Lunar New Year is around the corner and this year notably there would be more celebrative events coming. Besides those funfair, performance, shopping and eatery stalls hosted by Chinese communities as usual, different libraries and cultural organisations would be staging their activities such as craft and storytelling. Maybe many East Asian nations are also interested in celebrating Lunar New Year hence widely accepted in the local community.
Indians indeed have their own new year celebration such as the Diwali. Muslims’ Eid al-Fitr after their Ramadan is comparable to our new year. In multicultural Australia we can see celebrations of different ethnics being respected as an unique facet of our society.
When I migrated to Australia 30 years ago, it did not occur to me that multiculturalism was such a beautiful value that is making this nation to stand out. In Australia besides the indigenous people and the British group who settled here in 1788, all others were those who chose to leave their home countries to tie up their remaining life with this territory, including that of their next generations. North America and South America were not the same: they were explored much earlier as colonies and the respective cultures were planted; besides the US and Canada, all the others are not nations for migrants hence multiculturalism did not exist.
Since WWII to date, many colonies became independent nations while retaining their own culture and their people are proud of it. Australia has attracted these people as immigrants here and it is nice to have their very different cultures to be accepted and respected here. These days nationalism is on the rise in countries like China and Russia to the extent that they are not accepting other cultures and even trying to belittle and charge against foreign culture, instead of aiming to build an universal culture of goodness out from the different ones.
Actually, we can see the world especially on the Internet today filled with savage and rough attitude and behaviour which go against humanity and human right. Say the Malaysian singer Wee Meng Chee who recently published an irony Chinese song ‘Descendants of the Dragon’ and surged in his popularity, just because he was speaking to a vast audience on the web.
Living in this multicultural piece of land I am pleased to have the opportunity to embrace various nice values and the right to uphold them. Whereas I feel sorry for people in Hong Kong from where I came are day by day losing their civil right and power to defend their value of life.
Mr. Raymond Chow
The Publisher of Sameway Magazine