This year is going to be the year of the Rat for the Chinese lunar calendar. As with past Chinese new years, Chinatown will be dolled up to mimick what's done to Orchard Road in Christmas.

This year, they decided to use Mickey Mouse to represent Rats. So, there's lots of Mickey Mouse pictures and statues in Chinatown. I feel this is alright, but this receives a lot of complaints. People are not happy that something overseas is borrowed to represent something that is very much tradditional Chinese.

I thought this is silly. I am all for keeping our tradditional culture. I like to have my reunion dinner every CNY eve. I like to stay up till morning on CNY eve. I like to use Mandarin in my conversation. I would have typed this blog in Mandarin if my command of Chinese words are better. Maybe future posts should be in Mandarin, but my last attempt in writing articles in Mandarin did go well. But I don't see the harm in importing characters in our celebrations. The world is not getting smaller. Singapore is quite globalized. We shouldn't be too quick to change our culture to embrace new influences, but we shouldn't be too quick to dismiss them either. Change is needed for progress. If external influence is reasonable enough, we should embrace it. Blindly dismissing or accepting new things will be wrong. We should think objectively the implications of change, and embrace it if it's good.