The Silence of Chinese New Year

 Chinese New Year is perhaps one of the only few days when the city rests. Shops close, streets empty, and the familiar bustle of commerce vanishes. For a moment in the year, silence descends, a rare pause in urban life, as if the city has decided to sleep late.

But the quiet has its many sounds that reign over the silence. The New Year arrives, but not quietly.

Firecrackers erupt across neighbourhoods, their crackle and boom echoing into the early hours. Lion dance troupes take to the streets, their drums pounding in hypnotic cadence, cymbals clashing in precise bursts.

Inside homes, besides the ancestral altar, other sounds, as families reunite around tables laden with food cooked only for the New Year. The spread is a deliberate arrangement of fortune: a steamed whole fish is served to ensure a surplus of wealth, while gold-tinted dumplings and spring rolls are piled high to invite prosperity.

Long, uncut longevity noodles are carefully coiled into bowls to safeguard the family’s health, and sweet plates of nian gao and tangyuan sit ready to symbolise growth and unbreakable unity. 

Voices rise in laughter, a thousand occurrences of the past year recounted, a few rebukes, not spoken but shown in silent frowns louder than words. Then there is the Yee Sang, before the main meal - tossed high for prosperity with the chorus of “Loh, loh, loh!”

But in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, the city's silence at rest is replaced by another human sound, of a different reunion. With the closure of the city’s main sections, thousands of foreign workers emerge into the quiet of a few streets where the shops supply their particular needs. For them, the pause is a chance to reclaim fragments of home. A few hours to live, briefly, the life they left behind in pursuit of work.

It is an incomplete gathering, a reunion held in the absence of the very families they work to sustain. There is, for them, nostalgia in the city as it rests. For a few hours, the chatter of familiar tongues and the smells from the shops take these guests from afar back to the places they come from. Their presence fills the silence with a different kind of bustle, one rarely acknowledged in the city’s narrative.

Chinese New Year is thus a festival of silence and noise. It begins with silence but quickly fills with sound: the chaos of firecrackers, the rhythm of drums, the warmth of family voices, and the overlooked bustle of migrant communities. These contradictions remind us that silence and noise coexist not only in festivals but in governance. Silence can conceal injustice, while noise, the voices of citizens and workers alike, pushes for accountability and recognition.

Renewal, whether of a city or a nation, cannot come from silence alone. It requires the courage to break it, to hear the voices of the unseen, and to act. Just as firecrackers shatter the night, so too must we shatter complacency. Renewal requires rhythm, voice, and justice, the true soundscape of a society that values all its people.

 

18/2/26

Chinese New Year – Another of Our Rich Heritage

 

Learning Unity in Diversity

Growing up in the government quarters on Imbi Road, my world was defined by Malay, Chinese, Eurasian, and Indian families living side by side. With a child’s eye, I saw differences—languages, foods, festivals—but I also saw unity. Walking to school, sharing classrooms and playing fields, borrowing sugar and salt from neighbours, watching wives gather in a common place after the office buses had returned—all these moments taught me that our needs were the same, whatever our complexion or what we cooked in our kitchens. Joy and tears were shared, and in those exchanges, our differences dissolved into humanity.

More than anything else, it was the festivals that joined us. Trays of food and fruit from one house would be shared with neighbours. Everyone wore their best attire, even if it was not their festival. In those moments, difference became celebration, and celebration became unity.

A Festival Seen from Afar

In the 19th century, Chinese New Year was often described by outsiders as something exotic and distant. A British traveller in Hong Kong, 1867, called it “a riot of sound and colour, with crackers exploding incessantly and the streets filled with strange rites of the Celestials.”

An 1880s Singapore newspaper noted: “Days of feasting and gambling, when the Chinese close their shops and indulge in their peculiar customs.”

These voices reveal how the festival was once seen as a foreign spectacle—something “to indulge”, belonging to “others,” not yet embraced as part of a shared civic life.

Chinese New Year 2026

Today is Chinese New Year. The doorbell rang early, and our neighbours arrived with cakes and the traditional oranges. My wife placed a small red packet on their tray, and in that simple exchange, the Lunar New Year began for us all.

Now, the world celebrates too. In London’s Trafalgar Square, the Lunar New Year draws hundreds of thousands of people of every background. In Sydney, the Harbour Bridge glows red. In San Francisco, the parade is a civic highlight. What was once seen as peculiar or distant has become a global festival of renewal, prosperity, and family.

Children of the Monsoons

We are a lucky country. Situated on a peninsula where civilisations met, traded, and departed with the great monsoons, we have inherited not just cultures, languages, and food—oh, what food!—but civilisations themselves. Our neighbours enrich us. True, there are voices that would exploit differences to divide us, but they will wither away, shrinking against the vastness of our shared humanity.

As a former Minister of Education once reminded us, education must take note of our fortuitous position at the intersection of civilizations.

We must learn that we are children of the monsoons: the wind and rain birthed us, and the produce of this land, which is more than food, continues to nourish us. To celebrate Chinese New Year is to celebrate ourselves, our fortune, and our humanity.

A Call to Rejoice

So let us rejoice. Let us celebrate every festival as our own, for in doing so we affirm that unity is not the absence of difference but the embrace of differences.

To all of us - Happy New Year. KONG HEE FATT CHOY. Celebrate.

 

The Monolith vs. The Mosaic: A Critique of the Malaysian Higher Education Blueprint (2026–2035)

 

The recently unveiled Malaysia Higher Education Blueprint 2026–2035 (the Blueprint) is the second Blueprint on higher education published by the Ministry of Higher Education in the last ten years. The first covered the period from 2015 to 2025.

The new Blueprint sets out a broad new focus (page 10, the Blueprint) that outlines a ‘transformative shift’ in the higher education system to align it with future demands and challenges. It promises a shift from rigid, structured learning toward the unbundling of education that supports lifelong and life-wide pathways, while reframing graduates not only as job seekers but also as job creators equipped with entrepreneurial and innovative skills. Talent development is recast from output-driven to values-internalised and impact-driven, grounded in ethics and purpose, while leadership is envisioned as intrapreneurial and systems-thinking. Institutions are to be harmonised into collaborative ecosystems, competencies broadened into STEAM-enabled skills, and Malaysia’s ambition expanded from regional hub to global education centre that is competitive and prepared to meet the challenges of an evolving world.

The Blueprint’s new focus is undeniably ambitious, promising lifelong learning, entrepreneurial graduates, and sustainability-led leadership. Yet these shifts, like intrapreneurial, remain aspirational slogans rather than actionable reforms. The new document, as with the previous Blueprint (2015-2025), outlines what higher education should look like in an ideal future but provides no clear mechanisms, benchmarks, or evaluative tools to measure whether these transformations will succeed. Without a framework for accountability, the rhetoric of “unbundling education” and “values-internalised talent” risks becoming little more than fanciful branding, detached from the entrenched problems of access, equity, and community engagement that continue to define Malaysia’s higher education sector.

This absence of measurable pathways points to a deeper flaw: the Blueprint’s reliance on a top-down approach. By favouring ministerial vision over community realities, it assumes reform can be engineered from above without first engaging the diverse constituencies it seeks to serve. Instead of beginning with a rigorous audit of lived experiences—geographic, socioeconomic, and cultural—the Blueprint imposes a standardized model of progress.

The Fallacy of the Top-Down Reform
The Blueprint’s primary error is the assumption that reform can be engineered from the Ministry downwards without first conducting a system-wide audit of the "lived reality" of access. A proposal for reform should have begun with an assessment of the geographic, socioeconomic, and cultural factors that limit participation across our diverse regions. Instead, the document imposes a standardized vision of progress. To borrow from Paulo Freire, this approach mirrors the "banking model" of education: the state "deposits" a singular vision of the future into the system, treating the diverse societies of Malaysia as passive recipients rather than active participants in their own development.

A Nation of 50,000 Years: Diversity Beyond the Present
The "diversity" the Blueprint fails to recognize is not merely a matter of geography or economics; it is an epistemological and ontological pluralism. Malaysia is built on a mosaic of worldviews that define the "good life" in radically different ways. We are a nation of competing cosmologies, diverse social fabrics, and varied ways of knowing. Yet, instead of celebrating that unique diversity, we have voices in power that would abolish that diversity and place education, curriculum and all in a single Act of Parliament.

The most harrowing failure of a standardized "monolithic" plan is its inability to account for the Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples of this land. For the Orang Asli, whose presence in this region spans 50,000 years, education should be a bridge to the future that respects the sanctity of a rich and deep, localized past. When we impose a singular "Higher Education" model, we risk an act of epistemicide—the systematic destruction of alternative cultures. True education for a 50,000-year-old culture is not about assimilation into a globalized, urban-centric workforce; it is about recognizing that their understanding of the world is a "higher education" in its own right. As Freire argued, to impose a world on another is an act of violence.

The "One Act" vs. The Pluralistic Law
This monolithic thinking culminates in the proposed "One Higher Education Act" (OHEA). While "harmonization" sounds efficient, it often acts as a tool for homogenization. A more progressive approach—as envisioned in the Maszlee Committee's draft—would have been a two-part framework:

1. The Universal Soul: A section codifying the "Idea of the University," protecting non-negotiable attributes like academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and the fundamental rights of students and staff.
2. The Contextual Body: A section that preserves the unique policy objectives of diverse institutions. Rather than forcing every university into a standardized regulatory mould, the law should provide the flexibility for institutions like UiTM or local polytechnics, including a university or institution dedicated to indigenous studies to fulfil their specific social contracts without the pressure of fixed KPIs that may be irrelevant to their mission.

Conclusion
Higher education must be a practice of freedom, not a mechanism of conformity. The purpose of education is not to standardize to such an extent that it destroys the very cultures it claims to empower. To truly reform Malaysian higher education, we must move away from the top-down directive and return to a system designed from the individual and the community outwards. We do not need a "One Act" that makes us the same; we need a framework that guarantees our universal rights while protecting our 50,000-year-old diversities.