I attended the wake of my boss’ father this evening. Like most other wakes in the HDB void deck, it was a simple affair. He passed away from cancer discovered less than one and a half years ago and left behind four children, all of whom are married and have children of their own.
During the conversation my colleagues, my boss revealed that his other siblings, their children and spouses, together with he and his wife, would travel to his parent’s flat for dinner everyday. His mother, who’s probably in her late 60s or early 70s, made it a point to cook dinner for her four children and seven grandchildren daily. Imagine the trouble she goes through every day!
What was remarkable was the cohesiveness of the family in this age, where extended families are a thing of the previous generation. Extended families who dine together daily has got to be a rarity here. Because increasingly, we are going down the road some societies have travel through. Families are getting smaller — we rarely hear of four-children families these days. If couples plan for children at all, two is usually the typical number. It is also rare that working, married adults who live away from their parents, visit the latter daily, even if the latter live within reasonable travel distance. If visits happen at all, it is on weekends. The trend these days is for family units to live independently. Obligatory gatherings only happen on major festivals or anniversaries.
I’ve lived in an extended family. Yes, lived. In the first ten years or so of my life, I lived with my parents, younger sister, my three uncles (my dad’s brothers) and my grandmother in a flat with three bedrooms. It amazes me today how we managed to share that small space. Well, I remember having to sleep in the living room, but that didn’t bother me then (perhaps because I took up less space). My grandmother, who was also my caretaker when my parents were at work, prepared dinner for all eight of us every day. When I didn’t have to go to school, she’d do her morning shopping at the market, with me tagging behind, always holding on to the end of her blouse so that she knew if I went missing.
One by one, my uncles got married and moved out into flats of their own. Although we had less people around, my parents got a larger house, situated near my elementary school, in which I had lived in for almost 20 years. My grandmother continued to live with us, but she did less cooking when we hired a maid to help with the housework. My uncles and their wives would come by at least once a week. Later on, when they had kids of their own, they would bring them over. My cousins and I were all young then, and it was quite a blast whenever they were in the house. Those were the days before they entered elementary school. Occasionally, we even slept over in each others’ homes.
Then we grew up, and found that we had less in common than we had originally thought. My cousins came by less and less, but my uncles and their wives continued to visit grandma at my house. It is no mean feat to survive in the schools here. My cousins all had to attend classes outside school hours, even on weekends. Conversations between my mum and my aunts began to revolve around school work instead of diapers and the antics of my younger cousins. My memories of dinners with my grandma, parents, uncles, aunts and cousins are those which took place on festivals and anniversaries at restaurants. In between those years, my extended family must have stopped doing dinner at my home. Grandma only cooked rarely, for it took too much effort. She was a bit of a kitchen hazard too.
In recent years, grandma passed away, and that eliminated any purposes for my uncles’ visits to my home. When I moved into a new home last year, I also dissociated myself from that last physical link to a large part of my extended family’s past. We still meet for meals at least twice a year. My cousins are in their teens, and amongst us, there is quite visibly a certain amount of awkwardness and shyness at the dinner table. With the diverse personalities we have grown into, it is difficult to fathom that we were once bosom playmates.
Like how friendship takes effort to keep up and nourish when friends become physically separated, it takes even more for extended families to stay close. Some of my relatives do take the initiative to organize dinners. These don’t happen very frequently, however. My father had expressed his wish to get the whole group of us on a trip back to the hometown in China where my grandma came from. An aunt had commented to me in no guised words on how we should treat each other like immediate family members. There are definitely signs that my elders do want to see a more cohesive unit.
But what is a family? The intuitive definition may differ from generation to generation. For my elders, it may encompass their siblings’ families, along with their parents. It may even go further if we backtrack a few generations. For my peers and myself, it might only go as far as our parents and our siblings. Notice that I had to use the term “extended family”.
Even the parent-child unit is becoming more fragmented. While it is still typical in this part of Asia for unmarried adults to live with their parents, more of us relish the independence of living away from the nest. In short, the family unit is going the way more developed societies go.
Perhaps my extended family — uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents included — is lucky to have come this far. Some of my friends have witnessed much bad blood in their extended families. While I appreciate the efforts my elders make, I also wonder if it’s purposeful. I do have nostalgic memories of the old days, but…are we trying to recreate that? Should we?
