Singapore Sling

Hey guys!

Yes, I'm still alive! Wow it's been like 13 days since I last blogged. That's not normal is it? It says I'm blogging at 12:56pm but it's only actually 9:56am, I felt it necessary to make that distinction.

But yes as many of you know, I'm in Singapore and have been here since last Saturday. I came back for my grandma's wake and funeral and it was all pretty last minute, left the very next day. Thanks for all those who've offered their condolences, it really means a lot.

I hope everything back in Melb is okay. I kinda miss Melb but at the same time I could stay in Singapore for a very long time. I don't feel like a foreigner here, maybe that's because I was actually born here! So despite my passport saying otherwise, I'm happy hanging out here. I guess it's a huge factor when you have most of your relatives around you as well. At the wake, I met SO many relatives, some of whom I hadn't even met before in my 23 years of existence! And we're not talking about like great-grand-step-uncle styles, but cousins! I guess that tends to happen when you move overseas and one set of grandparents had thirteen children!

I also decided early this year when I was staying with my cousin in Toronto that we would do a family tree. Ah, the Wong family tree. Where to begin? Well my dad encouraged me to find out more from all the relatives who were gathered for my grandmother and I found out some really interesting stuff! Like I had a great-great-great-great (don't know how many generations) grandfather who was a scholar or minister of some sort for the Chinese emperor and basically he began a family tree. Since he was educated, he also wrote a poem and that poem, I was to find out, has significance in that each word of the poem was to be applied to the first character of a certain generation's name.

For example, say one line of the poem was like "xin boon chang" all the people in my dad's generation ie. him, his brothers and sisters, and cousins would be named"Wong Xin-something". Then all the people in my generation (myself, my brothers and sisters and cousins) would be "Wong Boon-something". In turn, all our kids would be "Wong Chang-something". Not everyone's followed this but it's pretty neat I think. This comes in most useful when determining whether a certain relative is actually your "senior" or not as some of my nieces and nephews are like 10 years older than me and it tends to get confusing.

Anyway, this family tree and poem, written in Chinese calligraphy has been passed down through the generations. So this book was passed down to my grandfather by my great-grandfather. Later, my grandfather re-wrote this book twice for his two brothers. One of the brothers remained in China and died there. That book was lost. Another one moved to Malacca in Malaysia and my grandfather had the other which he brought to Singapore. Anyway, my grandfather passed the original book to one of my uncles and he has it in his possession. Now, not anyone can have access to the books since it's seen as a really important part of our family but somehow, one of my cousins, Francis who's also known as "Lau-Hoh" which means "tiger", was allowed to photocopy the rewritten version that my granduncle in Malaysia had. Lau-Hoh heard I was interested in doing a family tree and has allowed me to photocopy it and I now have it in my possession. Even though it's in Chinese and I won't be able to read anything other than "wo", "ren", numbers and my surname hopefully I can get it translated by my cousins who know Chinese back to front because they learnt it at school in Singapore.

Okay so that's about all for today's lesson in the Wong family history. Hope you all learnt something today but remember, stay in school kids and stay classy San Diego.