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.