tradition

Recently, I have gone to two different funerals and I realised that there's actually a lot of customs that have to be adhered to depending on your dialect/family tradition. While I am acutely aware of my lack of understanding about these customs, I did not feel the impulse to go learn about all the different intricacies, unlike how I would love to do so when it comes to things like weddings.

Talking about weddings, today I went for my cousin's engagment, which is called "da bua" in Hokkien or "luck cai" in some other dialect and this is also known as "gou da li" in Chinese. It was very interesting to hear the bevy of mothers sharing their experiences or knowledge about the different customs of the different dialects. Some of the more interesting things are as follow.

Bride and groom to do this when staring into the mirror together
- jio gia jio gai, ka eh ho mia (look into the mirror, look into the mirror, then will get good life)

Tea lady to say when the bride and groom are eating sweet vermicilli
- jia di jia di, ma ni xi hao xi (eat sweet eat sweet, next year give birth to baby)

Tea lady to say when the bride and groom are drinking tea
- jia da jia da, ma ni xi lam pa (eat dry eat dry, next year give birth to boy) (this is a bit crude but that's what they say)

Think all these are very interesting but of course it can be a very time consuming affair to prepare all the necessary items, which might no longer be easily available. But somhow I think it is so important for us to know as much tradition and heritage as we can cox it does look like a lot will be lost from our generation onwards. It's really a great pity that a lot of these traditions are regarded as a hassle and slowly pushed into extinction as we have simply no time to bother about these things.

Perhaps someone should write a book on all these things so as the preserve this for prosperity. Maybe we call it "Dummy's guide to Chinese dialect customs" (I'll buy it!!) and also place a copy of it in the new monster library.

Oh, and did I mention, it costs about 100K to get married (assuming 5 rm HDB and hotel wedding dinner) The minimum is about 10K++. Not the cheapest affair. No wonder people are getting married later. Perhaps this also helps explain why many of the traditional stuff are being left out as well.