use too much make-up. No one could tell that barely few years ago they were all wearing Mao jackets of the same dark blue or dark green colors, and no hairstyle or a smile. Yet, today, the Beijingers are some of the most fashionable and better-dressed people in the world.
I was been warned by people that I should to weary of the Beijingers and should be careful lest I could be mugged or cheated by the storekeepers, and peddlers. But, after making my way alone in many trips outside of the hotel, I cannot say that the advance warning seem appropriate. The peddlers do not pester people to buy anything, and there are no muggers! Beijing in like Kuala Lumpur where one can go about peacefully and without having to worry about being mugged.
And what about the advice by people who had not visited Beijing or China before which I got prior to visiting this country who said that the hotels foods or public facilities were not up to mark?
Well, for this I can simply say: Come and see for yourself. May be that they say is true of Beijing of China say ten years ago. But, with so many big hotels and modern facilities, one really needs not sorry about not being able to get whatever one wants including Muslim restaurants which serve ‘halal’ food.
Personally, I felt so much at ease in Beijing although I could not speak Mandarin. In all my travels to thirty-three countries, I can say with some authority that Beijing is one of the best destinations I had ever been to. Surely, it is not an overstatement, but a factual description. Not only that it is steeped in history, and represents one of the most major political capitals in the world, but the atmosphere and environment is balanced. On top of that the prices of most things excluding the western-style hotels are very, very cheap, especially clothes and food items or souvenirs.
. China's land mass probably remained after the ice-age?
I fail to see the relevance of this article.
China is a nice country, its accepts all who walks its street. The man enjoys some of his heritage.
But reflect on this, for some Malaysian they don't even feel welcomed in their own country.