or is it?

According to Peranakan.org, it comes with the price tag of $103 to become part of the association. I say I say, conduct a blood test, true-blue Babas and Nyonyas will enter the association FREE OF CHARGE while glory hunters (i.e. category 2) will pay that bloody $103.

Anyway, not long ago, I learnt that The Best Friend is also part-Peranakan. All very interesting to realise that we have one more similarity to add to the list though we're not going to squeal and do gravity-defying jumps to celebrate. She knows Bahasa Malay (root of Baba Malay) while the only two Malay phrases I could muster up is 'gila' and 'chilakah'. Both profanities.

I couldn't help but wonder why, unlike most of my peers, I wasn't taught my paternal or maternal dialects and their respective culture and customs.

I learnt to understand The Mother's Cantonese dialect during my primary school days, through Hong Kong's TVB dramas (when our satelite used to broadcast Malaysia's TV3) and endless probing of 'huh what did he say?' 'what does that mean?' 'how to pronounce this'. The Mother would used to brush me off, 'Aiyah quiet lah! 看完才问我.' With deliberate display of sulking and pouting, I'd storm off to my room and five minutes later, get some deserving caning and reprimanding. In Cantonese no less. There, my dialect lesson continued. Fast forward many years later, TV3 ceased to exist from my telly and Hong Kong TVB dramas have been (horribly) dubbed before being aired on TV. So I took on the interest in Cantonese opera, which is really very interesting. Good story-telling of classical fairytales and historical events. Very fairytale-like. And like most Cantoneses, I'm a sucker for weepies.

I was never taught how to speak Teochew too. The Father prefers to converse with me in English and his pipe-choked Mandarin. I picked up the dialect (bits and scraps) as I sat in between the adults when extended families gathered at my house for mahjong, 12-card games, gossip and lots of smoking. (I'm not sure if they did pot though) I kid you not when I say that my 5-room flat used to resemble a well-run gambling den. Somewhere during the dispute of the winnings, I learnt my first Teochew words - numbers 1 to 10. And sometimes during hide-and-seek with the cousins, I overheard many conversations in Teochew and Malay between the aunties as I hid under the dining table. Inquisitive, I'd related as many words as I could remember to The Mother. I thought I had learnt new words but we learnt new truth too; they were gossiping about us.

After being called 'nun' and 'cursed child', my little mind associated Teochew with 'bad ass aunties'. I'd recoiled at everything and anything associated with 'bad ass aunties'.

I'm still confused on the kind of childhood I had.

Oh. Sans grandparents. I guess that's the missing piece. While most kids are cradled in their grandparents' arms and cooed fondly with baby talk (in dialect no less), my grandparents were mainly six feet under or had other cousins to cradle. Anyway, the backlog for this family history would take me another 365 days to explain. Even a 100-episode Hong Kong reel-life drama cannot rival the real-life melodramatic predicament both sides of my extended families had. Next time maybe.

The Mother still calls me Teochew Nian/Neo when she's pissed with me. It's an expression to describe me taking after The Father - Peranakan Teochew (proud arrogant and very hate-able). And she still refuses to converse with me in her dialect, citing 'you sound like a duck when you speak'. I take that as a compliment because ducklings are very adorable. Meanwhile, my Teochew is still limited to 'Happy Chinese New Year'.