Family and Chinese New Year

The longer you stay overseas to study, the more you appreciate the importance of family. Before, back when I was in Malacca, I was overexposed to the love of my family. Well, we meet everyday, how can it not be overexposed?

Well, with love I realised, there’s no such thing as seeing each other too much. I realised that I’ve not really understood love in the same way that my family did for me. I still didn’t understand love until this year (year 3 of my NUS life).

Now as I look back on the support, the warmth, the love of my family… I feel that I’ve been mistreating them too much. It does not matter that they are not the coolest dudes in the world, the best at whatever you think they should excel at, what mattered is that they cared for you. And I feel the care now. Now after so many years of pride preventing me from acknowledging them (one of the perks of blogging, you can write these stuffs here), I am gradually trying to develop loving-kindness to them, and showing it too.

This February (or end January), my sister (Ching Siang) came with Michelle and Ting Hui (2 of my closest female cousins), to NUS and I’ve bring them around! One fine point is that I could have brought them to SPS (the place where I hang out the most, the place they wanted to go) but I didn’t. It tells me of something about SPS that I didn’t want to bring to my closest family to share with…… Something I’ve no business to share here and you’ll have to guess and see it later on.

Well, back to the topic, on February, I’ve gone back to Malacca, and met with me cousins! The only guy missing (currently in USA) is Jia Long. We celebrated grandfather’s 80th Birthday (Chinese age, the age from birth counts as 1, because you are living the first year of your life, so now I’m living my 22nd year of life, even through I can say that I am 21 years old before my birthday this year)!

And had we some fun over there! I was still applying for MIT/Caltech/University of Penn summer research programme then, so I was a bit distracted. Well, I didn’t get them. However, due to some cool series of events, I’ve gotten Imperial College London’s summer research Programme! So (sorry digressing a bit here) I’m going to go to London on the 10th May and coming back to Malaysia only on the 8th August.

Ok, back to the night. I was also meeting my form 6 friends that night. I’ve meet them, and it is interesting to note that for the case of my previous crush, we are friends now! Haha… well, although a cure for love-sickness is to love another, I do not think that the first crush I had was anything serious. Not compared to this time. This time, I wouldn’t even call it a crush. Oh, but this is leaving off topic again and it is not yet ready to be disclosed. Hint: it is a girl from my current University.

Backing up, I had some good times there… didn’t remember most of it…… but it is still always sad that the cousins have to leave, one by one. Even through we had trained up for this all the time we had grown up, the sadness of not meeting each other again for a long…… time still holds.

As usual, I’ve come back with 3rd uncle (after a not-so-eager-to-collect-ang-pau-that-contains-ringgit-malaysia attitude during Chinese New Year), and I’ve gone back to the busy busy busy University Life. So till next time, stay tuned for updates on United Kingdom explorations!