Hi there,
Since this is the first ever time I'm creating & writing in a blog, forgive me if there's any mistakes. As the title suggest, I'm a peranakan. For the benefit of those who don't know, what the heck a Peranakan is? My view is they they are people of Chinese descent who are originally born & bred
in Melaka, who inter-marriage with the locals(Malays) but somehow managed to retain their Chinese culture, indentity & fate. So what you might ask, for me to bring out this piece of boring history?
For those who are peranakan or have relatives, I'm sure you know that the peranakan culture is slowly but surely dying especially in Singapore. My concern is the new generation might not realize they have peranakan ancestory, as one NST article reported a young teenager didn't even realize that she was a peranakan until a friend remarked that her auny was cooking peranakan-style cuisines. And only then did she made an effort to learn about her past, which can be traced back hundreds of years old (up to the 16th century)...
I believe that the near-future demise of the peranakan people, man or woman, is their custom or trend of marriages within the community. As the community becomes smaller by the late 19th & early/mid 20th century, they tend to marry even distant relatives, & later even closer relatives as long as the pair did not have the same sur-names. Why this is bad, from the scientific point of view, is that the gene pool gets 'bad' (Notice how inter-race marriage produces
often academically-gifted children?)
So now I come into the picture, both my parents are close relatives, distant cousins I might say,
therefore I have come to conclusion that must be the reason why I might be the last peranakan
man anywhwere on earth...I am academically poor, study is a torture because memory power is
abnormally short, in fact I can't even remember what I wrote in the first paragraph unless I read it over again. No talent to speak off, no good in sports, physically not fit, no skills in any field, in short. So as my academic qualification are not so good even after trying my best, I cannot geta 'good job', in M'sia previously or in S'pore currently, that means prospect of finding a 'life-partner' is also very slim....therefore no more future generation to speak off? (Both my elder sister41 & younger brother33, me 37, are also not married)
I wonder how many out there shares the same predicament as I do? Do many peranakan face the same problems I do or is it just me & myself is the problem?...Are they doing much better
out there by marrying outside the circle, inter-marriage with the 'typical' Chinese therefore
produces 'superior-in-all-fields' off-spings & therefore forgets their peranakan-roots as the
ties does-not benefit them in any way except maybe the authentically good food their aunts
comes-up every Chinese new year..?
If there is one very distinctive observation that I make is their inability to speak in Chinese,
i.e. Mandarin either at all or fluently in normal conversation, which again comes back to me.
No matter how hard I tried, l simply cannot get the pronunciation right...The "hanyu-pinyu
5 level-tone", is what l believe they call it , correct me if I'm not wrong..?
Can I blame it on my tongue, aka my bad genes or me myself for not taking enough initiative & extra-ordinary effords to succed....
If there's anyone out there who shares the same diabilities as I do, kindly do give your views good or bad?
