Chinese New Year is just a few days away and I was thinking of eating some sticky rice cake – aka Nian Gao in Chinese. You have to make a flour and egg batter for it and then fry it up and serve and eat it hot. I haven’t eaten these for ages – more than 20 years I think and it does bring back lots of memories. You see, my mom used to fry them for us when we were kids during Chinese New Year – I never liked it – till i was older and can appreciate it.
The taste is sweet and if eaten hot – it’s crispy as well. We didn’t have very much to eat when we were kids and not a lot of luxury for anything. While my kids are brought up with love and a lot of hugs, we were brought up to feel like we owed our parents everything. Never would we dare raise our voices at my parents – else, we would be smacked on the face so hard or get caned till we can sit down properly for a day or two. Fear was the word with my parents – there were no warm feeling there for them when we were kids.
But on the other hand, I too wonder, are we being too lax with our kids? For they too like to raise their voices if they weren’t happy about something. I try never to raise my voice at my kids – so where are they learning this from? I don’t cane my kids – maybe I should when they were younger eh but if I did that I would be the one crying because of all the times when we were hit when we were kids and the humiliation from it. I vowed never to teach my kids this way but didn’t they say something about spare the rod and spoil the child – and they will end up to be bad? well something like that – so where is the balance here? You can’t keep threatening them that you would run away if they were being rude to you – they do grow up and realized that you ain’t going to run anywhere.
Yes, food sure brings back lots of memories – memories that I don’t really want to revisit and think that what my parents did for us when we were growing up were right – because it cannot be right to hit your kids and call them in bad names to shame them? can it?