the little (bit of) nyonya in me...

i've been parking myself in front of the tv a lot lately, going thru the latest dvd set i managed to borrow from my godma on my recent trip back home. the drama series "the little nyonya" was produced by singaporean mediacorp, and is said to be the series with the highest production cost in the history of mediacorp.

tho' it's not a perfect production, in the sense that it did not really give an accurate portrayal of the peranakan chinese, what had me hooked was the drama!we all love our little dramas... hehe...

firstly, let me load off some rants abt the series...
1) the peranakans, esp. those of the older generations, do not speak mandarin (singapore mandarin some more!). they speak in baba-malay and/or english with a mix of hokkien

2) ok, even if the singaporean actors and actresses don't speak malay, the least the production team can do is make them practice the few malay words (that inevitably cropped up) over and over again to make them sound more convincing, rather than sounding so pelat (malay for "accented"). only pierre png gave an acceptable portrayal of the baba, where the language goes.

3) the baba and nyonya entertainment was referred to as "sing the pantun". eh hello, it's called dondang sayang lar!

4) the interior of huang family's ancestral home, set in heeren street, m'ca, seems so big. while the exterior is just of a normal sized, pre-war 2 storey shophouse that line heeren street and the various streets adjacent to it, the interior looks like that of a huge mansion! hello, u think harry potter story meh?? it will take at least 3 lots of shophouses to make up the interior of the huang family house. i know, coz dad grew up in one such houses (on heeren street itself!) and used to bring bro and i to visit our late ah mah when we were young.

5) the character, ah tao or tao jie, is supposed to be an amah or ma-jie. these domestic helpers belong to a group of "black-and-white sisterhood" that are not your regular maids or servants of the olden days. while maids and servants are the property of the family they are serving and normally do not get paid, an amah is an independent wage earner. sought after for their professional services, the amahs do not take crap from their employers. they can just pack up and leave and the employers will be ones suffering the greater loss. but in this series, this ah tao is punished, tortured and abused freely by the huangs. so not accurate! such a disrespect to the spirit and principle behind the sisterhood!

6) since when is there a railway track or railway station in modern day m'ca town?? the nearest (and the one and only) would be in alor gajah, and that's quite far away from heeren street. but the drama series made it seemed so near that their characters can just traipse over there on foot in mere minutes.


ok, enough ranting! hehehe... now on the drama. like i said, i'm hooked by the drama and plot of this series. sure, like any family drama about the olden days, it's full of the usuals. filial peity, the duty to procreate and carry on the family lineage, the virtues of women, the chastity of unmarried girls, ancestor worship, opression of the women, arranged marriage, marriage as a kind of business deal, etc etc. but more than that, it's because of the peranakan theme. very few ppl know this abt me, but i'm actually a half nyonya. a quarter nyonya, to be more accurate.

you see, popo was sort of a mistress to a baba. i said "sort of" because the said baba (technically my maternal grandfather) did not really support the livelihood of popo nor the 2 children they had together. so tho' i've met this 'grandfather' of mine a few times when i was young, he wasn't very 'grandfatherly' nor played an important role in my life, but that's another post for another time :)

i grew up in a hokkien (dad) and hakka (mom/popo) environment. not that we abide strictly to the rules and conventions of the clans... with both my parents being the youngest among their siblings and bro and i one of the youngest among all our cousins, ah mah and popo have mellowed out some by the time we came along and were quite liberal with our upbringing, as opposed to some of my older cousins' times.

so anyway, even though i have a whole army of baba half uncles, nyonya half aunties and half cousins, who have made an effort to have some family ties with us after my baba grandfather's (and their nyonya mother's) passing, i've never considered myself as a nyonya. maybe when someone commented that i don't look like a pure chinese (which happened a few times when i went to hk/china. i guess the locals here are used to these looks to really notice it in me?), i'd just make a passing remark that my maternal grandfather was a baba.

but watching this drama series has raised a kind of curiosity in me towards that (quarter) part of my ancestry. not that i'd suddenly start to take up cooking classes in nyonya dishes and kuih, and make bead-embroidered slippers, the two main skills the family matriarch look for in future daughters-in-law (which if is still practiced today, i'd surely die an anak dara tua [malay for "old maid"]), or start donning the kebaya, speak baba malay and chew betel nut leaves while playing cheki. instead, it has had me thinking about my baba nyonya nenek moyang (malay for "ancestors"), of what trade they went into in the olden days, if they were rich and influential (as most olden peranakan families were) and if the women folk were indeed embroiled in so much conniving, jealousy, domestic violence and drama.

and don't this kebaya look simply yummy? wonder how i'd look in one! :P