Happy Chinese New Year to all my Chinese friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. It's the year of the Dragon and this means that my niece is 24 years old this year. I'm that old. Now let's talk about the CNY celebration. One of the things I love most about being a Malaysian is that I get to celebrate all the different celebrations that all of us Malaysians are celebrating. Malay have Hari Raya, Chinese have CNY, Indians have Deepavali, and so on.
So, my first CNY celebration was not long ago. I mean a proper celebration, not the one where I followed my father to one of his colleagues' open house back in the day. I'm talking about me doing the "yee sang" tossing and whatnot. My first ever CNY celebration was back in 2016 when I worked in a Chinese majority company (in the management level mostly). The company brought all of us to dinner and we had a 5-course meal. It was fun, the food was delicious and the most important thing of the day was the "angpao".
Ever since then, I've been celebrating CNY every year because I've been working with a Chinese company till today. I've never worked with a bumiputra company ever but I'm not complaining because these Chinese companies always give us long leaves, especially during CNY and they will also give us long leaves for Hari Raya because there are only a few of us Malays in the company.
Apart from that, I also love the lion dance performance that they'll be having at the company and if you know me, you know I love watching all these stunts, dances, and performances. But most importantly, I love the food. Whatever celebration we are celebrating here in Malaysia, the highlight will always be the food! I don't know if the Chinese eat healthy or because I ate the halal version of the Chinese cuisine, I feel like all of the food tastes very "herbal" and healthy I would say. Not that I'm complaining but I love the strong taste of ginger and you can count on Chinese food to have the ginger taste.
For this year, I haven't been to a CNY celebration yet but I saw in the company group chat that they'll be having "makan-makan" soon so yeah. I'm looking forward to that!
Lastly, I want to wish everyone celebrating a happy new year and may you all be blessed.