Commonwealth Essay Competition- by Shao Wei

Shao Wei, a Secondary 3 student from Raffles Girls' School, won first prize in last year's Commonwealth Essay Competition. She drew on her own experience while writing a short story revolving around Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day. -- ST PHOTO: KEVIN LIM


IT HAS been more than three years since Chew Chia Shao Wei's elder sister left Singapore for high school in Boston.

But her absence at home is still keenly felt by her family.

'I was especially struck by how much my mother missed her. She would go into my sister's room and spend time there,' says Shao Wei, 15.

The Secondary 3 student at Raffles Girls' School misses her sister too, especially during Chinese New Year.

'I love Chinese New Year. My sister does too. In fact, my whole family loves Chinese New Year,' says Shao Wei, who also has a younger brother. Her father is an administrator and her mother, a psychotherapist.

'It's three days of wearing new clothes, getting hongbao, seeing relatives and friends you don't get to see often, and going to parties. And we do it together as a family. It's a shared experience, like going on holiday,' she says.

When asked by Saturday Special to write a story revolving around the Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day, the first prize winner of last year's Commonwealth Essay Competition naturally decided to draw on her own experience.

'I was thinking about my sister and putting myself in her shoes,' says Shao Wei, adding that she hopes to study overseas too.

The result is a poignant short story about family love and togetherness, one which also whimsically captures the traditions of Chinese New Year.

'It took me just two hours to write after the idea came. I wrote two other stories before this, but I didn't like them,' she says.

A voracious reader, Shao Wei started writing when she was seven or eight.

'But I probably did my first story when I was two or three. It was called The Magic Pen and I wrote it on a Post-it note,' she recalls.

Her taste in books is eclectic.

'The last one I read was Ben Okri's The Famished Road,' she says referring to the 1991 Booker Prize winner about a spirit-child.

'I also read The Idiot last month.'

The classic - by Russian literary great Fyodor Dostoyevsky - revolves around the trials and tribulations of Prince Myshkin, a beautiful human being who wants to sacrifice himself for others.

Asked if she's partial to trendy fiction for teenage girls such as Stephanie Meyer's Twilight vampire series, she says: 'My friends all told me to read Twilight. I held out for a couple of months before I succumbed.'

Her verdict? 'I managed to finish the first one but not the second. It just fizzled out for me.'

WONG KIM HOH
Xin nian kuai le*

By Chew Chia Shao Wei

CHINESE New Year is approaching and your mother gets up from her desk in the late afternoon to get a glass of water, lingering at the open door to your empty room on her way back. You are away at college, and she misses you.

The little sunlight is bluish in this room you left behind. The bed is neatly made.

When she steps inside she moves her hand over the corner of your mattress, smoothing a wrinkle that reappears when her hand stills. And when she leans her hip against your bedside table and contemplates your bed, she is not looking at a bed but at an absence.

It is not your voice and your face that is missed. It is your individual pulsing life, the thread of your daily existence woven in and out of these corners and doorways, the dearth of which is keenly felt. All the after-school naps you took on the living room sofa, arm hanging over a side, uniform rumpled under your thighs, your mind quiet - even those lent your heartbeat to the house, which holds itself a little lopsided in your not being here.

On these late afternoons, to your mother you are your empty room, your vacant chair round the dining table, your unfilled space in the five-seat car. On these afternoons when the house is quiet, your mother sighs and badly wants you home.

Before you went back to school you took your sister shopping for New Year clothes.

Already the songs had started to play, cymbals clashing and exuberant voices ringing out in Chinese across the department stores. Even if you could not recognise the words, each song felt familiar enough for you to sing.

In primary school, they taught you a selection of songs. This was done in the Hall, everyone reading the lyrics off the screen on the stage. You learnt these songs without trying, and when Chinese New Year itself came you sang them boisterously with your siblings in the car between stops.

They did not teach you the songs every year, so as you grew older you could only repeat the choruses, and then only of a more limited number of songs. Singing boisterously in the car no longer held the same pleasure for the three of you as it used to, which gave your father some relief as he drove.

Also as you got older, red clothes stopped being a requisite of Chinese New Year. Then you were satisfied by having red in your clothes, and later on any clothes were fine, as long as they were not black.

Even these tinily evolving Chinese New Years were still Chinese New Year. Every year still in the days leading up to Chinese New Year, you watched your father hanging the red cloth above the front door.

Every year still your family began First Day mornings with a tea ceremony, exchanging auspicious greetings as you and each of your siblings took turns to serve your parents cups of tea and receive your red packets. Every year still the family photograph would be taken somewhere between the tea ceremony in the living room and the rush to the car. Every year it was visits to people whom you grew up associating mainly with red packets and roast pork and gong xi fa cai, gong xi fa cai, how big you have grown!

This year you watched your sister holding out outfits for your approval and as you nodded you realised that all the clothes she was buying were Chinese New Year clothes; all the clothes you bought that day were just clothes.

Over the three days of Chinese New Year visiting, your family thinks of you often.

You know this because even without being there, you amass a small stack of red packets that your siblings collect for you from friends and relatives who sort of remember that they have an elder sister.

Every party they stop at is a party your family has been dutifully going to for years, and they still remember the years you went to the same party with them.

In the car between stops, your sister sits on one side and your brother sits on the other and in the unoccupied seat their cellphones and wallets and red packets co-exist with a box of tissues.

Still, your family has a happy Chinese New Year. When they come home through the front door each night, smiling and taking off their shoes, one or two of them think wistfully of yours in the cupboard. Your absence is another change to the Chinese New Year tradition.

*Xin nian kuai le means Happy New Year in Mandarin