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REFLECTION ON FAMILY AND CULTURAL TRADITIONS SESSION

I couldn't attend this session. Hence, I would like to share my own opinion or experience regarding this topic. First of all, family is a basic social unit consisting of parents and their children, considered as a group, whether dwelling together or not. It also can defined as the divine building block of society. I have a small family included my parents, grandfather and me myself. I'm the only child for my parents. We are typical Indian family who practices Hinduism.

We celebrates few cultural related festivals such as Pongal, Deepavali and Thaipusam . Ponggal is a harvest festival dedicated to the Sun. It is a four-day festival which according to the Tamil calender is usually celebrated in the month of January. The significant part of the occasion is the pongal (dish) which prepared using rice, milk, cardamom, raisins, cashew nuts and Green gram. Deepavali is known as festival of light. During this occasion, family members will gather and celebrate this festival happily. Traditional food will be served to guest and all the family members will wear Indian traditional clothes. The main cultural clothes of Indians are sari and dhoti.

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Family and Cultural Tradition

I have a small family with 6 family members which included parents, 3 younger sisters and grandmother. We live in Penang, Georgetown. We do like Sunday because we have the time to spend together for movie. Most of the time we do use Hainan to communicate, next is Hokkien or Chinese too. Our tradition clothes are cheongsam. But nowadays, most of the people will only wear cheongsam during Chinese New Year or certain festival only.

During Chinese New Year Eve, we will have family reunion dinner. My grandmother and my mother will be busy with cooking. Besides, we will offer prayers to our ancestors during Chinese New Year Eve. We like calling the all the ancestors come back home and have their reunion dinner together for a new year. We will wake up early in the morning and prepare for the offer prayers. After this, we only have our reunion lunch and dinner with family members. I will not miss every reunion dinner with my family.

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I was born with seven other siblings by a Chinese father and an Indonesian Torajan mother in Sabah. I have three brothers and two sisters. I have been living in Malaysia since I was born, thus, I am not familiar with my mother’s family traditions. I speak to my family members in Hokkien, mandarin, Malay and English. We are Chinese so just like any other Chinese, we celebrate Chinese New Year every year.

On Chinese New Year’s Eve, we will have reunion dinner. This is where all the family members eat and chat together. We also clean the house at this time because it is a tradition for Chinese people to not clean the house on the first day of Chinese New Year. Besides that, on the ninth day of Chinese New Year, especially Hokkiens and Taoist, we offer prayers to the Jade Emperor and celebrate His birthday. We call this celebration is Pai Ti Kong. We offer many food and gold for the Jade Emperor as thank you and protection.

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On the 2nd session we talked about family and traditions. We had to wear our respective traditional clothes such as baju kurung, baju melayu, kurtha, and sari. We also had the chance to show them the cheongsam. We then explained to them the many festives tradition we have in Malaysia such as Eid Mubarak, Chinese New Year, and Deepavali. We told them about what do we do on those specific days and explain how it strengthens the family bond and the traditions born from these festives among families. We also talked about superstitions and taboos.
During this session the ECU students shared about their family traditions such as opening christmas presents together and going for a drive to the race track for car racing. I also learned that in America they dont really have festives that they celebrate, they said that its more to big days like the 4th of July and explained about thanksgiving. They also told us about formal events that they wear dresses to such as the prom or dances. They also shared about how the rate of split ups among married couple is high. Most of them have step parents and step siblings. It was a exciting and touching session since we changed enjoyable days and stories of families with each other and actually enjoyed ourselves

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s44152  STEPHANIE'S PERSONAL REFLECTIONS: FAMILY AND CULTURAL TRADITIONS

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s44152  STEPHANIE'S PERSONAL REFLECTIONS: FAMILY AND CULTURAL TRADITIONS

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I am truly thankful to God for being a part of my family. They nurture me with love, affection and traditions. As I am more attached to my paternal relative, I would like to share some of our traditions. We are ardent Christians, basically we were taught to fast and practice abstinence during a month prior to Easter. It is a must to attend mass during Ash Wednesday and attend Easter Virgil mass as one family. Thus it increase our family closeness. Besides that, it is also a tradition for us to visit our grandfather’s and my father’s cemetery during Easter day and Christmas day. Usually we will clean their graves, light up candles, perform prayers and sing Easter song and Christmas song during the respective days.

Although we are also consider as Indians, we really don’t follow all the traditions and customs expect for some for example we will perform the rituals and customs of puberty ceremony. Puberty ceremony is done when a girl hits her puberty. Usually girls will be prohibited to meet boys during this time expect for their family members. It mostly held within a week where for a few days the girl must eat foods made of URAD dhal and to drink raw eggs daily. During the final day menstruation, the girl will bath in flower water, apply sandalwood on her body and that is the starter pack of Indians girls to wear Sari (Indian traditional attire) we were taught to pass down this traditions to future generations as well

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S39726JAYASRI’S PERSONAL REFLECTIONS: FAMILY AND CULTURAL TRADITIONS

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S39726JAYASRI’S PERSONAL REFLECTIONS: FAMILY AND CULTURAL TRADITIONS

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My family is everything to me and the one who taught me Indians culture and traditions. Here’s a bit of trivia about me: I have two siblings and basically from happy family. My mom is the main head in teaching us Indians culture and traditions. She is religious and strongly follows our Indian customs. She’s been a good idol for me and my siblings in practicing the right cultures of our Hinduism. Well, Hindu culture is unique especially the temples with amazing statues, delicious cuisine and garments. Even, the traditions and customs of Indians has influenced other ethnic such as their lifestyles, attire and food.

Indian community likes to use herbs and spices in their daily cooking. For example, my mom always cook delicious food with many kinds of spices and it’s just tasty to eat. When it comes to clothing, Indian woman usually wear saree and men goes for dhoti. Besides, we do practice some customs such as not wear footwear inside the holy places and pierce the ears when we are baby. Apart from that, we celebrate our traditional festival called Diwali. Diwali is basically symbol of joy and my family never forget to celebrate it. We believe that, this festival bring prosperity to each and every Hindus family. Overall, I love my family and I respect cultural traditions of my religion.
-The beauty of the world lies in the diversity of its people-

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This topic is about family and cultural traditions so I’m going to tell a bit about Iban or Ibanese people because I’m a pure Ibanese. My family was Iban and according to some research, Iban is the largest group in Sarawak. Iban people speak Iban language and they either a Christian, a Muslim and pagan. We Iban celebrate Gawai Dayak Festival on 1st June every year and the purpose is to thank God for the paddy and also marking  a bountiful harvest and a time to plan for the new farming season. Lots of activities were held during Gawai such as beauty pageant (Pekit Keling Kumang), traditional dance performance (Ngajat), poem recite by old Iban people (I don’t really know how to describe this but we Iban called this ‘sabak’.)

This tradition is compulsory to be celebrated and my family will gather together during this time. There’s so much do’s and don’ts during Gawai but I’m gonna mention one. Watch out before you speak or talk because every word may influence everything happens around you. I remembered being scolded by my grandma just because I said the penganan jala (cakes or biscuits, I guess, made from rice flour and palm sugar) looked delicious. It turned out we can’t compliment or say a thing about food or drink before it was fully done. It’s weird and I still remember it till now because my grandma almost threw the coconut shell at me. So, that’s all about this topic.

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UMMU'S PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON FAMILY & TRADITIONS

This was actually the first video session experience of mine as I just joined this course and it has opened up my mind about how diverse the culture and traditions are throughout the world. First, we all wore our traditional attires to portray the culture that we practice which was for me, the classic abstract patterned baju kurung. The moment when we started the video conference, we each presented what we were wearing and explained when we would normally wear it. As we were showcasing the attires, I can see that the ECU students were fairly excited and full of curiosity, resulting in them throwing us more and more questions regarding our culture and traditions. I can see that it encouraged a very productive and proactive conversation and exchange of ideas. After that, we moved on to asking them what special occasions that they celebrate and what kind of attires that would be appropriate for those occasions. From there, it was obvious that our traditions are completely diverse.

From there, we moved on to the matter of family traditions. We discussed on what is considered norm in the family constitution of both cultures. This discussion includes number of family members, marital statuses, and family gatherings. Eventhough it was different from our standard family traditions, but I could conclude that both cultures celebrate family values greatly. We also exchanged family pictures, picture of our domesticated pets, and stories of family backgrounds. As conclusion, I think that it was a very informative video session and I look forward to the next one.

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FARIS'S REFLECTIONS ON SECOND VIDEO SESSION.

For the second video session. i believe that the UMT students have done a better job at presenting themselves when compared to the first session. A lot of our students were more confident and interacted more with the students of ECU. It was actually a nice idea for us to wear our traditional clothes for that day as i believed it was something very interesting and unique in the eyes of the ECU students. I was even happier when they said that the clothes were cute. It was so fun teaching them some Bahasa Melayu basic daily words.

As the topic was about family and cultural traditions, the basis of our discussions centered around that. However, for me the most interesting discussion for me was when we talked about thanksgiving. A lot of information was gained from that discussion even though i can see that even the ECU students didn't know the entire history behind thanksgiving. Even so, it was still an interesting topic for me.

Talking about family culture was also a bit interesting. I finally noticed that divorce in Malaysia is actually quite different than divorce in the USA. For one, people there seem to be more open to it and try not to hide it at all. As to here, we rarely know about whose parents are divorced  and try to avoid that topic as a whole. This is a great as i can see that i am learning something and knowing new information by entering this course.

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JEANNIE’S PERSONAL REFLECTIONS: FAMILY AND CULTURAL TRADITIONS

I was really excited for today’s discussions since I prepared a few simple greeting in Bahasa Malaysia to teach the ECU students. I taught them how to pronounce them as well. We even dressed up to show them our traditional clothes. This is to give a rough idea of how diverse Malaysia is and what we usually wear during special occasion and festive seasons.

Today’s topic was about family and cultural traditions. We share about our culture and family background and what we holidays we usually celebrate. We even prepared printout pictures to show them our families.  ECU students explained to us the significance of Thanksgiving celebration which I thought to be very informative. Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas parties are huge celebrations in America since a large population of Americans are Christian.

Our discussion today was much better structured compared to the 1st link. We managed to discuss about more subtopics such as taboos and superstitions since we are much more prepared. After today’s discussion I felt motivated to learn and appreciate other cultural diversity even more.

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For the 2nd session i feel more confident as we prepare the points ahead and we know what we are going to talk about. The session start by greeting each other and introducing about our traditional clothes. Later we taught them few greeting in malay . The other that discussed during this session was festivals like thank giving and halloween, pets, taboos and family tradition, dance, arts and musics. We also sang songs, show them family photos and dance videos.

In my opinion i think this session was better than the previous one as all of us get chances to speak and we didnt run out of points. I really enjoy because i think its fun to learn other tradition and culture in a joyfull way like this. Lastly we also get to make new friends from diffrent countries .