There is very little festive mood in the air, even though Chinese New Year is a mere fortnight away. This absence of excited anticipation is itself indicative of the vast changes that have engulfed the Chinese community in Malaysia.

The Lunar New Year has always been celebrated by the Chinese people for millennia as the most auspicious festival on their annual calendar. It is probably still so in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and among the Chinese global diaspora.

When I was a child growing up not long after the war ended, it was certainly the occasion to which all children looked forward with great excitement, counting the days a month in advance.

Few people could afford to live in individual terrace or semi-detached houses then. My family used to rent a small room in a rickety double-storey wooden structure that housed 18 tenant families in all. The monthly rental was something like five dollars a month. Even when we moved to a tiny city council flat later, there were still 56 families sharing a whole block with three lifts permanently reeking with the stench of urine.

Living at such close quarters, you are inevitably infected with the general festive mood long before the arrival of the New Year day. For weeks on end, noisy cheery New Year music would be blasting from the cheap radios at all corners of the neighbourhood. Transistors were not in vogue yet, and those radios had large valves emitting light and heat. In the absence of television, these radios were the only mode of heralding in the happy air of another season of great rejoicing.