Letter from Baba Colin Chee, President, The Peranakan Association Singapore

(This is a monthly column to TPAS members and guests)


Dear Babas and Nyonyas,

PRIVACY OF PERSONAL DATA

This Sunday, 1 September 2019, is momentous. It is when strict laws pertaining to the collection, retention and use of members’ personal data come into effect in Singapore.

Your Association takes members’ privacy seriously. Last year, soon after the incumbent General Committee (GC) members were elected on 27 May, we focused on privacy requirements when we began digitalizing our Association’s membership data. The government had already revealed in greater detail its plans to implement the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA).

Consolidating and digitalizing the personal data of 1,850 members proved to be a mammoth challenge. In light of PDPA requirements, the task had to be handled by only two people to ensure that members’ personal data stayed private.

I have written about this unenviable task in an earlier letter. It was completed by end-January this year, largely by Nyonya Agnes Ng, our Assistant Honorary Secretary. As at 31 August, we have 2,061 Life members.

Concurrently, as members’ data was being streamlined, a small PDPA Technical Team made up of GC members under the able leadership of Baba Philip Yeo, was formed in mid-last year. The team was tasked to better understand the requirements of PDPA and to study cost-effective options of membership identification without using NRIC numbers. Since January 2019, the GC has adopted several recommendations.

We have yet to decide on the best way to identify members at events but have narrowed down the options.

In working all these, our guidance has been:
(1) Ease of use: so that successive committees can pick up the ball and run with it
(2) Cost-effectiveness: to ensure sustainability
(3) Risk-based: so that we do not introduce protocols and systems for the sake of doing so

ANAK BABAS AND NYONYAS

With the new Junior Membership category, your children and grandchildren can now become members of the Association. Association member, Nyonya Rosy Ang with her husband David and their chu chu (grandchildren). Photo courtesy of Rosy Ang.

Many members supported the initiative to have Junior Membership which I mentioned in my July letter. The GC received encouraging calls and emails from enthusiastic members.

Mothers and grandmothers are waiting for the chance to register their children and grandchildren as members. Your GC and volunteers realise it is a serious responsibility that we have hoisted on ourselves. But it must be done.

We will launch our Junior Membership drive in September. Please watch out for it.

With members’ understanding and support, we will succeed together in introducing our unique and colourful culture in a fun way to our Anak Babas and Nyonyas.

Keeping our culture alive is a strong motivator for bringing the young into our fold. They have growing minds that are open to ideas. If not them, who can we pass the baton to before we are gone? Will a culture still be relevant to our young if it does not evolve with the times? Should culture stay ‘pure’?

This is a likely formula for our culture to come to a standstill, perched and displayed on a dusty museum shelf or between the browning pages of a heritage book. I believe a living culture has to be lived and relevant to the times. It has to evolve, with a respectful eye to its past. Because change is a norm.

THEME FOR 2020

It is for this reason that our theme for next year – the Association’s 120th Anniversary – will be “Keeping Our Culture Alive”.

There is much to be done – wisely and humbly – and it appears, so little time to do it.

Like it or not, ours is a folk culture that evolved from the ground up and flourished from the mid-19th century to the early 20th when wealthy patrons brought a certain shine to the culture.

It is therefore our community at large that has to decide whether we want our culture to be alive in the generations to come.

The Association must not assume that it is the sole champion of Peranakan culture. Such conceit will surely be our culture’s undoing. However, the Association can certainly be our community’s primary cultural and heritage gatekeeper and resource while being its leading champion.

We need our community to believe that our culture can be sustained and to rally around its champions to keep it alive and thriving. This is why the Association has spread its arms to embrace and work with many partners, including willing members, to organise relevant events that can raise awareness of our culture, and to faithfully and accurately document its past and present. The Association alone cannot achieve this effectively.

My wife Linda and I will be away during the first half of September. We sincerely regret we will not be able to join you on 11 September for Wild Rice’s Emily on Emerald Hill, which we will see later, or engage in Mari Main Cherki on 14 September so kindly organised by members Nyonyas Benita Fong and Heather Ong.

But we will be back in time for Dressing A Peranakan Home on 21 September when Ikebana master, Dr Leonard Lim, will demonstrate several Ikebana floral arrangements with Peranakan themes. Baba Leonard holds the very rare distinction of being possibly the only non-Japanese invited to perform the floral offering at Kyoto’s Rokkakudo Temple, the birthplace of Ikebana arrangement in Japan.

Until then, God bless and thank you for your time and undimmed passion for our culture.


Blessings,
Colin Chee
Unity. Stability. Growth
It is not going to be business as usual
31 August 2019