Reunion Dinner : The Journey Home

The Year of the Fire Horse arrives with energy of movement and change – our minds read it as freedom and independence. The Fire Horse occurs once every 60 years – the last one being 1966.

There's something fitting about this - the horse that runs far but remembers the stable, the journey that transforms us even as we seek the familiar comfort of return.

This Chinese New Year feels different. My youngest, Sophie will leave for university in the UK this fall, and this will likely be her last reunion dinner with me here in Singapore. The table will look different next year – I can feel the tightening of my heart with this thought.

The family has already changed - my grandparents have passed, my parents have separated and I have been on my own for 8 years. The constellation of faces around the table has shifted, rearranged, left spaces where beloved presences once sat. Age has brought introspection and nostalgia, so I hold onto this tradition with both hands.

The Weight of What We Carry Forward

I know I cannot recreate what was, nor can I freeze time or resurrect the gatherings of my childhood, when reunion dinner was the meal of the year - as significant and anticipated as Christmas Eve.

In a world that moves faster than we can sometimes bear, where everyone is scattered across continents and time zones, where young people lose language and customs with each generation – I feel that we need anchors.

We need ways to remember how to find our way home.

I cannot force my children to continue this tradition of Chinese New Year reunion dinner. It has to happen for them by their choice, in their own time. All I can give them is a sense of festivity and home - where home is more than a resting place.

Home is where you gather around the people who mean the most to you. Home is the act of coming together, of turning toward each other when the calendar marks this particular moment in time.

The Paradox of Tradition in Modern Times

There's a profound tension in wanting to move with the times while maintaining remembrance of where we come from. Chinese culture focuses on ancestors not as ghosts of the past, but as threads in the tapestry we're still weaving. Reunion dinner is more than just eating with family - it's a ritual acknowledgment that we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we belong to a lineage of people who gathered, who survived, who passed down not just recipes but resilience.

When I was young, in my generation, we witnessed perhaps the most rapid transformation any generation has seen. We were the last to know reunion dinner as non-negotiable, the last to live within walking distance of extended family, the last to speak our grandparents' dialects fluently.

This gathering held a weight that's hard to explain to those who didn't experience it. Perhaps the world felt smaller then and scarcity made coming together more precious. Mayhap we hadn't yet learned to scatter ourselves so completely across the globe, believing we could stay connected through screens and occasional visits. Maybe we have had no choice but to normalise distance as a part of our lives.

We watched Singapore transform from developing nation to global city. The old shophouses disappeared, the kampungs vanished, and with them, the assumption that family meant proximity. We became translators between worlds - explaining to our children why these traditions matter while understanding why they might not feel the same pull we do.

What the Body Remembers

There is something I cannot quite put into words - the feeling of holding a warm bowl of rice in my hands as I share my meal with my family and the people I love. Somehow the rice tastes better.

It tastes like comfort because it carries remembering – a deep remembering into my own childhood of what it tasted like when my grandmother served it, when the whole family crowded around a table that was somehow always big enough to fit everyone.

This is what's woven into our DNA, what makes us feel that traditions should still be passed down to our children - now more than ever, because everyone needs a sense of belonging, a remembering of where they came from.

Everyone needs to know there's a table that will be set for them, a meal that carries the flavors of home, a gathering that says: you come from people who loved each other enough to keep showing up for you and with you.

The Journey That Changes Us

Thomas Wolfe wrote "You Can't Go Home Again". We're different each time we return. The people change and we change. The world changes but this doesn't mean that the return is impossible – it is simply different.

The journey that leads us home carries the bittersweet memories etched into our bones. It is the journey that makes us, the choice to keep taking the familiar path so that our memories can live on.

Sophie will return from university as someone slightly different, carrying new experiences and certainly new perspectives. The table will be smaller. The traditions may feel strange to her after months or years away. It might even be precious in a way she couldn't have anticipated and it is in that return that she will learn her own values of home.

It's the taking of the journey that we remember. It's the choosing to come home, even when home has changed, that brings us growth and inner evolution.

Passing the Thread

I am part of the bridge generation - old enough to remember the old ways, young enough to understand why they're fading. We watched everything change: letters to emails, proximity to diaspora, obligation to choice. We gave our children the freedom to leave, and now we must find peace with their leaving.

This year, as the Year of the Horse brings its energy of independence and forward movement, I set the table knowing I cannot guarantee next year will look the same.

I cook the dishes passed down through generations, knowing my children may or may not carry these recipes into their own homes. I decorate the house, arrange the oranges, prepare the reunion dinner with the full knowledge that tradition lives only when it's chosen, not when it's demanded.

There is a quiet ache that mothers carry - the knowledge that our children must forge their own paths, that they may not hold the same values we do, that the traditions we cherish might end with us.

We feel this deeply, but we remain silent about it. We do not burden them with our longing. We do not make them feel guilty for building lives that look different from ours. This is what mothers do - we create the warmth, we set the table, we hold the space for return, and we let them go.

All I can offer is the memory of warmth and the knowledge that my loved ones can always come home. The taste of rice that somehow tastes like comfort because it's shared, the feeling of gathering around people who mean the most to you, marking time together in a way that says: this matters, you matter and being together will always matter.

The ancestors watch as the living gather and somewhere in the space between what was and what will be, we create the moment that our children will one day remember - the table they'll perhaps seek to recreate in their own way, in their own time, when they're ready to understand what it means to find their way home.

From a mothers' heart to you

Arora