CNY is over

Chinese New Year is just over. There is no celebrative mood for me as far as Chinese New Year is concerned, as I always treat it as a reunion with family members especially my younger brothers and cousin brothers and sister. After the long holiday, somehow I feel exhausted as there was long distance traveling over the Chinese New Year, from Seremban to Sitiawan then from Sitiawan to Arau then back to Sitiawan and Seremban again. The traffic jam can be killing sometimes.

Probably what I enjoy the most during the Chinese New Year was accompanying my cousins flying kite in the evening. The winds were too strong and inconsistent and due to the limitation of space, we can’t really fly the kites too high. It was scorching hot in Arau as the temperature went up as high as 36 C. So we could only fly kites in the evening before sunset. You don’t see that many kites on the sky nowadays unlike a few decades ago when I was a small boy. You can ask around and see how many kids know how to fly kites or rather how many of them keen for kite flying.

Perhaps the advancement of new technology not only making our world smaller, even the sky also becoming smaller and smaller, especially in the town, where can you fill a big field for kite flying. But if you go to the northern areas where there are still a lot of padi fields, yes you can still fly kites during the dry spell when the padi is harvested.

As we notice our parents are getting older and older every year, we are also not young anymore anyway. That is how life is, time flies and we can just look forward to every new day and slowly forgetting the past. Perhaps it is good to let go all the sad things and to start all over again. Just let the bygones be bygones.

Probably the biggest shock during this Chinese New Year was the news of my wife’s colleague committed suicide, jumping down from 14th floor on the eve of Chinese New Year. She was suspected to have suffered from postnatal depression. We may never understand what really caused a cherish lecturer to have made such a painful decision to leave behind her new born daughter and jumped down from the 14th floor. But it goes to show that behind every cherish face, there could be some hidden pains deep inside.

We can only hope that she will rest in peace and the family member can slowly come out from this dilemma and the baby girl who was left behind by her mother can grow up healthily as we know that it will be the greatest pain in life for a baby growing up without the love and care of a mother. I have a lot of respect for working ladies especially those working mothers needing to take care of their children. There could be many stresses from the workplace, home, sometime even from the husband as well.

I must say that there are not many good men around nowadays which could provide unwavering loves to their wives. Forget the unchanged melody, even the seemingly good family men like Tiger Wood and John Terry can turn out to be a womaniser. Perhaps it is timely for the government to amend the policy to allow a longer maternity leaves so that the new mothers can have sufficient rest before they have to face the many challenges of their working lives again. Perhaps by so doing, it can help to reduce the stress from the workplace or perhaps the bosses or colleagues need to provide more supports and cares to the newly delivered working ladies.

My own experience is that a female staff was instructed to be transferred to another office located about 80 km away from her previous office and can you imagine a newly delivered woman need to drive almost one and a half hour to her office and another one and a half hour back home? Sometimes, this is how things are going on.