Lunar New Year may be losing its significance in modern society

My Chinese co-worker said that to me. Her rationale was plain and simple. She considers herself a “banana”, a term we often associate with Chinese born and raised in an English-speaking environment and are more inclined to be seen as more “Westernised”.

Regardless of whether one feels “Cina” enough, in light of modernisation, Lunar New Year celebration may be losing its significance.

Lunar New Year is a time to welcome the new with an emphasis on family togetherness. Increasingly, as the society continues to adopt modern lifestyles, there is a shift in the perception of what deemed as customary to welcoming the New Year.

Reunion dinner with the family on the eve of the New Year may no longer hold as much weight in the minds of the urban Chinese. FaceTime or Skype with the elderly back home is fast becoming an acceptable norm -- although parents and grandparents alike may not be as enthused with the electronic means of communication in comparison to an intimate sit-down dinner.

In the past decade or so, Lunar New Year has lost its meaning that we once identified with. To many, in the recent years, the Lunar New Year holiday has since become nothing more than an escapade from the daily grind, an opportunity for a week-long getaway to travel abroad. The urbanites would opt for a trip back to the hometown during other times of the year.

While modernisation is an inescapable fact, it is equally important to not lose sight of upholding the values and strong moral fiber of our heritage.

I’ll have to admit that, I too, sometimes find it tough to elaborate in length about the diverse customs and traditions to my foreign friends. I have plenty of homework to do to retrace some of the cultural aspects that I have inherited, yet hardly understood.

If this phenomenon is already happening to my generation, I can only imagine how our perception towards “tradition” will further evolve with time.

At the age of eighty, could we only be reliving “the way things were” through the descriptive writing of a novelist?

Could it be that one day, experiencing “forgotten customs and traditions” is the key selling point of an augmented reality product to a niche market?